ocks above little harbours, and drinks a strange enchantment
from great vistas of lovely coast washed by blue waters and gladdened
by radiant sunshine. And on the second morning, issuing into the great
square before the station, you have your first sight of Rome.

=====================================================================

PLATE VI.--JOHN TAIT OF HARVIESTON AND HIS GRANDSON. (Mrs Pitman.)

One of the artist's most virile and trenchant performances, it was
painted in 1798-9. The child was introduced after the grandfather's
death. (See p. 63.)

[Illustration: Plate VI.]

=====================================================================

Yet impressive as these transitions are, they are nothing to the
contrast which Rome presented to the stranger from the north in the
eighteenth century when, after slow and long and weary travelling, he
reached his goal. Then Rome was still a town of the renaissance
imposed upon a city of the ancients; and under the aegis of the Papacy
preserved aspects of life and character which differed little from
those of three or four centuries earlier. After the grey metropolis of
the north, with its softly luminous or cloudy skies, its sombreness of
aspect, its calvinistic religious atmosphere, its interest in science
and philosophy, and its want of interest in the arts, the clear
sunshiny air of the Eternal City, its picturesque and crowded life, its
gorgeous ecclesiastical ceremonies and processions, its monuments of
art and architecture, and its cosmopolitan coteries of eager dilettanti
discussing the latest archaeological discoveries, and of artists
studying the achievements of the past, must have formed an
extraordinary contrast, Yet Raeburn, much as these novel and stirring
surroundings would strike him, remained true to his own impressions of
reality and was unaffected in his artistic ideals. Almost alone of the
foreign artists then resident in Rome, he was unaffected by the
pseudo-classicism which prevailed. In part a product of emasculated
academic tradition, and in part the result of philosophical
speculations, upon which the discoveries at Pompeii and the excavations
then taking place in Rome had had a strong influence, it was an
attitude which founded itself upon the past and opposed the direct
study of nature. Gavin Hamilton (1723-98) and Jacob More (1740?-93)
two of its most conspicuous pictorial exponents were Scots by birth,
but they had lived so long a