While Turner was producing these exquisite drawings for Whitaker’s _History of Richmondshire_, he also executed a series of ten or eleven slightly smaller drawings to illustrate Sir Walter Scott’s _Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland_. Eight of these drawings were presented by the publishers to Scott, who had them framed from an oak felled on the Abbotsford estate during Turner’s visit there in 1818. The effect of this frame on the drawings, it must be confessed, is atrocious. It might be guaranteed to kill the effect of any water-colour drawings but the radiantly immortal ones for which it was made. No doubt even these would look better out of it, but such as it is it hung in the breakfast-room at Abbotsford till after Scott’s death, and as it then hung, so it hangs now in Mr. Thomas Brocklebank’s hospitable mansion at Heswall, Chester. When we draw the curtain, which has kept Turner’s beautiful [Illustration: _PLATE LX_ DINBURGH, FROM CALTON HILL PENCIL. 1818] [Illustration: EDINBURGH FROM CALTON HILL ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN SCOTT’S “PROVINCIAL ANTIQUITIES OF SCOTLAND,” 1 NOVEMBER, 1820] [Illustration: _PLATE LX_ EDINBURGH FROM CALTON HILL PENCIL. 1818] [Illustration: FIGURES ON CALTON HILL PENCIL. 1818] [Illustration: _PLATE LXI_ BORTHWICK CASTLE PENCIL. 1818] [Illustration: BORTHWICK CASTLE ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN SCOTT’S “PROVINCIAL ANTIQUITIES OF SCOTLAND,” 2 APRIL, 1819] work as fresh as when it was first executed, and look at these drawings, it is difficult to single out any one of them for special attention. But after looking through the engravings made from them in Scott’s book, the marvellous view of ‘Edinburgh from the Calton Hill’ leaves perhaps the most powerful impression on the imagination. I have, therefore, selected the drawing made from nature upon which this design was based as the subject of one of our illustrations (Plate LX.). In this case we find that Turner has followed his sketch with great care, yet the whole material has been hammered this way and that by his powerful hand. We can see that the artist felt impatient with nature’s calm and unhurried chronicle of facts, and was determined at all costs to make a more immediate and concentrated attack on the spectator’s powers of perception. Instead of stretching out calmly and indifferently on both hands, as in the sketch, the city in the finished design seems to soar upwards from the depths beneath our feet. The jail on our left has been squeezed together, making the line from the porch to the central turret much more oblique than it was. The perspective of nearly all the buildings has been modified, yet the artist has taken great care to preserve the character of the silhouettes of the leading planes. But it is in the invention of the play of light which animates the whole, and throws into such strong relief all the telling points of the design, that we find the clearest evidence of the artist’s active intervention.