amson, its old monuments, its stained
windows, is brought back to us in all its minute detail as we remember it
in many a visit made on our way back from the morning's work at La Pitie
to the late breakfast at the Cafe Procope. Some of the instantaneous views
are of great perfection, and carry us as fairly upon the Boulevards as Mr.
Anthony transports us to Broadway. With the exception of this series, we
have found very few new stereoscopic pictures in the market for the last
year or two. This is not so much owing to the increased expense of
importing foreign views as to the greater popularity _of card-portraits_,
which, as everybody knows, have become the social currency, the
sentimental "green-backs" of civilization, within a very recent period.

We, who have exhausted our terms of admiration in describing the
stereoscopic picture, will not quarrel with the common taste which prefers
the card-portrait. The last is the cheapest, the most portable, requires
no machine to look at it with, can be seen by several persons at the same
time,--in short, has all the popular elements. Many care little for the
wonders of the world brought before their eyes by the stereoscope; all
love to see the faces of their friends. Jonathan does not think a great
deal of the Venus of Milo, but falls into raptures over a card-portrait of
his Jerusha. So far from finding fault with him, we rejoice rather that
his affections and those of average mortality are better developed than
their taste; and lost as we sometimes are in contemplation of the shadowy
masks of ugliness which hang in the frames of the photographers, as the
skins of beasts are stretched upon tanners' fences, we still feel
grateful, when we remember the days of itinerant portrait-painters, that
the indignities of Nature are no longer intensified by the outrages of
Art.

The sitters who throng the photographer's establishment are a curious
study. They are of all ages, from the babe in arms to the old wrinkled
patriarchs and dames whose smiles have as many furrows as an ancient elm
has rings that count its summers. The sun is a Rembrandt in his way, and
loves to track all the lines in these old splintered faces. A photograph
of one of them is like one of those fossilized sea-beaches where the
raindrops have left their marks, and the shellfish the grooves in which
they crawled, and the wading birds the divergent lines of their
foot-prints,--tears, cares, griefs, once vanishing as im