efrom in one of my books makes me look
like a nigger, insomuch that some Abolitionists claimed me as all the
more their favourite for my black blood! On the other hand, Mr. Edgar
Williams has made me much too florid; while recently that rising young
artist, Alfred Hartley, has caught my true likeness, and has depicted me
aptly and well, as may now be seen in the picture-gallery of the Crystal
Palace. Then Mr. Willert Beale (Walter Maynard by literary _nom de
pinceau et de plume_, for he is both a painter and an author) has lately
portrayed me in crayons, life-sized, an unmistakable likeness; and years
ago Monsieur Rochard, in a large water-coloured drawing, made me look
very French, quite a _petit-maitre_, in which disguise I was engraved
for some book of mine: all the above, except Rochard's, having been done
complimentarily. In America Mr. Pettit's life-sized oil portrait is the
most noticeable.

* * * * *

Two queer anecdotes I must give about another form of author-worship to
which we poor vain mortals are occasionally exposed, viz., what Pope
called in Belinda's case "The Rape of the Lock." I can remember (as once
by Lady---- in London) more than one such ravishment attempted if not
accomplished; but most especially was I in peril at the Philadelphian
Exhibition when three duennas who guarded some lady exhibitors (too
modest to ask themselves) pursued a certain individual, scissors in
hand, like Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, in vain hope of sheared
tresses; had they been, like many of our American sisters, both juvenile
and lovely, very possible success might have crowned their daring; or,
instead of the three seductive graces, had they posed as three
intellectual muses, I might have succumbed; but a leash of fates obliged
a rapid retreat. And for a second queer anecdote take this: a 'cute
negro barber had persuaded me to have my hair cut, to which suggestion,
as it was hissing hot weather, I agreed. He had a neat little shop close
to a jeweller's; next morning I passed that shop and noticed my name
placarded there, surrounded by gold lockets, for that cunning nigger and
his gilded friend were making a rich harvest of my shaved curls. Sambo
can be as sharp as Jonathan, when a freeman, if he likes.

"Interviewing" is another sort of homage nowadays to popular authorship;
in America it is very rife,--and I never came to any city but,
immediately on arrival, two or three representativ