appropriate action: Neil Gow with his fiddle, Doctor
Spens shooting an arrow, or Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause. Above all,
from this point of view, the portrait of Lieutenant-Colonel Lyon is
notable. A strange enough young man, pink, fat about the lower part of
the face, with a lean forehead, a narrow nose and a fine nostril, sits
with a drawing board upon his knees. He has just paused to render
himself account of some difficulty, to disentangle some complication of
line or compare neighbouring values. And there, without any perceptible
wrinkling, you have rendered for you exactly the fixed look in the eyes,
and the unconscious compression of the mouth, that befit and signify an
effort of the kind. The whole pose, the whole expression, is absolutely
direct and simple. You are ready to take your oath to it that Colonel
Lyon had no idea he was sitting for his picture, and thought of nothing
in the world besides his own occupation of the moment.

Although the collection did not embrace, I understand, nearly the whole
of Raeburn's works, it was too large not to contain some that were
indifferent, whether as works of art or as portraits. Certainly the
standard was remarkably high, and was wonderfully maintained, but there
were one or two pictures that might have been almost as well away--one
or two that seemed wanting in salt, and some that you can only hope were
not successful likenesses. Neither of the portraits of Sir Walter Scott,
for instance, was very agreeable to look upon. You do not care to think
that Scott looked quite so rustic and puffy. And where is that peaked
forehead which according to all written accounts and many portraits, was
the distinguishing characteristic of his face? Again, in spite of his
own satisfaction and in spite of Dr. John Brown, I cannot consider that
Raeburn was very happy in hands. Without doubt, he could paint one if he
had taken the trouble to study it; but it was by no means always that
he gave himself the trouble. Looking round one of these rooms hung about
with his portraits, you were struck with the array of expressive faces,
as compared with what you may have seen in looking round a room full of
living people. But it was not so with the hands. The portraits differed
from each other in face perhaps ten times as much as they differed by
the hand; whereas with living people the two go pretty much together;
and where one is remarkable, the other will almost certainly not be
commonplace