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[beginning of page] "Athenaeum". 19 June 1886.

                           By Augustus Jessop. 

Among the papers of the Hon Roger North at which I am now working is a somewhat elaborate "Register of Pictures" which appears to have been at one time in his custody, either his own property or deposited with him for safe keeping at Rougham Hall by his brothers and kinsfolk. The larger number of these pictures were actually at Rougham when Roger North's Great-grandson pulled down the old hall, with the dreamy intention of building a better one some day, which intention he never carried out. The pictures were therefore dispersed, and tradition and something better than tradition, asserts that many of them went to enrich the Galleries at Houghton Raynham and Holkham, the seats of the Walpoles, Townshends, and of Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, respectively. one of the notes upon these pictures refers to a strange story which some of your readers more learned in the history of Art than I am, may be able to throw some light upon, and which at any rate deserves to be made public.

           Roger North after giving an account of a portrait of Pope

Gregory XIV., which his brother Montague had bought at Marseilles in 1693, writes as follows: "This picture is judged to be by Pomerantius, painter to Gregory XIV., who was in England tempore Henry VIII., concerning whom the following story is told. The picture of Sir Thomas More done by Holbein was in Whitehall when the news [end of page]