St. George's Hall, the Waterloo gallery, the council-chamber and the Vandyck room are the most attractive, all of them for the historical portraits they contain, and the first, besides, for its merit as an example of a Gothic interior and its associations with the order of the Garter, the knights of which society are installed in it. The specialty of the Waterloo room is the series of portraits of the leaders, civil and military, English and continental, of the last and successful league against Napoleon. They are nearly all by Lawrence, and of course admirable in their delineation of character. In that essential of a good portrait none of the English school have excelled Lawrence. We may rely upon the truth to Nature of each of the heads before us; for air and expression accord with what history tells us of the individuals, its verdict eked out and assisted by instructive minutiæ of lineament and meaning detected, in the "off-guard" of private intercourse, by the eye of a great painter and a lifelong student of physiognomy. We glance from the rugged Blucher to the wily Metternich, and from the philosophic Humboldt to the semi-savage Platoff. The dandies George IV. and Alexander are here, but Brummel is left out. The gem of the collection is Pius VII., Lawrence's masterpiece, widely familiar by engravings. Raphael's Julius II. seems to have been in the artist's mind, but that work is not improved on, unless in so far as the critical eye of our day may delight in the more intricate tricks of chiaroscuro and effect to which Lawrence has recourse. "Brunswick's fated chieftain" will interest the votaries of Childe Harold. Could he have looked forward to 1870, he would perhaps have chosen a different side at Waterloo, as his father might at Jena, and elected to figure in oils at Versailles rather than at Windsor. Incomparably more destructive to the small German princes have been the Hohenzollerns than the Bonapartes. [Illustration: THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.] We forget these nineteenth-century people in the council-chamber, wherein reign Guido, Rembrandt, Claude, and even Da Vinci. If Leonardo really executed all the canvases ascribed to him in English collections, the common impressions of his habits of painting but little, and not often finishing that, do him great injustice. Martin Luther is here, by Holbein, and the countess of Desmond, the merry old lady Who lived to the age of twice threescore and ten, And died of a fall from a cherry tree then,