Beneath, round the ample cove or _volto_ of the room, is ranged a series of smaller subjects from Ossian—“The Valour of Oscar,” “The Death of Oscar,” “The Death of Agandecca,” “The Hunting of Catholda,” one of the finest of the subjects, very graceful in the figure of the nymph drawing a bow; “The Finding of Corban Cargloss,” an attractive moonlit scene; “Golchossa mourning over Lamderg,” “Oina Morval serenading Ossian,” a vigorous subject of “Cormac attacking the Spirit of the Waters,” “The Death of Cormac,” “Scandinavian Wizards at their Incantations,” in which the grotesque is in excess of the terrible, and “Fingal engaging the Spirit of Lodi.” If we were to criticise the ceiling purely as an example of decorative art, we might well object that the elaboration and wealth of detail in the work is hardly suitable to its position, that designs so placed should have been simpler and more salient in their component parts, and executed in a lighter and more airy scheme of colouring, so as to carry the eye freely upwards. But as an example of poetic art, in its earnestness of aim and vigour of conception, it is deserving of all praise, as one of the very few instances that Scotland has to show of a serious effort to produce a monumental work, a pictorial epic,—an effort honourable alike to the painter and his patron. The art of Runciman, as here displayed, may be regarded as the precursor of the art of David Scott, another of Scotland’s most imaginative painters, who was also powerfully attracted by the Ossianic legends, choosing “Fingal and the Spirit of Lodi” for the subject of one of his earliest works, and in another depicting Ossian himself, not surrounded by sympathetic listeners as in this central compartment by Runciman, but seated alone by the sea-shore, amid the last dying radiance of a sunset, with his harp lying idle by his side. It is recorded that about 1720 John Alexander, the grandson of George Jamesone of Aberdeen, executed a “Rape of Proserpina” on a staircase in Gordon Castle. After the completion of his work at Penicuik Runciman decorated a church in the Cowgate of Edinburgh (now St. Patrick’s Catholic Chapel) with sacred subjects, of which a portion still remain; and—presumably in humble imitation of the Ossian Hall—Alexander Carse painted an oval subject on the ceiling of the “Pennecuik Parlor” of New Hall, Mid-Lothian, depicting “The Troops of Tweedale in the Forest of Selkirkshire, convened by Royal authority in May 1685, as described in Dr. Pennecuik’s Poems.” This brief list may be said to include almost all the mural art—excepting such as was simply decorative—executed in Scotland during modern times.