now since the first wearing of that cap of yours,
will come upon you. Try and remember a
street as you saw it in eighteen twenty-nine,
or, as I saw it, in eighteen thirty-nine. What
strange novelties eighteen fifty-nine offers to
our inspection! Look at the photographs.
Could we do without photography now? And
yet when the gloss was on the cap we could
only go, if we wanted our portraits taken, to the
gentleman in Soho or Fitzroy-square, who painted
us in oils, with the column, the curtain, or the
cut orange on the plate, with an unnatural shirt
collar, clothes too new for us, and eyes staring
into vacancy. For miniatures, there was the
fashionable artist in a shawl dressing-gown
and a Turkish cap, who stippled us up in ivory,
with pink eyes like a white rabbit or an albino,
an elaborate gold chain round our necks, and a
highly finished Buhl inkstand, with a great quill
pen to break the dark background on the
curiously arabesqued table-cloth. Cheaper
performances "in this style" were undertaken by
modest practitioners, who dwelt in second floors
of the Strand or Oxford-street, and exhibited
gold frames full of specimens on the street door;
simpering ensigns in scarlet, and languishing
ladies with low-necked dresses, evidently copies
in water-colours from the Book of Beauty.
Photography has swept all these poor mediocre
artists away. Some, the better section, have
started up again as first class photographers, or
find employment in colouring to miniature
texture the productions of the sun and lens. Others,
the more inferior, take photographs, abominable
in quality, for sixpence and a shilling, in vile
little slums; Sunday being their great market
day: there are legions of people abroad on the
Sabbath who have their portraits taken for want
of something better to do. Some, the very
worst, may have sunk into the touters who stand
at the doors in the aforesaid slums, with shilling
specimens in their grimy hands, wheedling or
bullying the passers-by to come into their
masters' murky studios and be libelled on glass.
And some, poor wretches, for aught I know, may
be picking up sorry crumbs as photographees,
sitting as models for the personages in those
stereoscopic slides which look so curiously like
life, and so hideously unlike it, showing their
bleared faces and crinolines and legs, and playing
their miserable antics for a penny wage. Most
noteworthy feature of the things that have taken
possession of London since this old cap was
new is this stereoscopic mania. It is very good,
I think, to look on marvellous transcripts of
nature, to peep through two little holes at a
scrap of cardboard, and say: There are the
Grands Mulets, there is the Court of Lions,
there is the Alameda of Seville, not to have seen
which is not to have seen a wonder. There is
Mount Hor, there the Mount of Olives, there
the church of the Supulchre, there the place of
Job's tribulation—not as painters and poets have
imagined them, but in their actual, terrible
reality—barren, sunburnt, arid, desolate. See;
that little speck among a thousand heads is
Queen Victoria. By her side is Eugénie, in a
white bonnet; that little dark streak is the real
life-like twist of the moustache of his Imperial
Majesty Napoleon III. These are not phantoms;
they are real, and the sun cannot lie. It is good,
I say, to look into these magic mirrors, and
the reflective man may glean many and salutary
lessons from them; but how does it stand when
we come to photograph humanity tortured into
the similitude of an ape, or caricatured into
sham angels and sham ghosts? What a cold,
pallid glare is thrown by the stereoscope on the
deliberate indecencies the knaves have striven to
perpetrate. Faugh! take away this miserable
wresting of sunbeams, this forcing them to
irradiate dust-heaps and sewers.

Not to be denied, however, is this great fact
of photography: very potent and various in its
usefulness at this time and all since this old cap
was new! It has taken giant strides from its
little dim cradle, full of misty shadowings of
corpse-like colour, and distorted parts called
daguerreotypes. Photography is everywhere now.
Our trustiest friends, our most intimate enemies,
stare us in the face from collodionised surfaces.
Sharp detectives have photographs of criminals
of whom they are in search. Foreign police
agents speculate upon the expediency of having
the portraits of travellers photographed on their
passports. People are photographed on their
visiting cards, or have tiny albuminised portraits
of themselves in the crowns of their hats.
There are photographs so minute as to be
invisible, save under the microscope. They
photograph infants and dead people. I was in
Bedlam the other day, and the kind physician
showed me an album full of photographs of the
mad folks. There was Case XVI., raving in acute
mania, hair erect, eyes starting, muscles distorted,
mouth convulsed, hands clenched, limbs thrown
here and there; and lo! on the opposite page
was Case XIV. again, in a lucid interval, clean
shaven, prim, demure, with an irreproachable
collar, a white neckcloth, and a faultlessly
buttoned coat. Could the old mad doctors ever
have dreamed of this, among the phantasma of
chains, manacles, gags, whips, and whirligig
chairs, among which they kept the stricken
people! What sore and terrible an astonishment
photography would have been to them in
the days when their old caps and three-cornered
hats, their powdered wigs, and golden-headed
canes were new. This photography seems an
obedient slave, and has never claimed any fierce
or arrogant mastery. It has never blown any
one up, or rent anybody asunder, or maimed
anybody; though a skilful photographer tells me
that the art may yet exact such penalties
for extreme rashness or dense stupidity. The
worst harm it has wreaked has been to stain a
few manipulators' finger-tips a little. It is not free
from vice: witness those semi-ribald stereoscopes;
but it abhors the crimes of violence. My cap is
but middle aged, but when it is in truth old, and
covers a bald, wrinkled head, what marvels may not
have been added to photography! Of course it is in
its infancy. Steam, you know, is in its infancy.
So is ballooning. So is cotton-spinning