Then, too, there are the Penicuik Gardens to be seen,—the old garden, lying on a sheltered slope to the south, with its glass-houses, the first, or all but the very first, of the kind in Scotland; the extensive modern garden, bounded by brick walls, the soft mellow colouring of which tells so pleasantly through the green of the trees; and especially the “American Garden,” with its wealth of many-coloured azaleas springing from the midmost space of softest turf, “a garden inclosed” like the garden of the Canticles, cloistered and protected, like some princess of romance, by thick-set hedges and a circle of sheltering wood, lest any eager and nipping air of our northern clime should visit its cheek too roughly, and blanch the beauty of its ardent face of flowers. II. The house, which fronts us as we approach the termination of the drive, is a modern edifice, built by Sir James, the third Baronet, in 1761, after he had returned from a residence in Italy, saturated with classical ideas. It was erected entirely from the Baronet’s own designs; but, doubtless, these were produced under the influence of Robert Adam, the celebrated architect, whose sister had been married in 1753 to John Clerk, author of the “Naval Tactics,” Sir James’s younger brother. Consequently the present house does not possess the interest of having been the meeting-place of Allan Ramsay, who died in 1758, and his friends and patrons of the Clerk family; an association erroneously assigned to the present structure by Dr. Daniel Wilson in his “Reminiscences of Old Edinburgh,” a work which contains many curious particulars regarding the Clerks, and especially of the Baron, the second Baronet. The house in which the poet and the antiquary spent together many a genial evening of “honest talk and wholesome wine” no longer exists. It occupied a site close behind the present mansion, on whose completion it was removed. Some of the old cellars remain under the earthen mound to the south, and are still in use. We may sigh a little over the memories and associations of old Penicuik House, over the vanished picturesqueness of its “crowstep” gables and its circular corkscrew turrets, of which a shadow still survives in the sketch by John Clerk, reproduced in the Bannatyne Club issue of his etchings; but doubtless the present mansion is vastly more commodious and in better harmony with modern ideas of comfort than was its predecessor, and it takes its place excellently in the landscape; its effect not greatly marred by the more recent wings added by Bryce in 1857-8; its straight perpendicular and horizontal lines contrasting excellently with the flowing curves of ground and trees, in that fashion which Turner recognised and loved, and emphasised so delightfully in his early drawings of four-square English mansions set amid the rounded forms of wood and hill and stream.