Lord Seton was obliged to retire abroad for safety, and was an exile for two years, during which he was reduced to the necessity of driving a waggon in Flanders for his subsistence. He rose to favour in James the Sixth's reign; and, resuming his paternal property, had himself painted in his waggoner's dress, and in the act of driving a wain with four horses, on the north end of a stately gallery at Seton Castle. He appears to have been fond of the arts, for there exists a beautiful family-piece of him in the centre of his family. The original is the property of Lord Somerville, nearly connected with the Seton family, and is at present at his Lordship's fishing villa of the Pavilion, near Melrose."-"This was so valuable a painting," says an elder authority, "that when Charles the First came to Scotland, in 1633, being at Seton House, his Majesty, during the time of dinner, had his eyes constantly fixed on that picture; which the Earl of Winton observing, offered it in a present to the King; but he declined accepting it, saying, that he would never rob the family of so inestimable a jewel."

James the Sixth extended encouragement to art as far as his extreme poverty and the parsimony of his parliaments would allow. Painting began to extend from portraiture to history, and sculpture also re-appeared. The unfortunate Ruthven Earl of Gowrie, according to Hume of Godscroft, built a fair gallery, and "decorated it with pictures ;" and in the great gallery of the old palace of Scone, begun by the same earl, were various paintings in water-colours. "The roof of the gallery," says one of our ablest antiquaries,

66

was of wood, in the shape of the lid of an oldfashioned bandbox; the ground white; the groups of figures were in ovals, with a border like the frame of a picture. In every one that I remember, was King James, the principal figure, on horseback, surrounded by his courtiers, mounted also; he had always his high-crowned hat and yellow beard, and his face much larger than those of his attendants. I remember no ovals on any other subject but that of the King's sports. The roof around these representations was daubed over with heads and harpies, &c., the whole very ill done, and much spoilt when I saw the house.' Nor among these royal residences is the house of Ravelstone, built by George Fowlis in 1603, unworthy of being mentioned. On the ceiling of the principal apartment were painted the amusements and occupations of men in the twelve months of the year, each distinguished by the corresponding sign of the zodiac.

The

centre was occupied by a group of angels, drawn up in a circle, and performing a concert of vocal and instrumental music: one of the youngest, as in duty bound, playing on the bagpipe. A tragic story, connected with painting, is related in Pitcairn's Criminal Trials:- -One Archibald Cornwall, a town-officer of Edinburgh, having seized some furniture for debt, carried it to the market-cross to be disposed of. Among the articles were portraits of James the Sixth and his Queen. These royal heads, it seems, the unfortunate man, thoughtlessly perhaps, proposed to hang on the public gibbet, and fixed a nail for the purpose; when the people, aware of

the danger, or resenting the disgrace, interposed and prevented further exposure. The King, who would have forgiven an insult to his person, but not to his picture, was deeply incensed. Cornwall was tried, convicted, and executed, within the brief space of twenty-four hours; and the Town Council, returning from the execution, made it a law, "that nane of their Majesties or Graces pictures or portraits be poyndet, rouppet, or compryset for any manner of cause."

Art, such as it was, had done its part to honour King James; and when his Queen arrived from Denmark, the 19th of May, 1590, all the classic lore and skill in public pageantry seem to have been called into active service. Among other matters the contemporary rhymes of Birrell, an honest burgher of the place, dwell at great length on the historic tapestries and " images and antics auld," which were every where displayed on "the stairs and houses of the town." The principal pageant seems to have been made up of much the same material that some twenty years afterwards formed the staple commodity of the court masks of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones:

66

It written was with stories mae,
How Venus with a thundering thud,
Inclosed Achates and Enae,

Within a meekel mistic clud;

And how fair Anna's wondrous wraith
Deplors her sister Dido's daith.

Io with goldin glittering hair
Was portret wondrous properlie,
And Polipheme was pentit thair,
Quha in his forehead had ane ee.
VOL. V.

C

Beneath him but ane little space

Was Janus with the double face, &c. &c.

The more to enhance the merits of the exhibition,

At her entrie at the ports,
Trim harangs till her Grace was maid
Her salutation thair was sung

In ornate style of the Latine tung.

;

English readers will, it is hoped, pardon this retrospective view of matters, which must possess considerable interest for all Scottish ones. To conclude, the British Solomon, in 1603, carried his notions of royal right, and his taste for poetry, painting, and pageantry, into England; and art in Scotland, left without encouragement, suffered an eclipse till the return of Jamesone from the school of Rubens.

He set up his easel in his native city, in the year 1620, in the thirty-fourth year of his age; and the first-fruits of his study were landscape and history. It was, we may suppose, his desire to found a school in which works akin to poetry, and owing their excellence more to the imagination than to reality, should take the lead; and for a while he seems to have persisted in this unprofitable dream. Like others in latter days, he could only be taught by the cold touch of experience, that painting, dismissed as an auxiliary from the church, is, in Britain at least, considered only as a more genteel method of embalming and preserving the shapes and looks of the high born and the wealthy; or, as a humble handmaid of architecture, to embellish her coved ceilings and her naked walls. As an art capable

of exciting a pleasure all its own, few then regarded it; and fewer still thought of laying out their money on detached poetic pictures of dead or living nature. The leading people of the time were, however, attracted to Jamesone's studio, by the beauty of his drawing and the transparent splendour of his colouring; and he was gradually induced, after the usual fashion of those who do not wish their days to pass without profit, to forsake the fields of fancy for those of living life. No doubt, then, we must assign to the first years after his return his paintings of the Sybils, still preserved in the North; which owe, tradition avers, some part of their fascination to the good looks of a lady of Aberdeen; several landscapes, of which no other account can be rendered, than that they were small, and remarkable for the clearness of their colours and the accuracy of their perspective; his Book of Scripture Sketches, "containing," according to the words of his will," two hundred leaves of parchment of excellent write adorned with divers historys of our Saviour curiously limned," valued at two hundred pounds,

and a picture of Medea, of which I can find no particular account any where. With this we may close our account of Jamesone's historic attempts, unless we admit into the num ber that singular piece of his at Cullen House, allegorically expressive of the fortunes of Charles the First; and which may be considered as a successful prediction, since the painter died before the prince. This work, which is three feet eight inches high, and two feet eight inches