Born in 1756, Raeburn was not too late to paint many of the most gifted of the older generation. David Hume, who sat to Ramsay more than once, was dead before the new light rose above the horizon, and the appearance of Adam Smith does not seem to be recorded except in a Tassie medallion; but Black, the father of modern chemistry, and Hutton, the originator of modern geology, were amongst his early sitters; and fine works in a more mature manner have Principal Robertson, James Watt, the engineer, Adam Ferguson, the historian, Dugald Stewart, the philosopher, and others scarcely less interesting for subject. And of his own immediate contemporaries--the cycle of Walter Scott--he has left an almost complete gallery. Nor were his sitters less fortunate. If they brought fine heads to be painted, he painted them with wonderful insight grasp of character, and great pictorial power. [1] J. Michael Wright (1625?-1700?), at his best probably the finest native painter of the seventeenth century, went to England. II. Descended from a race of "bonnet-lairds," who took their name from a hill farm in the Border district, Robert Raeburn, the artist's father, seems to have come to Edinburgh as a young man in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. At that time the city had expanded but little beyond the limits marked by the Flodden wall. The high grey lands along the windy ridge between the Castle and Holyrood were still tenanted by the upper classes, and such extension as had been was towards the Meadows. The new town had not been projected even, and on the slopes, now occupied by its spacious streets and squares, copse-woods and grass and heather grew. In the hollow at the foot of these green braes, and by the side of the Water of Leith, a chain of little hamlets--Dean, Stockbridge, and Canon-mills--nestled, and in the mid-most of these Robert Raeburn established himself as a yarn-boiler. Although in the country, his home was less than a mile from St Giles's Kirk. His business appears to have prospered, and during the early forties he married Miss Ann Elder. There was a difference of twelve years in the ages of their two sons, William and Henry, and the younger was no more than six when both father and mother died. Left to the care of his brother, who carried on the business, Henry Raeburn was nominated for maintenance and education at Heriot's Hospital by Mrs Sarah Sandilands or Durham in 1764, and remained seven years in the school, which owed its origin to the bequest of George Heriot, jeweller to James VI. and I. in Edinburgh and later in London. Many boys had been educated on "Jingling Geordie's" foundation, but Raeburn was to be its most distinguished product. He does not seem to have distinguished himself specially as a scholar, however, the two prizes awarded to him having been for writing, and at the age of fifteen or sixteen he was apprenticed to a jeweller and goldsmith in Parliament Close. This