26 
no mean jealousy in his nature, but he gladly recognised the genius 
of his compeers, even when their views of art differed wholly from 
his own. In the end, having been admitted an Academician with- 
out passing through the humbler grade of Associate, he settled in 
Glasgow, till he was elected to the Presidency of the Eoyal Scottish 
Academy, on the death of Sir George Harvey in 1876. 
It was in Glasgow, then, that his life-work was really done, and 
probably the necessities of “ pot-boiling ” dictated the path it 
* 
was to follow. How and then, for a season, indeed, he sent for 
exhibition some simple rural study— “ A Peat Sledge,” or “ A Burn- 
side,” or. “ A Pretty Picture of Children ” — which had a touch of 
pure poetic fancy. Put these were short flights into a region which 
he could not afford to cultivate ; and ere long he settled down to 
the steady business of portrait painting. Pembrandt and Eeynolds, 
Vandyke and Eaeburn, have shown that this may he a very noble 
branch of art ; and Macnee’s portraits of the late Dr. Wardlaw 
and Mr. Dalgleish prove that he had no mean idea of the work of 
his profession. But if painting was the right vehicle for his genius 
to express itself in, we should have expected to find him rather 
following in the wake of Wilkie than of Eaeburn, and showing on 
his canvass that dramatic power, and insight into Scottish character, 
and rarely delicate humour, which were the richest gifts, and most 
real qualities of his mind. Nothing of this, however, can be found 
in all his work. Even in painting portraits, though among so 
many he must have come across some faces which had Scotch 
character and humour like his own, yet I am not aware of any of 
his pictures which suggest what a wealth of laughter lay in the 
man. It would almost seem as if his art was not his natural utter- 
ance, but a mere skill of hand, and that this successful painter, 
after all, had not “ found his mission,” and has left no real record 
of his brilliant genius, except in the short-lived memory of his 
friends. For assuredly, however excellent his likenesses are, and 
however ably some of them are painted, they give no adequate 
conception of that singularly- rich and fertile and dramatic portrayer 
of national character, who could so nicely hit off not local dialect 
only, but local habits of thought, with strokes of finer insight that 
pierced far into the deepest heart of man. Of all this, however, 
nothing now remains. Ho other tongue could reproduce those tales 5 
