crescent moon is seen above the water.

Among other pictures deserving of notice for the aptness of their symbolism and the richness of their colour, may be mentioned, "Cupid sharpening his Arrows," "The Pursuit of Pleasure," "Children following Fortune," and "Time surprising Love."

It is in the second class, that of works dealing with real life and deriving their subjects from history, that we find the largest, and, in many ways, the most impressive of Scott's pictures. In 1841 was exhibited " Queen Elizabeth at the Globe Theatre," the production of which extended over two years. It contains much excellent characterpainting, is well composed, with the interest admirably concentrated in spite of the multiplicity of component parts, but it is unfortunate that the figure of Shakespeare is one of the least satisfactory-limp and ineffective; and the colour, though still rich and fine, seems to have changed and darkened with time and over-varnishing, so that we can scarcely feel that we see the canvas as it left the artist's hand.

To the same period is referable "The Duke of Gloster entering the Water-gate of Calais,""The Traitor's Gate," as the picture is now titled-the most complete, harmonious, and impressive of the artist's historical subjects; probably, setting quality against quality, the greatest of all his works. A boat is entering the dark vaulted portals of a prison, whose heavy door is swung open by the hands of unseen warders. One of the rowers crouches down in his seat, overcome by the ominous gloom of the place. At the stern is the doomed nobleman, his face pale but composed,-apprehensive, evidently, of danger, but one able resolutely to suppress all signs of fear. Higher in the stern

are armed guards, their black forms towering above him, and seeming to overshadow his figure. Beyond is a distance with a stretch of sea, on which a far-off ship is riding freely; in the sky above, the chill light of early morning is slowly mastering that of the waning moon. The sense of all that space and freedom of the outer world is grandly contrasted with the gloomy vault which the boat is entering, grey and ghostlike when compared with the warm reality of the torch-lighted figures in front who wait ready to receive it; and there is a fine imaginative touch in the introduction of the star above, its rays struggling through a barred portcullis. The picture is wonderfully free from the usual defects of the painter's technique; it is no less powerful in form, colour, and handling, than in invention. The admirable quality of the distance is especially striking-Corotlike in its quiet and tender grey mystery.

"Richard III. and the Princes" was painted in 1842. It is a powerful and intense tragedy: the deformed usurper bending forward and holding the children, one with either hand, as though he would never let them go, scanning the face of the elder-the heir-with eager evil gaze; the grim attendants, one holding behind him a dungeon keytwo, armed and mail-clad, standing silent and ominous like fates beside the regal seat. The beautiful face, and shrinking yet stately figure of the queen, probably make up Scott's finest personification of womanly comeliness and grace.

While these pictures were in progress, he was also occupied with a still more important work. Shortly after his father's death in 1841, he built a new and extensive studio at Easter Dalry, a suburb of Edinburgh, that he might have facilities. for the execution of those works of

ample size, in which he felt that his art had its fullest scope. Here he began, on a canvas some 25 feet in length, the "Vasco de Gama encountering the Spirit of the Storm," which he always regarded as the main production of his later period, as the "Discord" had been of his earlier. It shows the great foreshortened shape of the ship's deck, with its crowded figures, terrified by the weird apparition of the Spirit of the storm, who is seen in the darkened and bewildered sky, as by a momentary flash of lightning. The grouping and the varied gestures of the mariners beneath are grandly conceived,-some striving to be calm, some driven almost demented; a monk, lax and help less with terror, his beard grasped by the Moor beside him, who points to the horror which his spells are powerless to exorcise. Amid all this tumult of confused emotions is the supreme figure of De Gama, standing firm, his feet planted on the deck, his weapon-sword and cross in one-pressed to his heart. Depicting, primarily, a scene from history or tradition, the scope and meaning of the picture becomes, through the earnestness and intensity of its treatment, wider and more universal. "It is a heroic man filling his sphere, sufficient for his circumstances, a match for fate. It is a universal text. It stands for Homer, St. Paul, Dante, Michael Angelo, Luther, Shakespeare, Cromwell, Kepler, Luis de Camöens, or for Scott himself, as truly as for De Gama. Nor is any man alive who may not or ought not to see the express image of himself in this self-sufficing Vasco, with his faith in the cross, his confidence in himself, and his ready-handed use of means." The picture has splendid qualities of colour and design; and

though not without the occasional faults of draftsmanship which seem quite inseparable from the artist's works, it conclusively proved his ability to treat figures of a colossal size with a skill and vigour which have no parallel in the productions of the Scottish school.

"The Alchymist," 1838, and "Peter the Hermit Preaching the Crusades," 1845, may be regarded as companion historical subjects, illustrating two different phases of the medieval spirit. Both pictures, while full of variety and character in their numerous subsidiary parts, are mainly remarkable for the strongly imaginative and individual personification of their principal figure.

In "The Alchymist" we see the man of quasi science-in part a self-deceiver, in greater part a conscious deceiver of others-his form clad in academic black, and poised on tilted stool. In his right hand he holds a mortar, whence a curl of smoke issues as he stirs the contents with a pestle. His head is raised in eager attitude; like the Ancient Mariner, he holds his audience with his glittering eye. Beside him are gathered the implements of occult research-glass phials, retorts, diagrams, &c.; behind him in a shadowed corner is a skeleton half swathed in drapery, and lying on it are surgeons' knives, with their suggestions of what was then held to be the unhallowed efforts of irreverent science to wring from the lifeless clay secrets which might aid the living. At the lecturer's feet sits a scribbling clerk, and leaning against the door of the laboratory is a servant, a shockhaired plebeian figure, drowsed and weary with his labours at the furnace-mouth. Before and around is grouped a motley auditory. In

front we see the broad back of a Scottish soldier of fortune. Two figures to the right, conspicuous by their gay dresses of pale blue and yellow, are young exquisites of the period. One has brought his lute into the lecture - hall, and leans back in easy posture, his hand held lightly behind his head as he laughs gently at the drollery of the lecturer's experiment. The other is more intent, the alchymist's fervour has been strong enough to dissipate his frivolity for a moment. In the earnest face seen in profile beside them, the painter has depicted his own thoughtful features. To the left are two specimens of the burgher class, grave members of the municipal council, eminently stolid, much puzzled. In sharp contrast to their Teutonic dulness is a green-robed Eastern seated near, his hand resting on his mouth and sustaining his head, and in his dark Semitic face the unsatisfied yearning look of a man eager for supersensuous knowledge-a Magian this, ready to leave his home and seek the radiance of any star that may rise to brighten the firmament of East or West. On the seats that slope upward is a varied gathering of courtier, clown, and priest; while in the centre of all sits the crowned figure of the reigning prince, with gentle face and "old smiling eyes," like the mild ideal king of Pippa's song.

In "Peter the Hermit" the main figure is seen on the raised steps of a church porch, his form attenuated by fast and vigil, and by the fervour of the unresting spirit within. He is a man of the Baptist's type, a desert-dweller, entering the city for a moment, visiting the haunts of men only to stir their inhabitants, and work them to the fulfilment of the visions which have come to him in solitude. Kneeling on one knee, with raised hand and

impassioned gesture he sways the crowd beneath, who become under his eloquence like some mighty organ that sends forth billows of tumultuous sound at the touch of a master's finger. In front, to the centre, is a mailed knight kissing the cross of his sword - hilt and swearing the crusader's oath,—his finger rightly prominent, as indicating the military nature of the mission which the hermit preaches. Around we see all differences of

feeling and attitude. Here a girl fastens the red badge upon her lover's shoulder; there a mother strives to stir into fervour her student son; or a daughter, clinging round her father's neck, would keep him from the Holy War; while on one side is seen a young apothecary, his keen sneering face expressing the contempt for the scientist for the enthusiasms with which a fervid spirit can inspire the vulgar herd. Behind the swaying multitude is a space of chill sky wanly lighted by the crescent moon, and a great mass of towered and belfried masonry, a fitting type of the medieval church which had grown so hard and intolerant, and had in it so little of the gentleness and sweet reasonableness of Christ.

"Wallace, the Defender of Scotland," is another of the artist's historical subjects or personificationsone which had an especial attraction for Scott, and which he frequently treated. A version of it was painted so early as 1829, another was left incomplete on the artist's easel at the time of his death. In 1843 he produced a triplicate of the subject, with exquisite use of his rich, powerful, and glowing colour.

We may here speak of the designs and drawings executed by Scott. The most ambitious of them were those which he contributed to the national competition, which was held preparatory

to the decoration of Westminster Hall. This occasion was felt by all the more earnest artists of the country to be one of the last importance, and by none more than by Scott. In 1841 he published a pamphlet on the subject, entitled British, French, and German Painting; being a reference to the grounds which render the proposed Painting of the New Houses of Parliament important as a Public Measure.' The occasion, he says, "becomes a demand upon the mental status of the country. It will in very important respects be a verdict of life or death upon the future efforts of artists in Great Britain." He is careful to insist that the proposed frescoes must be no mere pleasant patterns on the walls, no mere meaningless arabesques. In this sense "Raphael in the Vatican could never, in English language, be styled decorative, still less Michael Angelo in the Sistine." Neither must the designs revert, as did the works of Cornelius and Overbeck, "to subjects and treatment which have lapsed from their worth by the passage of nearly four centuries," they must be art that is fresh, living, and of to-day, finding and pursuing such conceptions as are "abstract and dictated by the general intelligence."

In 1842 Scott contributed two designs to the competition, "Drake witnessing the Destruction of the Spanish Ships," and "Wallace defending Scotland,"-at the same time informing his friends of the determination, should he be successful, of taking no part in the subsequent work in London, unless he obtained full control of an entire department, and was permitted to carry out his own thoughts in his own way. But the cartoons were by no means adapted to the public taste. Like all Scott's works, they verged on wilfulness in their individuality,

and showed no strenuous effort after executive skill and exactitude. As was to be expected, they failed of success; and a like fate befell the other designs which he afterwards sent to a similar competition. The first prize was carried off by Armitage, then a young man little known in this country, fresh from the academic training of France, and participation in The Hemicycle in the Palais des Beaux Arts, under the eye of his master Delaroche.

The separate smaller drawings of Scott are very numerous, their method, slight and rapid as compared with that of oil-pictures, fitting them to be the readiest means for the expression of his teeming imagination. Indeed, as Mr. Ruskin has remarked, there seems to be an especial appropriateness in monochrome as the vehicle of art which is mainly that of imagination and thought rather than of mere sensation; and it is doubtful whether such subjects as the "Melancholia" and the "Knight and Death" would have retained their full impressiveness had they been carried out in finished colour. Scott was fond of sketching with the brush and a rather liquid tint, which readily responded to his rapid hand, the line being sensitive and of easily varied thickness and depth. One drawing of this method, "The Sirens," lately in the possession of Dr. David Laing, we remember as singularly passionate in the strenuous action of the mariner who binds Ulysses remorselessly to the mast, and in the steady action of the rowers, who never dare to raise their eyes as the boat flashes past the enchanted shore and the eager enticing forms that people it. Many sets of drawings, like those entitled "The Anchorite," "Unhappy Love," and Scenes from the Life and Thoughts of a Student Painter," were executed; more were only projected, and the subjects of their in

dividual illustrations indicated in writing two very important series of designs, the illustrations to the Pilgrim's Progress,' and to 'Nichol's Architecture of the Heavens,' were completed and published as engravings after Scott's death. The former date from 1841, the year of Scott's greatest and most impressive picture, "The Traitor's Gate." The original drawings, forty in number, are in pencil, executed with much vigour, in very slightly shaded outline. In some of them we find more of that beauty which comes of quietude than in the former illustrations to the "Ancient Mariner," in the bowed heads of "The Angels that cry continually, Holy! Holy! Holy!" for example, in the "Christian harnessed for the Pilgrimage," the "Christian welcomed in the Palace Beautiful," and the "Christian instructed in the Palace Beautiful,"—a design which was also carried out very successfully as an oil-picture. But whatever charm there is in these placid scenes, the artist is, with two exceptions, most powerful and most individual in subjects which have their motive in violent and rigorous action, in the tremendous force of demoniac assault in "The Fight with Apollyon," in the terror of the descent of "Ignorance," in fiendish clutches through "The Byway to Hell." Two of the designs, conceived in calmer mood, "Christian entering the Valley of the Shadow of Death," and "The Martyrdom of Faithful," may rank as among the most impressive and suggestive subjects of modern art. In the first we see Christian, "ever a fighter," entering, sword in hand, on his "one fight more, the best and the last." Towering above his pigmy human form is a gigantic Presence, sharply foreshortened so that the face is almost wholly concealed. The eyes are hidden, the expression of the countenance can

only be guessed at.

This great

figure, vast like some mountain, some elemental feature of nature, casts over the human form beneath a shadow which in the distance, towards which the man advances, darkens like the recess of some gloomy cavern, and in front is outlined sharply sharply by the serrated edge of that "likeness of a kingly crown" which the Presence wears. It is Death, whose regal diadem, whose tyrant sway over the mind and imagination of man, lies in his mystery, his impenetrable shadow.

In "The Martyrdom of Faithful" this shadow is rolled away, and, as in the death of Stephen, we see the heavens opened. Beneath is the witness for the truth, amid the crackling fagots and the fierce flames, watched by the stern faces of soldier and executioner. But the moment of release has come in the closed eyes, the lax open mouth, and the head that has fallen back and is pressed against the stake, we see that the man has sighed forth in anguish his last gasp of mortal breath, and has gained the insentient calm of death. And above are heavenly ministrants with palm branches and a celestial chariot, and floating towards them is a form of utter peace, the hands laid softly together, the hair flowing quietly from the upturned face, which is calm with a new immortal life that knows neither pain nor sorrow. Italian art herself has no vision more poetic or impressive than this.

The other designs of which we have to speak are the series of eleven inventions illustrating an edition of Professor J. P. Nichol's Architecture of the Heavens,' published in 1850. The imaginative mind of Scott had always been strongly drawn in wonder and reverence to the splendour and vastness of the conceptions presented by astronomy; he tells us