From a]⁠[Painting
AGE 5.

From a]⁠[Lithograph
AGE 45.

From a Photograph by]⁠AGE 80.⁠[Messrs. Elliot & Fry

E are indebted to the kindness of Professor Blackie for three portraits of himself at widely different ages. Three-quarters of a century is so vast a span of human life, that the resemblance between the charming little boy of five in frills and the grey Professor of eighty, who might be his great-grandfather, though distinctly traceable, may not at first be visible to all. At five years old John Stuart Blackie was, we may assume, most interested in tops and pop-guns; at forty-five he was a University Professor, and just returning from his tour to Athens, which was the origin of his well-known advocacy of the study of modern Greek; at eighty he was—as he still is, and as we trust he may long be—at once the most learned and the most popular of living Scotchmen.