For the making of a good portrait a great deal more is required than excellent colour and dexterous brush-work--shrewdness, insight, imagination, common sense, and many another mental quality besides, are needed. No man can paint a good portrait unless he knows his sitter thoroughly; and every good portrait is a kind of biography. It is curious, as indicating that the instinct for biography and portrait-painting are alike in essence, that in both walks of art the Scotch have been unusually successful. It would seem that there is something in the national character predisposing to excellence in these departments of effort. Strictly to inquire how far this predisposition arises from the national shrewdness or the national humour, would be needless; thus much is certain, that Scotland has at various times produced the best portrait-painters and the best writers of biography to be found in the compass of the islands. In the past, she can point to Boswell's "Life of Johnson" and Raeburn's portraits: she yet can claim Thomas Carlyle; and but lately she could claim Sir John Watson Gordon. Thomas Carlyle is a portrait-painter, and Sir John Watson Gordon was a biographer. [Sidenote: Scottish portraiture.] On the walls of the Exhibition, as I have said, will be found some of the best products of the Scottish brain. There, year after year, are to be found the pictures of Mr Noel Paton--some, of the truest pathos, like the "Home from the Crimea;" or that group of ladies and children in the cellar at Cawnpore, listening to the footsteps of deliverers, whom they conceive to be destroyers; or "Luther at Erfurt," the gray morning light breaking in on him as he is with fear and trembling working out his own salvation--and the world's. We have these, but we have at times others quite different from these, and of a much lower scale of excellence, although hugely admired by the young people aforesaid--pictures in which attire is painted instead of passion; where the merit consists in exquisite renderings of unimportant details--jewels, tassels, and dagger hilts; where a landscape is sacrificed to a bunch of ferns, a tragic situation to the pattern on the lady's zone, or the slashed jacket and purple leggings of the knight. Then there are Mr Drummond's pictures from Scottish history and ballad poetry--a string of wild moss-troopers riding over into England to lift cattle; John Knox on his wedding-day leading his wife home to his quaint dwelling in the Canongate; the wild lurid Grassmarket, crowded with rioters, crimson with torchlight, spectators filling every window of the tall houses, while Porteous is being carried to his death--the Castle standing high above the tumult against the blue midnight and the stars; or the death procession of Montrose--the hero seated on hurdle, not on battle-steed, with beard untrimmed, hair dishevelled, dragged through the crowded street by the city hangman and his horses, yet proud of