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"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 of deposition with him for safe keeping at Rougham Hall by his brother 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 Holham, 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, painted 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 was brought to Henry VIII that Sir Thomas More was beheaded, and the King fell into a passion at the news, and running to the picture, tore it down and