EARL  OF 925 (b) dramas, (c) the heroic fragment on

Jonathan and the long poem on Doomesday . a . His earliest effort was Aurora, containing the first fancies of the author's youth (London, 1604), a miscellany of sonnets, songs and elegies, showing considerable formal felicity, if little originality, in the favourite themes of the Elizabethan sonneteers . To this may be added the Paraenesis to Prince Henry (u.s.), An Elegie on the Death of Prince Henrie (u.s.), and shorter pieces, including a sonnet to Michael Drayton, who had called Alexander " a man of men," and lines on the Report of the Death of Drummond of Hawthornden . b . He wrote four tragedies, Darius (1603), Croesus (1604), The Alexandraean (1605), and Julius Caesar (1607) . The first and second were published together in 1604 as the Monarchicke Tragedies, a title which was afterwards given by Alexander to a print of the four works in the editions of 1607 and 1616 . They are didactic poems rather than plays, a sequence of reflections of the type of the Falls of Princes, the Mirror for Magistrates, or Lyndsay's Dialog between Experience and a Courteour (known also as the " Monarche ") . It is very probable that the last suggested both motif and title . The pieces are dialogues rather than dramas: the choruses are of the " Moralitas " type of Renaissance verse rather than classical; and the varied versification is unsuitable for representation . Yet they contain not a few fine passages in the soliloquies, notably one in Darius (IV., iii.) on the vanishing of " Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls " as " vapours in the air," which recall Shakespeare's later lines in the Tempest . c .

Of Jonathan, an Heroicke Poeme intended, only the first

book (105 eight-lined stanzas) was written . Doomesday, or The Great Day of the Lord's Judgement (1614) is a dreary production in twelve books or " hours," extending to nearly 12,000 lines . It is written in eight-lined stanzas . In addition to the pamphlet on Colonization, he wrote (1614) a continuation or " completion " to the third part of Sidney's Arcadia, which appears in the fourth and later editions of the Romance; and a short critical tract entitled Anacrisis, a " censure " of poets, ancient or modern . A collected edition of his works appeared in his lifetime (1637) with the title Recreations with the Muses (folio) . Aurora and the Elegie were not included . A complete modern reprint The Poetical Works . . . now first collected and edited (but without the editor's name on the title-page) was published in 3 vols . 8vo. in 187o (Glasgow: Maurice Ogle & Co.) . His Encouragement to Colonies was edited for the Bannatyne Club by David Laing (1867), and by Edmund F . Slafter, in Sir W . Alexander and Amer .

Colonization (Prince Society,

Boston, Massachusetts, 1865) . See also E . F . Slafter, The Copper Coinage of the Earl of Stirling, 7632 (1874) ; The Earl of Stirling's Register of Royal Letters relative to the Affairs of Scotland and Nova Scotia from 161.5-1635 (ed . C . Rogers, with biographical introduction (1884—1885) ; C . Rogers, Memorials of the Earl of Stirling (1877); the introduction to the Works (187o) referred to above; the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, passim; and the bibliography for William Drummond (q.v.) of Hawthornden . (A . B . G.; G . G .