126 TRANSACTIONS. 1906-7. 



mask more perfectly than I have seen in any engraving. I have 

 no place to hang it up here, and, lying on the side-table, I can 

 hardly tell you the strange effect it has in different lights. Above 

 all at midnight — more than once, when on raising my head from 

 a book, my eye has casually fallen upon it lying pale and still 

 in partial shadow, the calm face has become as it were a presence, 

 and I have been filled with a momentary awe in the consciousness 

 that I was not alone. Positively the only ghost I have ever seen. " 

 From another letter I venture to quote, as it illustrates not so 

 much appreciation of great art, as that intense humanity of 

 Professor Baynes' nature, its almost womanly tenderness and 

 susceptibility, which made him one of the most winning of aca- 

 demic masters, to the successive bands of students assembling 

 year after year, from all parts of the British Islands : — " I went 

 in for half an hour to the Royal Academy yesterday,' ' he wrote to his 

 friend John Skelton, "but, as I was almost too tired to stand, 

 and did not stay long, I shall say nothing about it — save only this, 

 that the face and form of that woman on the stairs of the burning 

 house are — if not as I am disposed to think, beyond all — quite 

 equal to the best that Millais has ever done, not forgetting the 

 look of unutterable love and life-deep yearning in the Huguenots. 

 And those children — ah me! — I can hardly bear to think of it 

 yet; the agony is too near, too intense, too awful, for present 

 rejoicing, even at the deliverance; and that smile on the young 

 mother's face has struggled up from such depths of speechless 

 pain, and expresses such a sudden ecstacy of utter gratitude and 

 over-mastering joy, that it quite unmans you to look at it. It is 

 the most intense and pathetic utterance of pure human love I 

 have ever met with. " The same note of profound emotion one 

 finds in much of Professor Baynes' correspondence, witness this 

 written on Xmas Eve 1860, "Nine years ago my sister, with 

 whom I had grown up, died. How earnestly we look into the 

 darkness, and ache over the mystery of death, and how vainly. 



It is Christmas Eve, and I am here alone in my room. 



I am not much given to days and seasons, but there is something 

 hallowed and gracious in the time, and it is good to be alone and 



fill an evening hour with thoughts of the absent Let me 



send you, dear S . . . . , across the frozen land lying white beneath 

 the stars, the best wishes for a new year. " 



When Principal Tulloch died in 1886, Professor Baynes de- 

 cided that a biographical account should appear in the volume 



