so upright and inflexible a judge, nay, and might at that
very moment be lurking in the mouth of a dark close with hostile
intent--I can fancy that he indulged in a sour smile, as he reflected
that he also was not especially afraid of men's faces or men's fists,
and had hitherto found no occasion to embody this insensibility in
heroic words. For if he was an inhumane old gentleman (and I am afraid
it is a fact that he was inhumane), he was also perfectly intrepid. You
may look into the queer face of that portrait for as long as you will,
but you will not see any hole or corner for timidity to enter in.

Indeed, there would be no end to this paper if I were even to name half
of the portraits that were remarkable for their execution or interesting
by association. There was one picture of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane Hill,
which you might palm off upon most laymen as a Rembrandt; and close by,
you saw the white head of John Clerk, of Eldin, that country gentleman
who, playing with pieces of cork on his own dining-table, invented
modern naval warfare. There was that portrait of Neil Gow, to sit for
which the old fiddler walked daily through the streets of Edinburgh arm
in arm with the Duke of Athole. There was good Harry Erskine, with his
satirical nose and upper lip, and his mouth just open for a witticism to
pop out; Hutton the geologist, in quakerish raiment, and looking
altogether trim and narrow, and as if he cared more about fossils than
young ladies; full-blown John Robison, in hyperbolical red
dressing-gown, and every inch of him a fine old man of the world;
Constable the publisher, upright beside a table, and bearing a
corporation with commercial dignity; Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause, if
ever anybody heard a cause since the world began; Lord Newton just
awakened from clandestine slumber on the bench; and the second President
Dundas, with every feature so fat that he reminds you, in his wig, of
some droll old court officer in an illustrated nursery story-book, and
yet all these fat features instinct with meaning, the fat lips curved
and compressed, the nose combining somehow the dignity of a beak with
the good-nature of a bottle, and the very double chin with an air of
intelligence and insight. And all these portraits are so pat and
telling, and look at you so spiritedly from the walls, that, compared
with the sort of living people one sees about the streets, they are as
bright new sovereigns to fishy and obliterated s