uite) in the storm,"
but coloured according to the imagination and taste of the artist; its
name ought assuredly to have been _Redcap and the blue-devils_, for
the venerable and lamented monarch had fine streaming locks of the
real _carrot hue_, whilst his very hideous companions showed _blue_
faces, and blue armour; and with their strangely contorted bodies
seemed meet representatives of some of the infernal court.--In a
highly adorned prayer book, published in the reign of William
III., the engravings of which are from _silver-plates_, one print
illustrates our Lord's simile of the mote and beam, by a couple of men
aiming at each other's visual organs, ineffectually enough, one having
a great _log of wood_ growing from his eye, and the other being blind
in one eye from a _cataract_; at least, though I think I do not err
in saying, a _moat_ and castle, in it--I have seen an old edition of
Jeremy Taylor's "Life and Death of Christ," illustrated with many
remarkably good engravings. Of one of these the subject is, the
Impotent Man at the Pool of Bethesda; the fore ground is occupied by
our Saviour, the cripple, and other invalids; and in the distance
appears a small _pond_ palisaded by slender pilasters; over it hovers
an angel, who, with _a long pole_, is, to the marvel of the beholders,
dexterously "troubling the waters." In the same volume, some of the
figures are clad in the garb of the time when drawn, and St. Jude is
reading the _New Testament_ in a _pair of spectacles_!--In Holyrood
House, and in one of the rooms added in the days of Charles II., is a
panel-painting of "the Infant Hercules strangling the serpents;" and
leaping up in front of the cradle, appears one of those pretty and
rare spaniels called _King Charles's breed_. In the same palace, and
in one of the chambers, once occupied by the unfortunate Mary, is
a very old painting, intended, as the guide assures visitors, to
represent St. Peter's vision of the great sheet; it may be, but if so,
_one_ archangel in _military sandals_, holding in his hands a _small
towel_, represents (by a _figure_ in _painting_ I presume,) St. Peter,
the sheet, and its innumerable living contents. He must have taken a
hint, from the artist who painted for the passage through the Red Sea
nothing but ocean, assuring his employer, that the Israelites could
not be seen, because they were all gone over, and the Egyptians were
every one drowned!--"I once saw," writes a friend, "a ful