the old church at the edge, the quaint village, and the mighty Lion Hill that broods over all. Thomson is said to have diligently attended to his clerical duties, but he was hard put to it sometimes, for you believe he was more artist than theologian. He built himself a studio in the manse garden down by the loch. This he called Edinburgh, so that too importunate callers might be warded off with the remark that he was at Edinburgh. “Gone to Edinburgh,” you must know, is the traditional excuse of everybody in Duddingston who shuts his door. One Sunday John, the minister’s man, “jowed” the bell long and earnestly in vain—the well-known figure would not emerge from the manse. John rushed off to the studio by the loch and found, as he expected, the minister hard at work with a canvas before him. He admonished him that it was past the time, that the people were assembled, and the bells “rung in.” “Oh, John,” said his master, in perplexed entreaty, “just go and ring the bell for another five minutes till I get in this bonnie wee bit o’ sky.” An old woman of his congregation was in sore trouble, and went to the minister and asked for a bit prayer. Thomson gave her two half-crowns. “Take that, Betty, my good woman, it’s likely to do you more good than any prayer I’m likely to make,” a kindly but amusingly cynical remark, in the true vein of the moderates of the eighteenth century. “Here, J. F.,” he said to an eminent friend who visited him on a Sunday afternoon, “_you_ don’t care about breaking the Sabbath, gie these pictures a touch of varnish.” These were the days before the Disruption and the evangelical revival. You may set off against him the name of Sir George Harvey, who was made president of the northern Academy in 1864. He was much in sympathy with Scots religious tradition, witness his _Quitting the Manse_, his _Covenanting Preaching_, and other deservedly famous pictures. As Mr. W. D. M‘Kay points out, the Disruption produced in a milder form a recrudescence of the strain of thought and sentiment of Covenanting times, and this influenced the choice of subjects. In his early days when Harvey talked of painting, a friend advised him to look at Wilkie; he looked and seemed to see nothing that was worth the looking, but he examined again and again, even as Wilkie himself had gazed on Velasquez, and so saw in him “the very finest of the wheat.” In painting the picture _The Wise and Foolish Builders_, he made a child construct a house on the sand, so that he might see exactly how the thing was done, not, however, that he fell into the stupid error of believing that work and care were everything. He would neither persuade a man nor dissuade him from an artistic career. “If it is in him,” he was wont to say, “it is sure to come out, whether I advise him or not.”