which is often to be found bound up along with copies of his sale catalogue, showing him in full-length ascending a flight of stairs, snuffbox in hand. In the Business-room there hangs a small portrait of Lord Eldin’s younger brother, William Clerk, advocate—“only less witty and odd than his great Swiftian brother,” as Dr. John Brown has truly remarked—who figures so prominently in the biography and correspondence of Sir Walter Scott. At college they were contemporaries and bosom friends, they passed their Civil Law and their Scots Law examinations on the same day, and together assumed the advocate’s gown. It was in his company that the young Scott, after a fishing expedition to Howgate, visited Penicuik House, when he “was overwhelmed with kindness by the late Sir John Clerk and his lady”—the pair who figure in the great Raeburn group, and when “the pleasure of looking at fine pictures, the beauty of the place, and the flattering hospitality of the owners drowned the recollection of home for a day or two.” The friendship thus begun was continued through life; and in his latest years Scott dwells, in his Diary, with especial gusto upon the snug little dinners in Rose Court, Edinburgh, when a few chosen spirits gathered round Clerk’s bachelor board. The present picture, a cabinet-sized bust, is somewhat amateurish in its execution, but still full of character and individuality; the features of the shrewd, wrinkled face, its definitely curved nose, sharply-cut mouth, thin compressed lips, and dark, brilliantly blue eyes beneath the bushy white eyebrows, combine into what is doubtless a faithful rendering of that friend of whom Scott wrote in his Diary, in 1825, “I have known him intimately since our college days; and to my thinking I never met a man of greater powers or more complete information on all desirable subjects.” It is the work of Mrs. Hugh Blackburn, a lady so well known for her excellent renderings of birds and animals; but another oil-portrait of William Clerk, a cabinet-sized bust, turned to the right and dated 1843, the work of Miss Isabella Clerk, sister of the seventh Baronet, is also preserved at Penicuik.