VII.

“O merry may the maid beThat marries the miller,”

“O merry may the maid be

That marries the miller,”

which will be found in Johnston’s “Musical Museum,” but were first published anonymously, in 1751, in “The Charmer”; and by the lines beginning

“Harmonious pipe, how I envye thy blissWhen pressed to Sylphia’s lips with gentle kiss,”

“Harmonious pipe, how I envye thy bliss

When pressed to Sylphia’s lips with gentle kiss,”

which he sent, screwed up in a flute to Susanna Kennedy, afterwards the celebrated Countess of Eglintoune, to whom Allan Ramsay dedicated his “Gentle Shepherd,” and of whom Clerk was a lover in his youth, at the time when, as he tells us, he suffered from his father’s “attempts” to find him a wife, and especially to wed him to a lady—whose name he honourably suppresses—“not to my taste, and indeed it was happy for me to have stopt short in this amour, for she proved the most disagreeable woman I ever knew, tho’ otherways a wise enough country woman.” There also exist inMS.“Some Poetical Ejeculations on the Death of my dear wife, Lady Margaret Stuart,” that “choice of my own,” who became his first wife, “a very handsome woman, for the most part bred up in Galloway, a stranger to the follies of Edinburgh,” “the best Woman that ever breathed Life.”

The earliest of the portraits of the Baron preserved at Penicuik House hangs in the dressing-room of the present Baronet. It is a small, carefully finished pencil-drawing; an interesting memorial of Sir John’s student days at Leyden. The figure is portrayed to the waist, clad in a loose gown, and with a voluminous cravat wrapped round the neck. The hands are not shown. The hair is long andcurling. The face full, beardless, and youthful, set in three-quarters to the right, is modelled with excellent thoroughness, and very crisp and incisive in the touches that express the lips and the dimple at the corner of the mouth. The background is dark to the left, and to the right appears a wall decorated with pilasters. The drawing is inscribed on the background “Ætatis 19,” and beneath “My picture done at Leyden, Jo. Clerk”; while on the back is written “My picture done at Leyden by Francis Miris,” the two latter inscriptions being in the handwriting of the Baron himself.

A comparison of the dates leads to some dubiety as to who was the actual draughtsman of this portrait. There were three well-known Dutch painters of the name of Mieris—Frans Van Mieris, the pupil of Gerard Dow, born at Delft in 1635, died at Leyden 1681; Willem Van Mieris, his son, born at Leyden 1662, and died there, 1747; and his son, Frans Van Mieris, the younger, born at Leyden 1689, died there in 1763. The year in which the drawing was executed must have been 1695, consequently it cannot be the work of the elder Frans; nor can it have been done by his grandson, the younger Frans, who was then only six years of age. A solution of the difficulty seems to be afforded by a comparison of the “Travels” and the “History” of the Baron. In the former, a journal written at the time, he states that he was instructed in art at Leyden, by “Miris,” but in the latter, compiled from the former many years afterwards, he states that “Francis Miers, a very great painter,” was his teacher, the Christian name being apparently added from memory, which, in the present case, seems to have played him false. There can be little doubt that the portrait was drawn by Willem Van Mieris, who at the time of Clerk’s residence at Leyden was forty-one years of age, and in full practice as an artist. As corroborating this supposition, we may notice that in the account of the Clerks of Penicuikcontributed by Miss Isabella Clerk to the “Life of Professor James Clerk Maxwell,” and “chiefly derived from a book of autograph letters which was long kept at Glenlair, and is now in the possession of Mrs. Maxwell,” it is stated that the Baron was a pupil ofWilliamMieris in drawing; and further, that a drawing of two men’s heads similar in style to the present portrait, preserved in the Penicuik Drawing-room, is inscribed in the Baron’s hand, “Originall by William Van Miris, 1696,” indicating that about the date he must have been in communication with this artist.

Three oil portraits, showing the Baron in later life, hang in the Dining-room. In the first, by Sir John Medina, he appears still as a young man, seen to the waist, clad in a bright blue coat and a crimson cloak—a combination of primary colours in which the painter frequently indulged. His right hand is laid on a book, which rests on an unseen table in front to the right. He wears a long yellowish wig, with powdered curls, and the blue eyes and the alert mouth are full of activity and energy. Probably this portrait was executed at the time of his marriage, in 1700, for there is a companion picture of his first wife, Margaret Stewart, daughter of the third Earl of Galloway, and grand-daughter of James, Earl of Queensberry, painted by Aikman. As was to be expected in so early a work of the artist’s—he must have been under twenty when he painted it, for the lady died in 1701—this latter is full of faults, stiff in pose, with little suggestion of the figure under the draperies of white and blue: still it conveys the idea of a charming and attractive personality, fitting as that of the lady for whom the Baron—as shown in the “History of his Life,”—mourned so truly.

There is a second bust-portrait of the Baron by Sir John Medina, a low-toned picture, executed with care if with considerable hardness. Here the costume is a lilac gown, with a long curled wig, and a white cravat; the body seen turned to the right, and the face in three-quarters to the left.

The finest, however, of the portraits of the second Baronet, is the three-quarters length by his cousin, William Aikman. Here he appears robed in his black gown as Baron of the Exchequer, worn over a yellow-brown coat. Long white hanging bands appear at the breast, and lace ruffles at the wrists; and the grave face, with its strongly marked features, is surmounted by a long curled wig. His left hand hangs down in front fingering among the folds of his gown, and the right rests upon a red-covered table. The whole is relieved against a plain brown background, with a low-toned space of crimson curtain to the left. It is an excellent example by the painter, well arranged, dignified, firmly handled, and manifestly faithful to the personality portrayed. A bust-portrait similar in costume and wig to this one, but with some difference in the features, was engraved, in line, by D. Lizars, “from a portrait in the possession of John Clerk of Eldin, Esq.”

Of Sir James, the third Baronet, the architect of the present house of Penicuik, we, unfortunately find no adequate portrait. The only effigy of him that is here preserved is a small silhouette in white paper, relieved against a black background, marked as cut two years after his death by Barbara Clerk, his fifth sister, and as being considered very like by those who knew him. It shows a small face, looking a little downwards, with a high forehead, beneath the wig, impending over the delicate features. (SeeNoteat page 69.)

In the Dining-room there hangs another picture by Aikman, marked in the Baron’s writing, “My eldest son, John Clerk, by Lady Margaret Stuart, born 1701, died 1722, painted by Mr. Aikman.” The figure is seen nearly to the waist; the costume, a long curled grey wig, and a lilac-grey gown, lined with blue. The small eyes are of a blue colour; the face pale, refined, and delicate-looking. This was “the most accomplish’d Son,” of “bright aspiring mind,” whose birth cost the life of the Baron’s first wife, and whose owndeath, some twenty-one years later, was mourned by Ramsay in the verses addressed to the bereaved father, which may be read in his works. On another wall hang three pictures, portraying, in pairs, the Baron’s six daughters by his second wife.

Near the portrait of his son is a half-length by Aikman, rather hard in execution, showing a gentleman, with face turned to the left, in a purple-grey coat, the end of his white cravat being thrust through one of its button-holes. This is Dr. John Clerk, grandson of the first Baronet of Penicuik, whose father, Robert Clerk, was a physician in Edinburgh, and a close friend of Dr. Pitcairn. The son, born 1689, died 1757, was a personage of greater mark. For above thirty years he was the most eminent physician in Scotland; on the institution of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh in 1739, he was elected a Vice-President, an office which he held till his death; and from 1740 to 1744, he was President of the Royal College of Physicians, in whose Hall in Edinburgh another smaller portrait of him is preserved. He purchased the lands of Listonshiels and Spittal in Mid-Lothian, and founded the family of the Clerks of Listonshiels. His name appears in the list of subscribers to the collection of Ramsay’s poems, published in 1721, and he is believed to have contributed songs to the “Tea-table Miscellany.” The portrait of his second son, Colonel Robert Clerk, in a red military uniform, is also preserved in the Penicuik Dining-room.

Two other works by Aikman may here be mentioned, two drawings in red chalk upon blue paper, which hang in a passage near the Library door. They evince more of an ideal aim than any other of the productions of this painter with which we are acquainted. Evidently they are companion works, and the female portrait is dated 1730, the year before the artist’s death. This shows a girl’s head in profile to the left, a young attractive little face, with the faintest half-smile playing round the tiny mouth, and theshort hair decorated with a chaplet of leaves, or of leaf-like ribbons. It is a portrait of Jean Clerk, the Baron’s third daughter, who married James Smollet of Bonhill, one of the Commissaries of Edinburgh.

The other drawing shows a male face in three-quarters to the right, with flowing hair over the shoulders, and a heroic expression on the high-arched brows, the raised eyes, and the rippling lips; the dress thrown carelessly open at the throat. This is Patrick Clerk, the Baron’s third son. His life-record is a brief one, as given in the Baronage along with that of three of his brothers: “Patrick, Henry, Matthew, and Adam, died abroad, in the service of their country.” We learn from the Baron’sMS.that he died at Carthagena in 1744.

We now come to consider the prime artistic treasure in Penicuik House, the largest and finest of the three Raeburns that hang in the dining-room, that admirable group of Sir John Clerk, the fifth Baronet, and his wife Rosemary (so she signed her name) Dacre. It is an oblong picture, showing the two life-sized figures almost to the knees, and turned towards our right. Nearly one-half of the picture, that to the left, is occupied with a landscape of undulating country, diversified by darker passages afforded by tree-masses, with flashes of light playing over the grass in points where it is quickened by the radiance of the setting sun, and with still sharper flashings which mark the course of the “classic Esk.” To our extreme right an elm-tree raises its great forked stem, and throws out a slenderer branch, bearing embrowned leafage. This is carried over the upper edge of the picture, across nearly its whole extent, repeating, by its mass of dark against the sky, the arm of the male figure standing beneath, which is extended, dark against the distant expanse of dimly-lighted landscapebackground. The sky, against which the heads of the figures are set, is filled with the soft mellow light of a sunset after rain, struggling with films of fluctuating misty clouds,—a sky in the treatment of which Raeburn has used a portrait-painter’s licence, making it lower in tone than would have been the case in such a natural effect. The figure furthest to our right is that of the lady, clad in white muslin, a dress utterly without ornament, but “adorned the most” in the absolute simplicity of its soft overlapping folds, delicate and full of subtlest gradation as a pile of faintly yellow rose-leaves. The waist is girt with a ribbon of a more definite yellow, though this too is subdued, taking grey tones in shadow. The light comes from behind the figures, and the edges of the dress, catching its brightness, are the highest tones of the picture. The lady’s face is one of mature comeliness and dignity, the hair brown and slightly powdered, the light touching and outlining sharply the rounded contours of cheek and chin, and the edge of the throat, which rises from the masses of pure soft muslin—itself still purer and more delicate in tone and texture. Her left hand hangs down by her side, fingering a little among the folds of the dress and compressing its filmy fabric; and her right hand rests on her companion’s left shoulder, its hand, an admirable piece of draughtsmanship and foreshortening, hanging over, loose from the wrist, which is circled by a sharply struck band of black ribbon. The Baronet stands by her side, with his left arm—on whose shoulder the lady’s hand rests—circling her waist, and his right relieved against the background as it stretches across the canvas, pointing, over the river, to the mansion of Penicuik,—which is manifestly visible to the pair in the distance, though unseen to the spectator of the picture. He wears a soft felt hat, broad-brimmed, low-crowned, and Quaker-like in fashion, with an oval metal clasp set in front in its band. His coat is low-toned greyish yellow in its lights, and low-toned olivegreen in shadow, the vest and breeches showing a lighter tone of the same; and a white cravat and ruffles appear at throat and wrists. His face is a well-conditioned face of middle life, small-mouthed, with cheeks plumply rounded, and a nose delicately aquiline. He stands, quietly expectant, looking into the lady’s face, which is gazing right onward into the background.

There is in this group none of the strong, positive, insufficiently gradated colour, which is sometimes rather distressing in Raeburn’s work. It is far quieter and more delicate than is altogether usual in his art, full of tenderness and subtlety; the faces exquisitely lit by reflected light, their half-shadows softly luminous and delicate exceedingly, never sinking with a crash into blackness and opacity. The artist has seldom produced a finer or more artistic group, has seldom given us a more fascinating portrayal of well-born manhood and of female loveliness.

It is not at all in originality of general conception that the greatness of Raeburn’s portraiture usually lies, in the novel groupings of its figures, or in any suggestion of story in their combinations. Some other painters have contrived to throw a hint of narrative into works which, in first and main aim, were mere likenesses; but Raeburn was a portraitist in the strictest and most exclusive sense; and he simply adopted the accepted poses of the figure that were current in the Scottish portraiture of his day, though to these his original genius gave a finer grace, catching from Nature an added ease. But in the grouping of this picture, and in its lighting—so abnormal in arrangement—we certainly have as definite a departure as could well be imagined, from the stock traditions that have guided the art of portraiture from time immemorial; and some other reason than a purely technical one is suggested by the marked originality of the work, in both conception and treatment. Was this strange and most unusual distribution of light in the picture a mere artistic experiment in chiaroscuro?Did the painter devote half of his canvas to an extended landscape vista, merely in honour of the Baronet’s ancestral acres; and was that pose of regardant countenance and interlacing arms selected only because it made for a graceful flow of changeful line? Hardly was all this the case, one fancies.

May it not, then, be conceivable that when the portrait had been commissioned, and while its details and way of treatment were being discussed by the pair—painter and baronet—as they sat together, in quiet after-dinner hour over their wine, in this very room where the completed picture now holds its place,—is it not just conceivable that Sir John, in some such time of genial heart-expansion, as he poised his glass to catch the last warm gleam of summer evening light that streamed across the darkening woods,—that the childless man, beginning now to verge gently towards age, may have been stirred by ancient memories, and have told the artist of some bygone scene to which these ancestral woods were once the witness? Is it a walk of plighted lovers that the painter hints at on his canvas, and has the bride just caught first sight of her future home? Or, can the scene be one tenderer still? The middle-aged lover looks—calmly, earnestly expectant, waiting for an answer that will not come from the lady’s lips, that will certainly not be given by theirwords—at the noble face of the mature and stately beauty by his side, into her dear grey eyes that never meet his, but gaze right on into the distance—into the future is it? Has the painter then meant to show us one of those strenuous, delicately-poised moments that come in mortal lives, when “words are mere mistake,” when

“A lip’s mere tremble,Looks half hesitation, cheeks just change of colour,”

“A lip’s mere tremble,

Looks half hesitation, cheeks just change of colour,”

at once crystallise intensest emotion and afford its fullest expression, and sign and seal a human soul with final impress of success or failure? Is—inbriefest English—the man waiting for the sign that will make him accepted or rejected lover?

This portrait, the chief treasure of Penicuik House, would surely possess enough of interest from the power of its artistry, and the romantic associations with which our fancy may possibly invest it; but its interest is deepened, and it gathers a yet more intimate charm when we have heard the beautiful old-world story connected with the lady’s birth.

Of this curious episode there are varying versions extant, which are given and fully discussed by Ellen K. Goodwin, in a pamphlet (Kendal, 1886) reprinted from the “Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archæological Society.” There is a puzzling difference between the date of 15th November 1745, given by Lady Clerk as the day of her birth, and that of 3d November which appears in the register of Kirkliston parish as the day of her baptism; but this discrepancy—we may suggest—would be lessened to within a single day, if her Ladyship has calculated according to New Style, introduced in Scotland in 1600, and the register has estimated by Old Style, current in England till 1752; while the presence of the Highlanders at Carlisle at the time would be accounted for if they crossed the border on “the 7th or 8th of November,” New Style.

The following is the interesting version of the story, communicated by Lady Clerk herself to the Editor of “Blackwood’s Magazine”:—

“... The incident occurred November 15th, 1745. My father, Mr. Dacre, then an officer of His Majesty’s Militia, was a prisoner in the Castle of Carlisle, at that time in the hands of Prince Charles. My mother (a daughter of Sir George le Fleming, Bart., Bishop of Carlisle) was living at Rose Castle, six miles from Carlisle, when she was delivered of me. She had given orders that I should immediately be privately baptized by the Bishop’s chaplain (his Lordship not being at home)by name of Rosemary Dacre. At that moment a company of Highlanders approached headed by a Captain Macdonald, who having heard there was much plate and valuables in the Castle came to plunder it. Upon the approach of the Highlanders, an old grey-headed servant ran out and entreated Captain Macdonald not to proceed, as any noise or alarm might cause the death of both lady and child. The Captain enquired where the lady had been confined. ‘Within this house,’ the servant answered. Captain Macdonald stopped. The servant added, ‘They are just going to christen the infant.’ Macdonald, taking off his cockade, said, ‘Let her be christened with this cockade in her cap, it will be her protection now and after if any of our stragglers should come this way: we will wait the ceremony in silence,’ which they accordingly did, and they went into the coachyard, and were regaled with beef, cheese, and ale, then went off without the smallest disturbance. My white cockade was safely preserved and shown me from time to time, always reminding me to respect the Scotch, and Highlanders in particular. I think I have obeyed the injunction by spending my life in Scotland, and also by hoping to die there.Rosemary Clerk.. . . . .“Edinburgh, April 21, 1817.”

Rosemary Clerk.

. . . . .

“Edinburgh, April 21, 1817.”

In memory of the event, Lady Clerk always wore the cockade, along with a white rose, upon her birthday. It has been said that she presented it to GeorgeIV.on the occasion of his visit to Scotland, and its existence, unfortunately, cannot now be traced: but a still living connection of the family informs us that she had seen the relic in the possession of Lady Clerk, at a more recent date than that of the royal progress.

It will be remembered that Scott, to whom in his youth Sir John and Lady Clerk had been kind, with his keen and appreciative eye for thepicturesque, has seized upon this incident and turned it to excellent account in the opening chapter of “The Monastery.”

That white cockade, the symbol of a cause so full of poetry and romance, seems to have brought a benison with it to the babe Rosemary Dacre, to have dowered her with beauty, and gifted her with an unusually magnetic attractiveness. As she grew into fairest womanhood she had many lovers, declared and undeclared, and in the hearts of those who failed to win the lady her memory seems to have lingered tenderly with no touch of bitterness; to have been, to some of them, a kind of lifelong inspiration, evoking gentle wistful feelings, such as Dante Rossetti has so exquisitely recorded in one of the finest of his earlier poems, his “First Love Remembered.”

Some curious records, some strange hints of the potent part which the lady of the white cockade, and the memory of her, played in the lives of certain men whom she never wedded are preserved at Penicuik, casketed in the dainty little Chippendale workbox that once was hers, among other personal relics,—her long black gloves, with a space of black lace inlet from palm to top; her cap edged with delicate lace; a long tress of her dark brown hair, marked “June the 6th, 1794, aged 48”; and her silhouette, cut in black paper, showing a strong dignified profile, beneath a tall hat, wound round with a veil.

Two of the interesting letters preserved in this quaint old workbox are from Lord Chancellor Eldon, who in his youth, as they clearly indicate, had been a lover of Rosemary Dacre; though the impression can hardly have been overwhelmingly deep or very permanent, for he was only twenty-one when he eloped with Bessy Surtees, a step which entailed the loss of his Oxford fellowship, closed his hopes of preferment in the Church, and obliged him with “a most kind Providence for my guide,” as he says, to take to the study of law, one of his earliest legal efforts being the delivery, as Deputy-VinerianProfessor for Sir Robert Chambers, of a lecture on “the statute of young men running away with maidens.” But in his youth the future Lord Chancellor was, as he used to confess, “very susceptible.” “Oh,” he would say, “these were happy days; we were always in love then.”

The first letter of the old man of nearly eighty runs as follows:—

“14 April 1829.“Dear Mary Dacre,—Pardon my use of a name, which belonged to you when I first knew you. I can sincerely assure you that I have often, often thought of the person who bore that name when I knew her, with, may I say, sentiments of most sincere affection? If I had been Lord Stowell, her name now might neither have been Molly Dacre, nor Mary, Lady Clarke.“Thank you a thousand Times, thank you for your Letter, which I have this moment received. I would thank you more at large if I could delay in an hour, in which I am much engaged, to thank you, but that I cannot persuade myself to do.“I have done my best to defeat this disastrous measure. If I am wrong God forgive me! if I am right God forgive others, if He can! Lady Eldon, Bessy Surtees, sends her Love to you with that of,Yr obliged and affectionate Friend,Eldon.Mary Lady Clarke,100 Princess Street,Edinburgh.”

“14 April 1829.

“Dear Mary Dacre,—Pardon my use of a name, which belonged to you when I first knew you. I can sincerely assure you that I have often, often thought of the person who bore that name when I knew her, with, may I say, sentiments of most sincere affection? If I had been Lord Stowell, her name now might neither have been Molly Dacre, nor Mary, Lady Clarke.

“Thank you a thousand Times, thank you for your Letter, which I have this moment received. I would thank you more at large if I could delay in an hour, in which I am much engaged, to thank you, but that I cannot persuade myself to do.

“I have done my best to defeat this disastrous measure. If I am wrong God forgive me! if I am right God forgive others, if He can! Lady Eldon, Bessy Surtees, sends her Love to you with that of,

Yr obliged and affectionate Friend,Eldon.Mary Lady Clarke,100 Princess Street,Edinburgh.”

The second letter is written, on the 29th of June in the same year “as Lady Eldon’s Secretary” to thank Lady Clerk for a present of jewellery.

“... After the Lapse of so many years to be remembered by one whom we remember, I can most sincerely say, with Respect and affection, is perhaps the most gratifying circumstance thatcould have happened to either of us. I feel the Value of your kindness to her ten thousand Times more than any that could have been shown to myself. She will wear the Ornaments from you and the Grampians as in Truth the most valuable she has, as long as she lives, and we shall both take some Pains to secure its being, in the possession of those who follow after us, an heir Loom. I know not why we search the World over for Diamonds, when the Grampians can furnish what equals, if it does not surpass them, in beauty and brilliancy.“How often have Lady Eldon and I—distant as we are from your Habitation—fancied that we have been looking at Molly Dacre, and listening to ‘Auld Robin Gray’ sung exquisitely by her? eyes and ears alike highly gratified. Excuse this—remember that it comes from one, who, in his last Letter, expressed a wish that he had beenThe Elder Brother.“With Lady E’s Thanks and affectionate Regards,YrDear Madam,Eldon.Eliz: Eldon.”

“How often have Lady Eldon and I—distant as we are from your Habitation—fancied that we have been looking at Molly Dacre, and listening to ‘Auld Robin Gray’ sung exquisitely by her? eyes and ears alike highly gratified. Excuse this—remember that it comes from one, who, in his last Letter, expressed a wish that he had beenThe Elder Brother.

“With Lady E’s Thanks and affectionate Regards,

YrDear Madam,Eldon.Eliz: Eldon.”

The allusion at the close of the first letter is to the Catholic Relief Bill which Lord Eldon so strenuously opposed. Only four days before the date of the note his name had headed the protest of the Peers against the measure.

The Lord Stowell referred to is the Chancellor’s elder brother, Judge of the High Court of Admiralty. He was born in the same year as Mary Dacre, and, curiously enough, his birth also was associated with the presence of the Pretender’s army. As in the other case there are varying versions of the story. One tradition asserts that the town of Newcastle being fortified and closed in anticipation of the approach of the Jacobites, who were then in possession ofEdinburgh, it was thought that his mother should be removed to a quieter place, in anticipation of her confinement; and that this was effected by her being lowered in a large basket into a boat in the river and conveyed to Heworth, a village four miles distant. The other version assigns the perilous descent to Dr. Hallowel, her medical attendant, who was let down from the top of the town wall of Newcastle in order to be present at Heworth at the critical moment.

The remaining letters afford even a more curious glimpse of the fascination which Rosemary Dacre exercised upon those who came within the circle of her influence. The first is addressed to her husband’s nephew and successor the Right Hon. Sir George Clerk, and is dated—

“Chitton Lodge,3 June 1830.“My dear Sir George,—Enclosed I send you Capt. Morris’s verses which I mentioned to you. The circumstances which occasioned them were the following. Lord Stowell, Lord Sidmouth, and Capt. Morris, with some other Friends, were dining with me last Spring, when Lord Stowell remarked that although Capt. Morris was the same age as himself he was much more active and elastic. Capt. Morris attributed this to his having been ardently in Love for the whole of his Life; and on being pressed to disclose the object of his passion confessed that it was Lady Clarke, who at the age of sixteen won his affection, and that although he had been since married she had never ceased to exercise an influence on his heart, and be a source of animation. Lord Stowell immediately acknowledged that by a remarkable coincidence he also had been enamoured of Lady Clarke, and at the same age of sixteen, and that although twice married, the recollection of her charms had not been effaced from his mind. This of course gave rise to much mirth among the company, Lord Sidmouth particularly laughing atthe Lovers, who at the age of eighty-four declared that their passion was undiminished towards a Lady who had attained the same age,I am,My dear Sir George,Yours truly,John Pearse.”

“Chitton Lodge,3 June 1830.

“My dear Sir George,—Enclosed I send you Capt. Morris’s verses which I mentioned to you. The circumstances which occasioned them were the following. Lord Stowell, Lord Sidmouth, and Capt. Morris, with some other Friends, were dining with me last Spring, when Lord Stowell remarked that although Capt. Morris was the same age as himself he was much more active and elastic. Capt. Morris attributed this to his having been ardently in Love for the whole of his Life; and on being pressed to disclose the object of his passion confessed that it was Lady Clarke, who at the age of sixteen won his affection, and that although he had been since married she had never ceased to exercise an influence on his heart, and be a source of animation. Lord Stowell immediately acknowledged that by a remarkable coincidence he also had been enamoured of Lady Clarke, and at the same age of sixteen, and that although twice married, the recollection of her charms had not been effaced from his mind. This of course gave rise to much mirth among the company, Lord Sidmouth particularly laughing atthe Lovers, who at the age of eighty-four declared that their passion was undiminished towards a Lady who had attained the same age,

I am,My dear Sir George,Yours truly,John Pearse.”

Then follows a copy of the enclosure from Captain Morris of the Life Guards, who, it may be remarked, was a well-known politician and popular song-writer, and a boon companion of the wits at Brooks. His portrait, engraved by Greatbach, is given in an early volume of “Bentley’s Miscellany,” and another portrait, painted by James Lonsdale, was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London.

“No. 1 Thornhaugh St.Bedford Sq.May 29, 1829.My dear Sir,—Looking in my Scrap Book to-day, I find a few Stanzas, on mydeathless Passionfor myfirst love, written in my latter days, and as such an extraordinary and singular coincidence on that subject occurred at your table on Wednesday, I take the liberty of enclosing them to you, the more so as Lady Sidmouth is a correspondent, and perhaps might have no objection to honour them with a perusal; if you think so, and will let her Ladyship see them, I beg permission to commit them to your care, and I remain,My dear Sir,Most gratefully and faithfullyYours,Chas. Morris.”“I beg leave to add that it is sixty-eight years since I lived in Carlisle with my Father and mother. Lady Clark will of course have no recollection of myBoyish adoration, but to recall it, if possible, to her memory, I would wish her toknow that it is Chas. Morris, son of Col. Morris, of the 17th Regt., who lived with my mother at Carlisle, and with whom Lady Clark and the Dacre Family were acquainted.”

“No. 1 Thornhaugh St.Bedford Sq.May 29, 1829.

My dear Sir,—Looking in my Scrap Book to-day, I find a few Stanzas, on mydeathless Passionfor myfirst love, written in my latter days, and as such an extraordinary and singular coincidence on that subject occurred at your table on Wednesday, I take the liberty of enclosing them to you, the more so as Lady Sidmouth is a correspondent, and perhaps might have no objection to honour them with a perusal; if you think so, and will let her Ladyship see them, I beg permission to commit them to your care, and I remain,

My dear Sir,Most gratefully and faithfullyYours,Chas. Morris.”

“I beg leave to add that it is sixty-eight years since I lived in Carlisle with my Father and mother. Lady Clark will of course have no recollection of myBoyish adoration, but to recall it, if possible, to her memory, I would wish her toknow that it is Chas. Morris, son of Col. Morris, of the 17th Regt., who lived with my mother at Carlisle, and with whom Lady Clark and the Dacre Family were acquainted.”

Then follows the brave old jingle of rhyme which the ever-faithful lover had made in praise of his lady:—

“Though years have spread around my HeadThe sober Veil of Reason,To close in Night sweet Fancy’s light,My Heart rejects as Treason;A spark there lies, still fann’d by Sighs,Ordained by Beauty’s maker,And fix’d by Fate, burns yet, tho’ late,For lovely Molly Dacre.Oh! while I miss the days of BlissI pass’d in rapture gazing,The Dream impress’d still charms my breastWhich Fancy ever raising.Tho’ much I meet in Life is sweet,My Soul can ne’er forsake her,And all I feel, still bears the SealOf lovely Molly Dacre!Whene’er her course in chaise or horseConveyed her to our city,How did I gaze, in bliss’d amazeTo catch her smile of pity;And round her door the night I wore,Still mute as any Quaker,With hope-fed Zeal, one glance to stealFrom lovely Molly Dacre.When rumour dear proclaimed her near,Her charms a crowd amazing,How would I start with panting HeartTo catch her eye when passing.When home she turned, I ran, I burnedO’er many a distant Acre,To hope by chance one parting glanceFrom lovely Molly Dacre.I’ve often thought the happy lotOf Health and Spirits lent me,Is deem’d as due to faith so true,And thus by Fate is sent me.While here she be there’s life for me,And when high Heaven shall take her,Alike last breath, I’ll ask of DeathTo follow Molly Dacre.M.”

“Though years have spread around my Head

The sober Veil of Reason,

To close in Night sweet Fancy’s light,

My Heart rejects as Treason;

A spark there lies, still fann’d by Sighs,

Ordained by Beauty’s maker,

And fix’d by Fate, burns yet, tho’ late,

For lovely Molly Dacre.

Oh! while I miss the days of BlissI pass’d in rapture gazing,The Dream impress’d still charms my breastWhich Fancy ever raising.Tho’ much I meet in Life is sweet,My Soul can ne’er forsake her,And all I feel, still bears the SealOf lovely Molly Dacre!

Oh! while I miss the days of Bliss

I pass’d in rapture gazing,

The Dream impress’d still charms my breast

Which Fancy ever raising.

Tho’ much I meet in Life is sweet,

My Soul can ne’er forsake her,

And all I feel, still bears the Seal

Of lovely Molly Dacre!

Whene’er her course in chaise or horseConveyed her to our city,How did I gaze, in bliss’d amazeTo catch her smile of pity;And round her door the night I wore,Still mute as any Quaker,With hope-fed Zeal, one glance to stealFrom lovely Molly Dacre.

Whene’er her course in chaise or horse

Conveyed her to our city,

How did I gaze, in bliss’d amaze

To catch her smile of pity;

And round her door the night I wore,

Still mute as any Quaker,

With hope-fed Zeal, one glance to steal

From lovely Molly Dacre.

When rumour dear proclaimed her near,Her charms a crowd amazing,How would I start with panting HeartTo catch her eye when passing.When home she turned, I ran, I burnedO’er many a distant Acre,To hope by chance one parting glanceFrom lovely Molly Dacre.

When rumour dear proclaimed her near,

Her charms a crowd amazing,

How would I start with panting Heart

To catch her eye when passing.

When home she turned, I ran, I burned

O’er many a distant Acre,

To hope by chance one parting glance

From lovely Molly Dacre.

I’ve often thought the happy lotOf Health and Spirits lent me,Is deem’d as due to faith so true,And thus by Fate is sent me.While here she be there’s life for me,And when high Heaven shall take her,Alike last breath, I’ll ask of DeathTo follow Molly Dacre.

I’ve often thought the happy lot

Of Health and Spirits lent me,

Is deem’d as due to faith so true,

And thus by Fate is sent me.

While here she be there’s life for me,

And when high Heaven shall take her,

Alike last breath, I’ll ask of Death

To follow Molly Dacre.

M.”

Surely it was with true significance that Rosemary Dacre’s seal—the seal which always descends to her name-child in the house of Penicuik—was engraved with the sign of a single star, shedding a benign and steadfast light over a pathless vastitude of air and a fluctuating waste of sea; for the Lady’s memory seems to have shone with an ideal light through many human lives.

The next portrait by Raeburn represents John Clerk of Eldin, the seventh son of Baron Clerk, second Baronet of Penicuik, and author of the celebrated “Enquiry into Naval Tactics.” He was educated at the Grammar School of Dalkeith and the University of Edinburgh, and in that city he engaged in business as a merchant till about 1772, when he purchased the property of Eldin, in the parish of Lasswade, and obtained a post in connection with the Exchequer, the secretaryship to the Commissioners on the Annexed Estates in Scotland. He was a man of a vigorous and active mind, and seems to have possessed equal aptitudes for art and science. Some of his sketches are dated as early as 1758, but it was in 1770 that he began to etch upon copper, and in the next twelve years he produced a series of over a hundred plates. These are founded upon a careful study of the old Dutch masters of the art. In their topographical aspect they are of great interest as portraying many ancient buildings which have since been removed or altered; and as examples of etching, in spite of certain amateurish defects, they form a curious connecting-link between the period of Rembrandt and the early days of our own century, when the process was taken up and carried to such fine artistic issues by two other Scotsmen, Geddes and Wilkie. A large collection of Mr. Clerk’s etchings and drawings is preserved in the Library at Penicuik. A series of the former, tinted by Robert Adam, the celebrated architect, whose sister, Susannah, Mr. Clerk had married in 1753,was presented to GeorgeIII.in 1786, at the suggestion of the Earl of Buchan. Twenty-eight of them were issued to members of the Bannatyne Club in 1825, and other of the coppers having been recovered, a series of fifty-five etchings and reproductions of sketches were issued to the same Club in 1855 with an admirable memoir by David Laing.

In his scientific pursuits Clerk was the intimate associate of Dr. James Hutton, whose geological papers his pencil was ever ready to illustrate, and it is believed that the Professor’s “Theory of the Earth” owed something to his friend’s suggestions. The first part of Clerk’s celebrated “Enquiry into Naval Tactics” was published in 1782, and the second, third, and fourth parts were added in 1797. Though a work of great interest and value, the assertion that it was the means of Rodney’s adopting that mode of breaking the enemy’s line which led to the celebrated victory off Dominique on 12th April 1782, seems to be one incapable of absolute proof. We have a pleasant characterisation of him,à proposof his death, May 1812, in Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials”:—

“An interesting and delightful old man; full of the peculiarities that distinguished the whole family—talent, caprice, obstinacy, worth, kindliness, and oddity, ... he was looked up to with deference by all the philosophers of his day, who were in the habit of constantly receiving hints and views from him, which they deemed of great value. He was a striking-looking old gentleman, with his grizzly hair, vigorous features, and Scotch speech. It would be difficult to say whether jokes or disputation pleased him most.”

“A striking-looking old gentleman” he certainly shows in Raeburn’s portrait—which, technically, is an excellent example of the ‘square touch’ and vigorous modelling of that painter—with the strong face, clear light yellowish eyes, broad forehead, and white hair, rising from the high-collared old-fashioned coat. The picture has been lithographed by A. Hahnisch in the 1855 Bannatyne Club issue of the etchings, and the personality of its subjectmay be gathered from two other portraits;—a crayon likeness by Skirving, showing less of dignity and more of shrewdness, which passed by bequest to the Blair Adam family, and was admirably mezzotinted by S. W. Reynolds in 1800; and a three-quarters length portrait in oils by James Saxon, now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where he is represented seated at a table holding a plan which depicts his naval manœuvre of breaking the line. The latter belonged to the father of W. H. Carpenter of the British Museum, who caused the ships in the distance to be painted in by William Anderson.

The remaining example of Raeburn at Penicuik House is a portrait of Mr. Clerk’s eldest son, John Clerk, Lord Eldin. Lord Cockburn tells a pretty story of the relation between the two. “‘I remember,’ the father used to say, ‘the time when people seeing John limping on the street, used to ask what lame lad that was; and the answer would be, That’s the son of Clerk of Eldin. But now, when I myself am passing, I hear them saying, What auld grey-headed man is that? And the answer is, That’s the father of John Clerk.’ He was much prouder of the last mark than the first.”

From his earliest years the future judge possessed all that love for art which has been constant in the family of Clerk; his own drawings possess considerable vigour and character. He was an enthusiastic collector, and the crowd that was gathered in his house in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, at the sale of his collection after his death in 1832 was so excessive that the floor gave way, causing the death of one person, and the serious injury of several others. Vigorous and lifelike sketches of his vehemence and wit and curiously eccentric and powerful personality will be found in the pages of Lord Cockburn and in “Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk.” From their student days Raeburn and he were chosen friends, and it must have been about the date of the presentportrait that the whimsical episode occurred which Allan Cunningham records in his account of the painter, an account that has left little to be gleaned by later biographers. “Raeburn received an invitation to dine with Clerk, and hastening to his lodgings, he found the landlady spreading a cloth on the table, and setting down two dishes, one containing three herrings and the other three potatoes. ‘And is this all?’ said John. ‘All,’ said the landlady. ‘All! Did I not tell ye, woman,’ he exclaimed, ‘that a gentleman was to dine with me, and that ye were to get six herrings and six potatoes?’ The tables of both were better furnished before the lapse of many years; and they loved, it is said, when the wine was flowing, to recall those early days, when hope was high and the spirit unrebuked by intercourse with the world.”

The present portrait shows Clerk in the character of a budding barrister. The figure is life-sized, seated, seen in three-quarters to the left, the wigged head turned nearly in pure profile to the left. The figure, clad in black coat, black satin vest, and knee-breeches of the same, and with ruffs at breast and wrists, lies back easily in the chair, the right hand extending over its arm, and holding a law paper, the left placed, with outspread fingers, on the table in front, which is covered with a richly tinted cloth, on which lie “Stair’s Institutes,” the “Regiam Magista,” and other volumes in “law-calf,” while on the other side, as though to hint at the advocate’s artistic tastes, appears a cast of a classical head, just as in the later Raeburn portrait a little bronze version of the Crouching Venus nestles among the bundles of briefs. The face, wearing an expression of great earnestness and intentness, is as yet beardless, unformed, and rather heavy-looking; different indeed from the emphatic furrowed countenance that appears in the later portraits which show him when age had developed his full individuality. The eyes are pale bluish grey, and the eyebrows very light in colour.

There are no other early portraits of Lord Eldin, by which we can judge of his appearance at the time that this one was executed. The admirable three-quarter seated portrait by Raeburn, where he appears holding his spectacles in his right hand, and with the other supporting a folio which rests on a table, shows him in later life. It passed by bequest to the house of Riccarton, and has been powerfully mezzotinted by Charles Turner, the plate appearing, after it had been reduced in size, in the Bannatyne volume of Mr. Clerk’s Etchings, 1855. A somewhat similarly arranged portrait, of cabinet size, painted by Andrew Geddes, another of Lord Eldin’s artistic friends, was in the possession of the late Mr. James Gibson Craig; and there is the lithograph by B. W. Crombie, a bust-portrait, in ordinary dress, executed in June 1837, showing in the shrewd profile face much of that “thoroughbred shaggy terrier” aspect upon which Lord Cockburn remarks in his “Life of Jeffrey”; and also the bust by Joseph, engraved in line by Robert Bell, of which a cast is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

In addition to these there are several caricatures which doubtless preserve much that was characteristic of the man. There is the etching by Kay, in the plate of “Twelve Advocates who Plead with Wigs on,” showing an eager countenance, with opened mouth and protruding under lip; and the four very vivid and lifelike sketches by Robert Scott Moncrieff, reproduced in “The Scottish Bar Fifty Years Ago.” The first of these latter shows him in suppressed—but most belligerent—mood seated as an advocate listening to the pleadings of the council on the opposite side, with mouth compressed, and lips drawn down at the ends, his left hand grasping his spectacle-case, the other cast over the arm of his chair and grasping his papers. Another shows him pacing the floor of the Parliament House, briefs in hand, his gown trailing behind him, his wig perched knowingly in front, his spectacles pushed far uphis forehead,—much as Carlyle, in his “Reminiscences,” records that he saw him, when he visited the Parliament House in 1809, on his arrival in Edinburgh to begin his student-life. “The only figure I distinctly recollect, and got printed on my brain that night, was John Clerk, then veritably hitching about, whose grim, strong countenance, with its black far-projecting brows and look of great sagacity, fixed him in my memory.” The third of Mr. Moncrieff’s drawings shows him in the full fury of his vehement eloquence as a pleader, his gown flying about him in mighty folds, his right fist clenched and raised in excited action. A fourth sketch, a rather terrible one, depicts him in latest age, seated on the bench, his hands laid in front and muffled in his judge’s gown, his great mouth with its prominent under lip firmly set, and his small eyes keenly observant through his spectacles. One other caricature remains to be noticed, the little etching marked “X. Y. Z.,” which is often to be found bound up along with copies of his sale catalogue, showing him in full-length ascending a flight of stairs, snuffbox in hand.

In the Business-room there hangs a small portrait of Lord Eldin’s younger brother, William Clerk, advocate—“only less witty and odd than his great Swiftian brother,” as Dr. John Brown has truly remarked—who figures so prominently in the biography and correspondence of Sir Walter Scott. At college they were contemporaries and bosom friends, they passed their Civil Law and their Scots Law examinations on the same day, and together assumed the advocate’s gown. It was in his company that the young Scott, after a fishing expedition to Howgate, visited Penicuik House, when he “was overwhelmed with kindness by the late Sir John Clerk and his lady”—the pair who figure in the great Raeburn group, and when “the pleasure of looking at fine pictures, the beauty of the place, and the flattering hospitality of the owners drowned the recollection of home for a day or two.” The friendship thusbegun was continued through life; and in his latest years Scott dwells, in his Diary, with especial gusto upon the snug little dinners in Rose Court, Edinburgh, when a few chosen spirits gathered round Clerk’s bachelor board.

The present picture, a cabinet-sized bust, is somewhat amateurish in its execution, but still full of character and individuality; the features of the shrewd, wrinkled face, its definitely curved nose, sharply-cut mouth, thin compressed lips, and dark, brilliantly blue eyes beneath the bushy white eyebrows, combine into what is doubtless a faithful rendering of that friend of whom Scott wrote in his Diary, in 1825, “I have known him intimately since our college days; and to my thinking I never met a man of greater powers or more complete information on all desirable subjects.” It is the work of Mrs. Hugh Blackburn, a lady so well known for her excellent renderings of birds and animals; but another oil-portrait of William Clerk, a cabinet-sized bust, turned to the right and dated 1843, the work of Miss Isabella Clerk, sister of the seventh Baronet, is also preserved at Penicuik.

Among the portraits of more recent members of the Clerk family are various works representing their eminent politician and statistical authority, the Right Hon. Sir George Clerk, D.C.L., the sixth Baronet, who repeatedly represented the county of Mid-Lothian in Parliament; who was a Lord of the Admiralty under the Liverpool Administration; succeeded Mr. Gladstone as Master of the Mint in 1845, and in the same year was appointed Vice-President of the Board of Trade, and a member of the Privy Council. Several miniatures representing him are preserved in the Drawing-room, and there are also two life-sized three-quarter-length portraits in oil. That hung in the smaller Drawing-room is an excellent example by William Dyce, R.A., a distant connection of the family’s, and was painted in 1830. It is executed with great delicacy, quietude, and reticence, and does full justice to the Baronet’s refined andhandsome face, then in its prime. This picture has been excellently mezzotinted by Thomas Lupton. That in the Dining-room, painted by the vigorous hand of Sir John Watson Gordon, portrays Sir George in later life, seated in an easy chair, and holding one of the statistical blue-books which his soul loved. Of his wife, Maria, second daughter of Ewan Law of Horsted Place, Sussex, there is also an oil portrait in the Dining-room, showing a refined face, with a delicate complexion, bearing the trace of suffering in the firmly compressed yet pathetic mouth, and the straight dark eyebrows, which are knit a little and contracted over the pale grey wistful eyes. The picture has a rather slight and unfinished appearance, and is somewhat chalky in its whites. Its painter, the late J. R. Swinton, worked comparatively little in oils, and examples of his better-known crayon drawings may be studied in the portraits of the Dowager Lady Clerk and her sister-in-law, the Hon. Mrs. Elphinstone, which hang in the smaller Drawing-room.

It should also be noticed that many characteristic likenesses of the sixth Baronet are included in an interesting volume of sketches, done in old days by his niece Mrs. Hugh Blackburn, and now preserved at Penicuik, a series portraying familiar scenes there, and at Sir George’s London residence in Park Street, Westminster,—card-parties and musical evenings in which Piatti and other eminent performers took part, days spent on the ice, or picnicking among the Pentlands, rides in the Park or over lonely stretches of moorland—drawings highly humorous, plentifully touched with caricature, yet including not a little substantial truth of portraiture.

There is also in the Dining-room an interesting cabinet-sized portrait of Sir George’s younger brother, John Clerk Maxwell of Middleby, that genial, practical, individual Scotsman of whom a most interesting account is given in the life of his distinguished son, Professor James Clerk Maxwell. The picture is the work of his niece,Miss Isabella Clerk, and shows some traces of the amateur, especially in the size and uncouthness of the hands, but a comparison with the engraving from the portrait by Watson Gordon, given in the above-mentioned volume, proves it to be a substantially faithful likeness of the good old man.

We now come to glance at the portraits at Penicuik House which do not represent members of the Clerk family. Among the earliest of these, hung in the Dining-room, is a three-quarter-length seated portrait of Sir Archibald Primrose, Lord Carrington, that ancestor of the Rosebery family who played an important part in politics during the Restoration period, who fought under Montrose, was captured at Philiphaugh, and barely escaped being executed for treason; who was appointed Lord Clerk Register in 1660, and Lord Justice-General in 1676, presiding, in that office, at the trial in 1678, of Mitchell for the attempted assassination of Archbishop Sharp; and whose later years were spent in steady opposition to the administration of the Duke of Lauderdale. He is styled by Burnet “the subtelist of all Lord Middletoun’s friends, a man of long and great practice in affairs ...; a dextrous man of business, he had always expedients ready at every difficulty.” In the picture he appears in his black, gold-laced robes as Lord Clerk Register, his right hand resting on the arm of his chair, the left raised, and his face seen in three-quarters to the right, with its thin prominent nose drooping at the point, small chin, and lips rising towards the ends and pursed and dimpled a little at the corners. A similar picture, but only bust-sized, stated (Catalogue of Royal Scottish Academy Loan Exhibition, 1863) to be dated 1670, has been long at Dalmeny, and a copy of it was presented by Lord Rosebery to the Faculty of Advocates in 1883, and now hangs in the Parliament House. His Lordship hasrecently acquired, from the Rothes Collection, another, a three-quarter length, version of the picture; and we are informed that there is also a similar-sized version in the possession of Lord Elphinstone. A portrait of Sir Archibald Primrose appears in Mr. A. H. Millar’s list of the portraits at Kinnaird Castle, but we have not examined this work, and cannot say whether it is a repetition of the present portrait.

Two interesting oil pictures showing Charles, third Duke of Queensberry, and his celebrated Duchess, hang near the portrait of Lord Carrington. The Duke, the correspondent of Swift, painted rather dryly and hardly by Miss Ann Forbes, whose work we have already referred to, is seen to below the waist, clad in peer’s robes, the figure turned towards the right. The face, shown in three-quarters, closely resembles that in the cabinet-sized bust in oils at Ballochmyle, and in the mezzotint engraved in 1773, by Valentine Green after George Willison, with the same high cheek-bones, and prominent high-bridged nose, and the eyes are of a warm brown colour; but the face is older than in either of the other portraits, grave and worn, and covered with wrinkles.

The companion portrait of the Duchess, “Prior’s Kitty, ever young,” the eccentric patroness of Gay, a work by Aikman, recalls in most of its details her portrait by Charles Jervas, in the National Portrait Gallery, London. She is shown in three-quarters length, slim, graceful, and youthful, clad in a coquettish country costume, a dress of greyish brown, of dainty proportions at the waist, low-breasted, and with short sleeves that display the well-turned arms, with a small white apron, and a little close cap set on the head and almost entirely concealing the dark brown hair. The face, with its blue eyes and fresh delicate complexion, is drooping a little, turned in three-quarters to the left; her left hand rests on the edge of a milk-pail, and her right holds what appears to be a broad round-brimmedhat. The background is a landscape, with rocks and trees rising behind the lady to the left, and with a stretch of green meadow to the right—in which, however, no figures appear, as in the National Portrait Gallery picture,—and a space of blue sky faintly tinged with red towards the horizon.

We are informed that these three last-named works were acquired at a sale, about the end of the last century.

Near them hangs a three-quarter-length portrait which forms an interesting memorial of one of the second Baronet’s most congenial friendships. It represents that prominent statesman in the days of Queen Anne and GeorgeI., Thomas, eighth Earl of Pembroke, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in 1707, a man of great refinement and varied culture, President of the Royal Society, of which body Baron Clerk was elected a member in 1728, “an honour”—as he states in his “History”—“I value much.” Clerk first made his acquaintance during his student-days at Leyden, when the Earl was acting as First Plenipotentiary at the Treaty of Ryswick. In his account of that Treaty in the “History of my Own Times,” Bishop Burnet remarks that “there was something in his person and manner that created him an universal respect; for we had no man among us whom all sides loved and honoured as they did him.” In 1726 Clerk tells us that he corresponded with Lord Pembroke upon classical and antiquarian subjects; it was then that the Earl “sent me his Picture which is now among the Ornaments of Mavisbank,” one of Sir John’s houses; and after he visited London in the following year, and examined its chief artistic collections, he records with delight his pilgrimage to his friend’s seat of Wilton, and his appreciation of the princely gathering of statues, coins, medals, etc., which he had brought together there, and especially of his great ancestral treasure, the Van Dyck group of Earl Philip and his family. The eighth Earl, it may be noticed, died in January1732-3, not 1702-3, as given in Noble’s “Granger,” or 1722-3, as stated by Chaloner Smith.

In the portrait he appears in three-quarters length, clad in armour, with a lace cravat, and a long dark curling wig, the jewel of the Garter being suspended by its blue ribbon under his right arm. The figure is turned to the left, but the sallow, shaven face, with its dark eyes appearing from beneath bushy black eyebrows, looks in three-quarters to the right. His right hand is raised holding a baton, behind which is placed a helmet, the left rests on a gold-hilted sword; and there is a rocky background, disclosing a space of sky and sea with a ship and boats.

The picture is evidently a version of the portrait of the Earl painted by William Wissing, mezzotinted by John Smith in a plate to which the date of 1709 has been assigned, though the painting must have been executed much earlier, as Wissing died in 1687. The naval background is stated to be from the brush of “Vandevelde,” having evidently been introduced by that artist, after the death of the original painter of the work, at the time when the Earl was appointed Lord High Admiral of Great Britain and Ireland, a post which he held in 1701, and again in 1708. The younger William Vandevelde must be the artist indicated, as the elder painter of the same name died in 1693.

Among the other portraits in the Dining-room may be mentioned a fine three-quarters length of the Earl of Denbigh, by Lely; a vigorous bust-portrait of the Duke of Norfolk, by Kneller,—the eighth Duke, as is proved by the robe and collar of the Garter which appear in the picture; and a copy from the well-known Janssen portrait of Drummond of Hawthornden, in the possession of the Earl of Home: while the portraits of Prince Charles Edward and of his wife the Princess Stolberg, known as the Countess of Albany, though sufficiently indifferent works of art, possess a certain interest as having been presented toRosemary Clerk by Miss Law of Princes Street, Edinburgh, after she had heard the tale of the White Cockade, as recorded by Lady Clerk herself, in the postscript to her letter to the Editor of “Blackwood’s Magazine,” which we have already quoted.

In the Corridor hangs an important and striking portrait of Lord Godolphin, probably from the hand of William Aikman, a work doubtless acquired by the Baron as representing an eminent English statesman with whom he had been brought into contact about the time of the Union. The figure is seen to below the waist, turned in three-quarters to the right; and the face is more individual and characteristic, if less dignified and well conditioned, than that which appears in Houbraken’s line-engraving, or in Smith’s mezzotint after Kneller. The nose is small and clear-cut, the mouth has a thin upper lip drawn inwards a little, the eyebrows are straight, slight, and of a dark brown colour, and there are strong lines on the cheeks curving downwards from the nostrils. A long grey curling wig is worn, and a claret-coloured coat, with a plain cravat falling in front; and a ruddy cloak is wrapped round the waist, and passed over the left arm. His right hand rests against his side, and his left is laid gracefully over a parapet.

In the same Corridor, hung over a door in an exceedingly bad light, is a bust-portrait titled on the back, in an old hand, “Calderwood the Historian by Jamesone.” The costume is a small black cap and a black doublet with a round ruff. The face, seen in three-quarters to the right, against a dark background, is full of intelligence; the features small, the eyes grey, the moustache and beard of a moderate length, yellowish-brown in colour. The flesh-tints are ruddy, inclining, indeed, to an unduly hot tone, but the picture has evidently been much repainted. It is undoubtedly a production of the period indicated inthe inscription, and resembles works that have been attributed to Jamesone; but we are not acquainted with any duly authenticated portrait of the historian of the Kirk of Scotland with which it might be compared.

The excellent bust-portrait in the Drawing-room, attributed to Holbein, is certainly incorrectly titled as representing Sir Thomas More. This vigorous, ruddy, bearded countenance is quite unlike the worn, shaven, student’s face which appears in the Chancellor’s authentic portraits by Holbein,—in his two drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor, and in the pen sketch, for the lost oil picture of the Family of Sir Thomas More, which he himself sent to his friend Erasmus, by the hand of the painter, when Holbein returned to the Continent in 1529, a sketch still preserved in the Museum of Basle.

Again, the curious, but much injured, panel picture in the smaller Drawing-room, of a lady wearing a white pipe-frilled cap, with a bowed veil over it, titled “Mary of Guise,” shows no resemblance to such authentic portraits of the Queen as that at Hardwick, in which she appears with her husband King JamesV.; and the impaled lozenge on the background bears no trace of the arms of either Lorraine or Scotland.

We have now to examine the mural decorations of Penicuik House, which include the celebrated Ossian ceiling of the room designed for a picture-gallery, and now used as the Drawing-room. But first, two smaller cupolas surmounting the staircases which give access to the upper floor of the mansion are deserving of notice. One is decorated in upright compartments, showing Jupiter in his car drawn by snakes, wielding his thunderbolts, with a moonlit landscape beneath, and on the other side a figure of Apollo, with yellow rays circling his head, driving his team of fiery white steeds over a landscape which is beginning toblush beneath the rosy light of dawn. Between these are ranged a series of allegorical figures of the Months, each marked with a sign of the Zodiac, and surrounded by scrolls, grotesque birds, and beasts, and vases. The whole is relieved against a light green background, and the compartments are divided by broad bands of ochre.

This curious example of the decorative art of the end of the last century is the work of John Bonnar, then a decorative painter in Edinburgh; and when, a hundred years after its execution, his grandson and great-grandson, who were at the time pursuing the same business in the same city, cleaned and restored the work, along with the Runciman ceilings, their ancestor’s signature was disclosed upon a corner of its surface.

The other cupola is decorated by the hand of Alexander Runciman, with scenes from the life of St. Margaret of Scotland, whose history furnished only the other year a subject for the brush of another of the most imaginative of our Scottish painters, Sir Noel Paton. Curiously enough we can find no single reference to this important St. Margaret series in any of the biographies of Runciman, or in the anonymous pamphlet, published in 1773, which so elaborately describes the ceiling of the Ossian Hall. Both series are executed in oil colours upon the plaster. Here the decorations consist of four oval compartments, each occupied with a scene from the life of the Queen.

The first shows “The Landing of St. Margaret.” Its background is a rich blue sky, and a distance of stormy sea. In the centre is King Malcolm, clad in a broad Scottish bonnet with a little white plume, red knee-breeches, white hose and white shoes with ample rosettes, and with a red cloak flapping around him in voluminous folds. With one hand he leads the lady, robed in a yellow mantle and a white dress, her long yellow hair tossed by the wind, and with the other points energetically towards the church before them,where white-robed monks, with clasped hands, are awaiting their arrival.

The second subject is “The Royal Wedding.” The pair are being united by a venerable and aged ecclesiastic with a grey beard, whose bronzed, weather-beaten countenance tells splendidly against his elaborate white vestments. To his right is the King, crowned and robed in red, placing the ring on the hand of the Queen, who stands draped in gold-brocaded white and green. An altar appears to our right, and beside it a mail-clad knight, with head bowed in worship. The figures of women are introduced to our left, and white flowers and a steaming censer lie on the ruddy marble pavement beneath.

The third subject shows the manner of the saint’s queenship. She is known to her people in the breaking of bread; clad in the same robes that she wore at the marriage festival, she is feeding the poor, and her husband, in his red mantle and wearing his royal crown, follows in attendance upon her, bearing a heaped platter.

The fourth subject shows the final development of Queen Margaret’s saintship. Having on earth filled herself with the life of heaven, she is now seen, white-clad, and with a red robe falling from her shoulders like the mortal life that she is done with, ascending inevitably into skies, where the clouds dispart to disclose the benignant figure of the Almighty Father and the white shape of the Holy Dove. Beneath is outspread a familiar landscape which she is leaving for ever—the Fifeshire hills appear on the right on the farther side of the Firth, and beneath is the town of Edinburgh, with the Palace, and the Castle rock crested with her chapel, and to the left the Pentlands which overlook Penicuik, with a kindly ray streaming from above, and irradiating their summit.

In spite of all deductions that may be made on account of occasional crudities and defects, and of the glaring anachronisms of costume that are apt to offend our more archæologically cultured eyes, the series is a remarkable one, with great richnessand variety of colouring, and with a dramatic power which goes directly to the heart of the legendary tale, and portrays its incidents in a vivid and impressive manner. Dealing for the most part with definite history, the series is more complete in its realisation than was possible in some of the visionary subjects from Ossian which the painter afterwards essayed in the Hall of Penicuik House.

The three last-named subjects are signed: the second bears the date of “Sept. 7, 1772,” the third “Octr. 14, 1772,” and the fourth “Octr. 6, 1772.” The inscriptions are interesting as showing that the subjects were executed immediately after the painter’s return from Italy, and as illustrating the impetuous speed with which he must have worked.

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