the time of our Eighth Harry. What we see could
not possibly be likenesses, because they are not humanity. But in
Holbein's heads, such as the royal collection, published by Chamberlaine,
we begin to see what men and women were. What our early Henrys and Edwards
were: what the court or the people were, we cannot know; they are buried
in the night of art, like the brave who lived before the time of Agamemnon.
Perhaps it is quite as well--"_omne ignotum pro mirifico_"--and who would
lose the pleasure of wonder and conjecture, with all its imaginary
phantasmagoria? We might have a mesmeric _coma_ that might put us in
possession of the past, if it can of the future--and gratify curiosity
wofully at the expense of what is more valuable than that kind of truth. A
mesmeric painter may take the portrait of Helen of Troy, and you may knock
at your twenty neighbours' doors, and find perhaps a greater beauty,
especially if chronology be trusted as to her age at the Trojan war. Would
you like to see a veritable portrait of Angelica--or of your Orlando in
his madness?

The great portrait-painter--the sun, in his diurnal course all over the
world, may be, for aught we know, photographing mankind, and registering
us, too; and, if we are to judge from the specimens we do see, the
collection cannot be very flattering. Who dares call the sun a flatterer?

"... Solem quis dicere falsum
Audeat?"

At the very moment that you are sitting to your man, to be set off with
smirk and smile and the graces of art, you are perhaps making a most
formidable impression elsewhere. You would not like to

"Look upon this picture, _and_ on this."

Some poor country people have an unaccountable dislike to having their
portraits taken. Savages think them second selves, and that may be
bewitched and punished; possibly something of this feeling may be at the
bottom of the dislike. I was once sketching in a country village, and an
old woman went by, and I put her into the picture. Some, looking over me,
called out to her that her likeness was taken. She cried, because she had
not her best cap and gown on. I was once positively driven from a cottage
door, because a woman thought I was "taking her off." I know not but that
it was a commendable wish in the old woman to appear decent before the
world, and so might have been the fine lady's wish--

"Betty, put on a little red,
One surely need not look a fright when dead."

We choose to be satir