At Penicuik we are enabled to trace the development of Aikman’s art from first to final phase. His portrait of “Dame Christina Kilpatrick,” second wife of the first Baronet, is marked on the back by the painter’s cousin, “painted 1706 by Mr. Aikman when he was learning to paint, but very like.” The portrait of the second Baronet himself, similarly inscribed, “painted by Mr. Aikman, about the year 1706, when he was beginning to paint,” is identical in style with the work of his master Medina. In the Red Bedroom are hung his school copies after classical subjects by Maratti, done at Rome; and we have seen that the portrait of himself was one of the very last canvases that his brush touched. This portrait of Aikman showing the figure nearly to the waist within a painted oval, is practically identical with that in the National Gallery of Scotland, formerly in the possession of Mrs. Forbes, the artist’s eldest daughter, and engraved in “The Bee,” vol. xviii. 1793. The only difference is that here the draperies consist of a coat and vest of a cool yellowish-brown velvet, passing into definite yellow in the high lights, while in the National Gallery version a golden-brown gown and a flowered vest of the same colour is substituted. The well-balanced, handsome, oval face, with its ripe mouth, rippling in its lines and dimpled at the corners, fine dark-blue eyes, and rounded, slightly cleft chin, is turned in three-quarters towards the right, and surmounted by a voluminous powdered wig. Another portrait of Aikman by himself is preserved at Florence in the Painters’ Gallery of the Uffizi. Here the pose of the figure is similar to that in the two other pictures; but the coat is of crimson, the lower part of the body is wrapped in a dark mantle, and no wig is worn, its place being taken by a white handkerchief which is wound round the head. Among the portraits of Aikman at The Ross is another from his own hand, showing him as he appeared on his travels, bearded, and wearing a turban and a ruddy Eastern gown. We may now turn to the family portraits with which the walls of the Dining-room are covered. The earliest of them is a portrait of John Clerk, father of the first Baronet, and the founder of the family, known for centuries in the familiar traditions of the Penicuik nursery under the playful title of “Musso,” from his prolonged residence in France. He was born in 1610, the son of a merchant-burgess of Montrose, and baptized at Fettercairn by the Bishop of Caithness, on the 22d December of that year. Bred a merchant, he settled in Paris in 1634, where he acquired “a fortune of at least £10,000,” as his grandson informs us. In 1647 he returned to Scotland, married, acquired the lands of Penicuik and of Wrightshouses, near Edinburgh, and died in 1674, at the age of sixty-three.