"Mr. Pennant has given a new edition of his former _Tour_, with more cuts: among others is the _vulgar_ head called the Countess of Desmond. I told him I had discovered, and proved past contradiction, _that it is Rembrandt's mother_. He owned it, and said he would correct it by a note: but he has not. _This is a brave way of being an antiquary_: as if there could be any merit in giving for genuine what one knows to be spurious." This is a very _teasing_ passage. I have no copy of Pennant's _Tour_ by me; nor do I recollect ever to have seen one with the print here referred to. Probably some of your numerous correspondents will find one, and inform us, whether the print in it resembles the description I have given. It is not at all probable that Pennant's "cut" was copied from the Knight of Kerry's picture: but _if_ it was copied from any of those mentioned by your correspondents; and _if_ these be duplicates of the Knight of Kerry's "family portrait;" and _if_ Horace Walpole's cruel criticism on Mr. Pennant be correct--then have we all been _shamed with a sham_. These are a considerable number of _ifs_, upon which this conclusion depends; but in one thing Walpole is correct: "there is no merit in giving for genuine what one knows to be spurious." Of the Mr. Pelham who published the print I have described, there are some particulars which may interest your readers. He will be found among the correspondents of the late General Vallancey, whose interest in Irish antiquities is well known. Mr. Pelham was an ingenious gentleman, who came to Kerry in the end of the last century, in the character of agent to the Marquis of Lansdowne; which engagement, after a few years, he resigned, but continued in the county, a zealous studier of its antiquities, and intending, as I have heard, either a new County History or a reprint of Smith's work. He was a good civil engineer, and executed a great part of a large county and baronial map, afterwards finished by another hand. Mr. Pelham, who perished prematurely by sudden death, in his boat, while superintending the building of a Martello tower on Bear Island, in the River Kenmare, in the very year he published this print, is said to have been an uncle by half-blood to the present Lord Lyndhurst, whose grandmother, Sarah Singleton, is said to have married to her second husband, ---- Pelham, an American--Henry Pelham being the only issue of her second marriage, as John Singleton Copley, father to the ex-chancellor, was of her first. In my next I propose to consider the question, Who was the old Countess of Desmond? A. B. R. PANSLAVIC SKETCHES.