Turning to the right from the Hall we enter the Dining-room, where the most important of the portraits are hung. But here the places of honour on the walls, above the fireplaces and fronting the long line of windows which light the apartment, are occupied by no family portraits, by no effigies of distinguished heads of the house. Even the portrait of the second Baronet, the potent Baron of Exchequer himself, even the great Raeburn group of the fifth Baronet and his comely wife, Mary Dacre, have been waived to less important positions; and the pictures which hold the chief places represent a poet and a painter who were loved and honoured by this family of Penicuik. Over the fireplace to the right is an excellent portrait, by William Aikman, of Allan Ramsay the elder, a man who, though his verses may seem a little artificial and a little dull to the readers of our own day, is worthy of all honour, not only for having aided in turning Scottish poetry into a freer and more natural channel, but also for having established a theatre and the first circulating library in Edinburgh, and so distinctly served the cause of culture in Scotland. He was the sworn friend of the house of Penicuik, the chosen associate of the second Baronet, and of his son, afterwards Sir James, whom he addresses in that homely and vigorous “Epistle,” beginning— “Blythe may he be who o’er the haugh, All free from care, may sing and laugh,” which is dated “Pennycuick, May 9, 1755.” The present picture, very similar to that which was excellently mezzotinted by George White, shows the poet nearly to the waist, clad in a brown coat, the shirt open at the throat and without a cravat. No wig is worn, but the head is wound round tightly, cap-fashion, with a low-toned orange handkerchief, beneath which appears the bright, alert, intelligent face, with its bushy eyebrows and very black eyes, its wide-nostrilled, humorous, slightly _retroussé_ nose, and its large-lipped mouth, full and rippling over with good-nature and sensitiveness. We are enabled to fix the exact date of the picture by means of the following interesting inscription on the back, in the autograph of Sir John, the second Baronet:— “A Roundlet in Mr. Ramsay’s own Way. Here painted on this canvass clout, By Aikman’s hand is Ramsay’s snout, The picture’s value none might doubt, For ten to one I’ll venture, The greatest criticks could not tell Which of the two does most excell, Or in his way should bear the bell, The Poet or the Painter. J. C. Pennicuik, 5 May 1723.” The picture accordingly represents the poet in his thirty-seventh year, and was painted when the artist was about to leave Scotland to settle in London, an occasion on which Ramsay inscribed to him his “Pastoral Farewell,”—not his only poetical tribute to his friend, for previously, in 1721, he had penned another “Epistle,” in which he thanks the portraitist because