DRUMMOND

DRUMMOND, Sir William, of Logie-Almond, a distin-

guished scholar, acute philosopher, and accomplished writer, died at Rome, of a lingering and painful disease, on the 29th of March 1828. The date of his birth we have not been able to ascertain, and consequently cannot pretend to determine his age at the time of his decease.

He seems to have been early ambitious of literary distinction, and in 1794 he published A Review of the Government of Sparta and Athens, large 8vo; a work which, though not destitute of merit, and exhibiting considerable traces of a vigorous mind, yet gave no promise of that bold spirit of speculation for which its author was afterwards so much distinguished. At the close of the year 1795, he was returned to parliament for the borough of St Mawes, in the representation of which a vacancy had occurred; and in the two following parliaments, which met respectively in 1796 and 1801, he sat for the town of Lostwithiel. At the time of his second election he had been appointed envoy-extraordinary to the court of Naples.

In the year 1798, he published The Satires of Persius Translated, 8vo, which happened to appear about the same time with the rival translation of the Roman satirist by Mr Gifford, author of the Baviad and Mæviad, and afterwards editor of the Quarterly Review. This translation alone would have been sufficient to fix his reputation as an accomplished classical scholar; and, in point of fact, it has been much admired by all who are competent to appreciate the difficulty of the task which he so successfully performed. It would not be easy, indeed, to overrate the skill with which the niceties of Persius have been discriminated, or the felicity with which the idiomatic peculiarities of that difficult author have been converted into equivalent forms of expression. Drummond's versification is easy, graceful, and precise; and though it wants the piquancy of allusion, the congenial bitterness of spirit, and the occasional point and concentration, which impart so strong a zest to the translation of Mr Gifford, it is yet distinguished for greater freedom and equal fidelity, two things which Drummond has shown that it is not impossible to reconcile.

In the year 1801, Mr Drummond being then ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, was honoured with the order of the Crescent, which was confirmed by license, in the London Gazette, dated the 8th of September 1803.

In 1805 Sir William published his Academical Questions, in 4to, and thereby greatly extended his fame as an author. Hitherto he had appeared only in the character of an elegant and accomplished scholar; but in this work he boldly entered the domain of philosophy, and in a free and fearless spirit attacked every species of dogmatism, whether consecrated by time, or sustained by authority, exposing the weakness of the human understanding, and mortifying the pride of pretended wisdom, by a collection of what appear to be insoluble cases and indeterminate problems. In this work, however, it is only the task of demolition which he proposes to accomplish; and it must be owned that he has spread abroad the rubbish and scattered the dust of philosophical systems in a somewhat ap-

Drummond.
palling manner. "The author of Academical Questions," says the able critic of the work in the Edinburgh Review, "is indubitably a person of great reading, and much natural acuteness; but he has taken too wide a range, and indulged somewhat too much in a vein of controversial declamation. He often seems to think more of demolishing his antagonist than of enlightening his reader; and sometimes appears to enlarge upon a topic as much for the display of his eloquence as for the support of his reasoning. By frequent reference to the Greek writers, and continual allusions to the usages of antiquity, he expected perhaps to seduce the scholars of the South into metaphysical investigations, and to engage the attention of polite readers by a certain vivacity and polish in the turn of his expression. If this was his view, however, he certainly ought not to have plunged at first into the great gulf of substance and entity." (Edinburgh Review, vol. vii. p. 185.) To these observations, however, it is proper to add, that the author avowedly reserved the full exposition of his own theory for a subsequent volume, though in point of fact it never appeared; and that in this preliminary publication he conceived himself to be only clearing out the foundation on which it was his intention afterwards to build.

In the year 1810, Sir William Drummond, in conjunction with Robert Walpole, Esq. published Herculanensia, in 4to, containing archaeological and philological dissertations, and a copy of a manuscript found amongst the ruins of Herculaneum; and in 1811 appeared an Essay on a Panic Inscription found in the Isle of Malta, royal 8vo; both works of great merit and erudition. Sir William was also an occasional, if not a frequent, contributor to the Classical Journal; in which his papers on subjects of antiquity, particularly the zodiac of Denderah, which occupied without exhausting his ingenuity, attracted the general admiration of the learned, if not always on account of their soundness, at least by reason of the acuteness and originality they display, and the resources of learning which the author had always at command for the illustration of his peculiar views. About this time, Sir William Drummond, whose residence at Constantinople had turned his attention to oriental literature, sacred as well as profane, consigned the fruits of his researches and investigations into the historical books of the Old Testament, in his Edipus Judaicus. This singular work was never published, having been printed solely for distribution amongst the author's friends and acquaintance; but as he had caused a considerable impression to be struck off, copies of it soon found their way into the hands of persons connected with the periodical press, and those of others; and, as might have been expected, it was most fiercely attacked. The first onset was made by a churchman of the name of D'Oyly, in Letters to the Right Hon. Sir William Drummond, in Defence of particular Passages of the Old Testament against his late work entitled "Edipus Judaicus;" and the attack was renewed in the Quarterly Review, with equal vigour and ability. Whether it was altogether fair thus openly to stigmatize a book which had never been published, we shall not stop to inquire; more especially as the principal cause of regret is, not that it was severely criticised, but that it was ever written, far less printed. In the controversy which thus arose, however, Sir William was overmatched, both in science and in Hebrew, with which D'Oyly and the Reviewer evinced a most intimate acquaintance; and although his reply displayed much ingenuity, no skill could evade, far less destroy, the force of some of the criticisms. The truth is, the allegorical theory which he undertook to establish was taken at second hand from the work of Dupuis; and although the author, notwithstanding all the errors charged against him, brought great stores of learning and erudition to bear upon it, yet

the absurdities to which it leads are so glaring, and the consequences which follow from it are so pernicious, that it is surprising Sir William Drummond should not have foreseen the one, or been prudent enough not to hazard the other. The preface, too, though beautifully written, contains observations which nothing can excuse, and irreverences so gross as even to shock persons the least scrupulous about subjects of religion. The profane joke about veal cutlets is worthy only of Mr Thomas Paine, and fit to appear in no work where the ordinary humanities of taste and reason are duly observed.

In 1818 Sir William Drummond published, experimentally we believe, the first part of a poem entitled Odin, 4to, the object of which was to embody in verse some of the more striking features of the Scandinavian mythology. The poem, however, did not succeed in attracting public attention, which was then almost exclusively fixed on some of the great masters of song, whose deep voice of inspiration filled the land; and although it contained passages of very considerable power and beauty, it fell into almost immediate oblivion.

But the work on which the reputation of Sir William Drummond as a scholar and antiquary must chiefly rest, is his Origines, or Remarks on the Origin of several Empires, States, and Cities, in 3 vols. 8vo. The first volume, embracing the origin of the Babylonian, the Assyrian, and the Iranian empires, appeared in 1824; the second, which is wholly devoted to the subject of Egypt, including the modern discoveries in hieroglyphics, came out in 1825; and the third, which treats of the Phœnicians and Arabia, was published in 1826. It would be exceedingly difficult, by a general statement, or by critical observations apart from details, to convey an accurate idea of the real character and merits of this work; which, with much that is strained, exaggerated, or defective, to say nothing of errors into which the author is sometimes betrayed by the excessive refinements of an ever active ingenuity, is in several respects one of the most remarkable productions of modern times. A principal feature of the Origines, though certainly the least obtrusive, is, that here the author labours quietly to build up and fortify the authority of the historical books of the Old Testament, which, in the Edipus Judaicus, he had (probably without intending it) contributed to impair, if not to pull down: whilst by concentrating, as it were, into one focus the various scattered lights of tradition, history, philosophy, science, etymology, and archaeology, he has contrived to illuminate many of the darkest passages in the records of the ancient world; to dispel no inconsiderable portion of the obscurity which overshadowed the origin and annals of the great empires of antiquity; and, even in the merest archaeological discussions, to interweave incidental illustrations, alike curious in themselves, and valuable to the scholar, the theologian, and the antiquary. Upon this work, therefore, as on a fixed and enduring pedestal, the fame of Drummond as a scholar must in a great measure rest. Besides its other great and singular merits, it has that which indeed is peculiar to almost all Drummond's works, of being written in a pure, chaste, classical style, full of vivacity and vigour, and sometimes even rising into a rich and lofty strain of eloquence. The dialogue between Neomathes and Philothoth, in the second volume, where the one impugns and the other defends the astronomical and mathematical skill of the ancient Egyptians, may be instanced as a specimen of the grace, elegance, and force of Drummond's style, when it flows in a continuous stream, unbroken by the projecting corners and edges of a hard and rugged erudition.

Sir William Drummond's appreciation of the modern discoveries in hieroglyphics (a subject to which three consecutive chapters of the second volume are devoted)

is, in general, sound and discriminating; and he foresaw sooner than almost any one else, that the powers of the phonetic alphabet, as an instrument of discovery, would be found to have been greatly over-rated. In a letter, dated Naples, 27th April 1827, and addressed to the author of this imperfect notice, he very distinctly shows how fully he had estimated the difficulty which M. Champollion had overlooked, and which now appears to be nearly, if not altogether insuperable. "That M. Champollion's system is accurate to a certain extent," says he, "I admit; and his discoveries do him great honour. Whether he be right in all the details of his system is another question. He establishes the existence of a very great number (I forget the precise number) of phonetic hieroglyphs;¹ and to these, he says, are to be traced all the characters of the running hand, which he reads with so much ease. Now I cannot help observing, that where there are so many signs to represent each alphabetical letter, and where consequently there must have been various contractions for each of these signs in the running hand, the task of learning all these contractions without the aid of a master, and of accurately referring them to their prototypes, must be immense. In Sanscrit there are fifty-two letters, and yet there are above eight hundred contractions. To refer these Sanscrit contractions to their original letters is not always very easy; but the difficulty in Egyptian must have been much greater, in which language the phonetic characters, and consequently the contractions, are far more numerous." Here we have the germ of those principles which, developed and applied by Klaproth to the values of characters as set down by M. Champollion, have made terrible havoc of his discoveries, and left him at last little more than what he took without acknowledgment from Dr Young.

Of Sir William Drummond in his public capacity we are not prepared to speak with any degree of confidence, having little knowledge of his services as a diplomatist, or of his capabilities for acting in that character. The habit of his mind was a cautious or rather tentative boldness, accompanied with perseverance, yet tempered with a conciliating blandness of disposition, and an amenity of manners, native to his character; and it is to be presumed that this prevailing tendency showed itself in the conduct of affairs, as well as in abstract or speculative pursuits. In 1808, we find him, whilst resident at the court of Palermo, ostensibly embarked in a scheme for securing the regency of Spain, which had then just risen in arms to throw off the yoke of France, to Prince Leopold of Sicily. As might have been expected, the project misgave at the very commencement, and Sir William Drummond has not escaped censure for the part he had in it. "Sir William Drummond, the British envoy at Palermo, Mr Viale, and the Duke of Orleans," says Colonel Napier, "were the ostensible contrivers of this notable scheme, by which, if it had succeeded, a small party in a local junta (that of Seville) would have appointed a regency for Spain, paved the way for altering the laws of succession in that country, established their own sway over the other juntas, and created interminable jealousy between England, Portugal, and Spain; but with whom the plan originated does not very clearly appear. Sir William Drummond's representations induced Sir Alexander Ball to provide the ship of war, nominally for the conveyance of the Duke of Orleans [now king of the French, who had made no secret of his intention to negotiate for the regency of Spain], but in reality for Prince Leopold, with whose intended voyage Sir Alex-

ander does not appear to have been made acquainted. That the prince should have desired to be regent of Spain was natural; but that he should have been conveyed to Gibraltar in a British ship of the line, when the English government disapproved of his pretensions, was really curious. Sir William Drummond could scarcely have proceeded such lengths in an affair of so great consequence, without secret instructions from some member of his own government; yet Lord Castlereagh expressed unqualified approbation of Sir Hew Dalrymple's decisive conduct upon the occasion." (Napier's History of the Peninsular War, vol. i. p. 177.) In politics Sir William Drummond appears to have known his ground well, and to have given entire satisfaction to the governments which employed him, at periods of no ordinary difficulty, in transacting affairs of the greatest importance.

Such is an imperfect outline of the literary and political character of this distinguished person. In private life he was a man of modest, retiring, unobtrusive manners, perfectly unconscious that he differed from or had any claims to distinction superior to the most ordinary and commonplace person who fell in his way. Throughout his whole life he was a close and assiduous student, often preferring the company of his books to the promiscuous and frivolous intercourse of company; and hence he was sometimes considered as eccentric, if not cold, distant, and haughty, by those who neither knew nor could sympathise with the habits which are gradually formed by a studious and contemplative life; habits which continue unconsciously to grow upon men whose days and nights are devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. But he was, nevertheless, one of the kindest, mildest, and most generous and humane men that ever existed. To his tenants and dependents he was indulgent even to the injury of his own private fortune; to his friends he was most steadfastly and fervently devoted. In him rising merit was always sure to find a ready and active patron; and not a few individuals have owed their establishment and success in life to the circumstance of having attracted his notice, or of being pointed out to him as deserving of support or encouragement. Latterly, owing to the precarious state of his health, which made it necessary for him to resort to a warmer climate, he resided almost constantly abroad; chiefly, we believe, at Naples, where he continued to indulge in those learned pursuits which formed the main solace and delight of his life. (A.)