[Illustration:  THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.]

We forget these nineteenth-century people in the council-chamber, wherein reign Guido, Rembrandt, Claude, and even Da Vinci.  If Leonardo really executed all the canvases ascribed to him in English collections, the common impressions of his habits of painting but little, and not often finishing that, do him great injustice.  Martin Luther is here, by Holbein, and the countess of Desmond, the merry old lady

  Who lived to the age of twice threescore and ten,
  And died of a fall from a cherry tree then,

is embalmed in the bloom of one hundred and twenty and the gloom of Rembrandt.  The two dozen pictures in this room form nearly as odd an association as any like number of portraits could do.  Guercino’s Sibyl figures with a cottage interior by Teniers, and Lely’s Prince Rupert looks down with lordly scorn on Jonah pitched into the sea by the combined efforts of the two Poussins.  The link between Berghem’s cows and Del Sarto’s Holy Family was doubtless supplied to the minds of the hanging committee by recollections of the manger.  Our thrifty Pennsylvanian, West, is assigned the vestibule.  Five of his “ten-acre” pictures illustrate the wars of Edward III. and the Black Prince.  The king’s closet and the queen’s closet are filled mostly by the Flemings.  Vandyck’s room finally finishes the list.  It has, besides a portrait of himself and several more of the first Charles and his family in every pose, some such queer, or worse than queer, commoners as Tom Killigrew and Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia his hopeful spouse, so dear to novelists of a certain school.

[Illustration:  ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY.]

Vast sums have been expended on the renovation and improvement of the castle during the past half century.  With Victoria it has been more popular as a residence than with any of her predecessors since the fourteenth century.  What, however, with its greater practical proximity to London, due to railways, and what with the queen’s liking for solitude since the death of her consort, the more secluded homes of Osborne and Balmoral have measurably superseded it in her affections.  Five hundred miles of distance to the Dee preclude the possibility of the dumping on her, by means of excursion trains, of loyal cockneydom.  She is as thoroughly protected from that inundation in the Isle of Wight, the average Londoner having a fixed horror of sea-sickness.  The running down, by her private steamer, of a few more inquisitive yachts in the Solent would be a hazardous experiment, if temporarily effective in keeping home invaders at bay.  Holding as her right and left bowers those two sanctuaries at the opposite ends of her island realm, she can play a strong hand in the way of personal independence, and cease to feel that hers is a monarchy limited by the rights of the masses.  It is well for the country that she should be left as far as possible to consult her own comfort, ease