character. Cheseman, who is forty-eight, wears a silk doublet of purplish-red, with the customary black overcoat trimmed with fur. His curly hair is beginning to turn gray. He holds a hooded hawk on his gloved left hand, and strokes its feathers with his right. The bird is splendidly painted, and the keen, piercing eyes and clean-cut face of its master are wonderfully rendered. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who noted it during his travels in Holland, speaks of it as “admirable for its truth and precision, and extremely well coloured.” This picture is called erroneously in all the books “Henry VIII.’s Falconer,” but he was a person of much more importance. Robert Cheseman, of Dormanswell, near Norwood, in Middlesex, and Northcote, in Essex, was a man of wealth, and one of the leading commoners of his county. He was born in 1485, son and heir of Edward Cheseman, Cofferer and Keeper of the Wardrobe to Henry VII., and succeeded to the family estates in 1517. He was made a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex in 1528, and during his life served on a number of commissions for collecting tithes, subsidies, and so on. In 1530 he was one of the commissioners on an inquiry into the possessions of Thomas Wolsey after he was attainted, and was on the Grand Jury at the trials of Sir Geoffrey Pole and others (1538), and Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham for treason (1541). He was one of the gentlemen selected to welcome Anne of Cleves when she first landed in England, and was, in fact, one of some half-dozen men of position who represented Middlesex on such public occasions. In 1536 he supplied thirty men for the army against the Northern rebels, so that he must have been a man of substance. He married Alice, daughter of Henry Dacres, of Mayfield, Staffordshire, a Merchant Tailor and Alderman of London. These curtailed biographical notes are inserted here, as they have not been previously published. * * * * * A small work of great beauty in Hampton Court Palace, representing _Mary Magdalen at the Sepulchre_, sometimes called _Noli Me Tangere_, is of unusual value to English students, as being the only sacred painting by Holbein now in this country. It has darkened greatly with age, and has suffered other damage, but is considered by most judges to be an undoubted original by the master, although Dr. Woltmann attributed it to Bartholomew Bruyn, of Cologne.