the coins of the unfortunate
beauty, though not at all to any of the portraits I have happened to
see. I believe there is no doubt as to the authenticity of this most
curious picture. Among various family pictures, I noticed particularly
Sir Walter's great grandfather, the old cavalier mentioned in one of
the epistles in Marmion, who let his beard grow after the execution of
Charles I., and who here appears, accordingly, with a most venerable
appendage of silver whiteness, reaching even unto his girdle.

* * * * *

A narrower passage leads to a charming breakfast room, which looks to
the Tweed on one side, and towards Yarrow and Ettricke, famed in song,
on the other: a cheerful room, fitted up with novels, romances, and
poetry, I could perceive, at one end; and the other walls covered thick
and thicker with a most valuable and beautiful collection of watercolour
drawings, chiefly by Turner and Thomson of Duddingstone, the designs,
in short, for the magnificent work entitled "Provincial Antiquities of
Scotland." There is one very grand oil painting over the chimney-piece,
Fastcastle, by Thomson, alias the Wolf's Crag of the Bride of
Lammermoor, one of the most majestic and melancholy sea-pieces I ever
saw; and some large black and white drawings of the Vision of Don
Roderick, by Sir James Steuart of Allanbank (whose illustrations of
Marmion and Mazeppa you have seen or heard of), are at one end of the
parlour. The room is crammed with queer cabinets and boxes, and in a
niche there is a bust of old Henry Mackenzie, by Joseph of Edinburgh.
Returning towards the armoury, you have, on one side of a most religious
looking corridor, a small greenhouse, with a fountain playing before
it--the very fountain that in days of yore graced the cross of
Edinburgh, and used to flow with claret at the coronation of the
Stuarts--a pretty design, and a standing monument of the barbarity of
modern innovation. From the small armoury you pass, as I said before,
into the drawing-room, a large, lofty, and splendid _salon_, with
antique ebony furniture and crimson silk hangings, cabinets, china, and
mirrors _quantum suff_, and some portraits; among the rest glorious
John Dryden, by Sir Peter Lely, with his gray hairs floating about in a
most picturesque style, eyes full of wildness, presenting the old Bard,
I take it, in one of those "tremulous moods," in which we have it on
record he appeared when interrupted in