THE length to which I have extended my remarks on Mr Allan's pictures, may perhaps appear a little extravagant; but I think, upon the whole, that these pictures, and this artist, form one of the most interesting subjects which can at the present time attract the attention of a traveller in Scotland, and therefore I do not repent of the lengthiness of my observations. I wish I had been able to treat the subject more as it deserves to be treated in some other respects.

The truth is that till Wilkie and Allan arose, it can scarcely be said Scotland had ever given any promise of expressing her national thoughts and feelings, by means of the pencil, with any degree of power and felicity at all approaching to that in which she has already often made use of the vehicle of words—or even to that which she had displayed in her early music. Before this time, the poverty of Scotland, and the extreme difficulty of pictorial education, as contrasted with the extreme facility of almost every other kind of education, had been sufficient to prevent the field of art from ever attracting the sympathies and ambition of the young men of genius in this country; and the only exceptions to this rule are such as cannot fail to illustrate, in a very striking way, the general influence of its authority. Neither can I be persuaded to think, that the only exceptions which did exist were at all very splendid ones. The only two Scottish painters of former times, of whom any of the Scotch connoisseurs, with whom I have conversed, seem to speak with much exultation, are Gavin Hamilton and Runciman. The latter, although he was far inferior in the practice of art—although he knew nothing of colouring, and very little of drawing—yet, in my opinion, possessed much more of the true soul of a painter than the former. There is about his often miserably drawn figures, and as often miserably arranged groupes, a certain rude character of grandeur, a certain indescribable majesty and originality of conception, which shows at once, that had he been better educated, he might have been a princely painter.