The excellent bust-portrait in the Drawing-room, attributed to Holbein, is certainly incorrectly titled as representing Sir Thomas More. This vigorous, ruddy, bearded countenance is quite unlike the worn, shaven, student’s face which appears in the Chancellor’s authentic portraits by Holbein,—in his two drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor, and in the pen sketch, for the lost oil picture of the Family of Sir Thomas More, which he himself sent to his friend Erasmus, by the hand of the painter, when Holbein returned to the Continent in 1529, a sketch still preserved in the Museum of Basle. Again, the curious, but much injured, panel picture in the smaller Drawing-room, of a lady wearing a white pipe-frilled cap, with a bowed veil over it, titled “Mary of Guise,” shows no resemblance to such authentic portraits of the Queen as that at Hardwick, in which she appears with her husband King James V.; and the impaled lozenge on the background bears no trace of the arms of either Lorraine or Scotland. XI. We have now to examine the mural decorations of Penicuik House, which include the celebrated Ossian ceiling of the room designed for a picture-gallery, and now used as the Drawing-room. But first, two smaller cupolas surmounting the staircases which give access to the upper floor of the mansion are deserving of notice. One is decorated in upright compartments, showing Jupiter in his car drawn by snakes, wielding his thunderbolts, with a moonlit landscape beneath, and on the other side a figure of Apollo, with yellow rays circling his head, driving his team of fiery white steeds over a landscape which is beginning to blush beneath the rosy light of dawn. Between these are ranged a series of allegorical figures of the Months, each marked with a sign of the Zodiac, and surrounded by scrolls, grotesque birds, and beasts, and vases. The whole is relieved against a light green background, and the compartments are divided by broad bands of ochre. This curious example of the decorative art of the end of the last century is the work of John Bonnar, then a decorative painter in Edinburgh; and when, a hundred years after its execution, his grandson and great-grandson, who were at the time pursuing the same business in the same city, cleaned and restored the work, along with the Runciman ceilings, their ancestor’s signature was disclosed upon a corner of its surface.