his ordinary costume—unkempt, if it be his
custom not to brush his hair—shabby, if he be
usually averse from sacrificing to the graces.
When he sits or stands, let him assume
his natural attitude—or no attitude; which is
the most natural one of all. Let him sternly
repudiate the traditional book, or pencil, or
scroll, and kick away the carefully draped table,
the eternal arm-chair, the scene-painted columns,
curtain, and balustrade—all the hackneyed
"properties" of the photographer. The picture of
a man with a wall behind him, is all he needs.

I have a neat little collection of cartes de
visite of this kind. I even go further. When
I take a long suburban walk, or a run to a
provincial town, I stop at the nearest "studio," or
the nearest van, and have sixpennyworth of
portraiture done on glass, with the veneer of black
varnish behind. If you adopt this custom, you
will ere long be in a position to indulge in the
most edifying meditations, and may give your
looking-glasses a very long holiday. If time
hang heavy on your hands, out with the album,
or overhaul the pile of sixpenny half-length
tinsel frames which you may keep locked in
your bedroom drawer. There you are in many
moods, and under kaleidoscopic phases and
conditions. Ah! there is the new frock-coat in
which you went to that little fish dinner at the
Trafalgar. You remember:—the day you were
detained so long in the City, writing important
letters. There is the shooting-jacket in which you
took your pedestrian tour in Scotland. There,
too, are your knapsack and your Tyrolese wide-awake,
and those famous walking-boots that gave
you the soft corns. In that white waistcoat, my
friend, you were married. It was but five years
since; yet you have grown too stout to wear that
waistcoat now. What has become of that cameo
pin? Ah! you gave it to Jack Flukes who
went to Australia and made so much money at
the bar there, and never wrote to you. Why,
here you are, with Jack Flukes himself leaning
over your shoulder! How fond of you the old
fellow seems! What a dear old fellow it was!
But he never wrote from Melbourne, not even
in answer to that missive in which you
informed him that you had been sued on that
little bill, the proceeds of which paid his passage
to the antipodes.

I knew a man—not very long ago either, for
the carte de visite fashion is but a recent one—
who had evil craft enough to make
photgraphy serve the purposes of his hatred and
revenge. He had loved a woman who was
beautiful, and accomplished, and haughty, and who,
after showing him some slight favour, scorned
him. In the days of her condescension—brief
and fleeting as those days were—she gave him
a large photographic portrait of herself, blazing
with pride, and youth, and beauty. They
quarelled, and parted, and many hundred miles—
thousands at last—yawned between them. Two
years passed away, and the man found a woman
to love, and not to scorn him, and married, and
was happy, and nearly forgot his old love.
In a print-shop window one day he saw her
carte de visite. He went in and bought it.
The shopkeeper had half a dozen in different
dresses and attitudes; for she had turned her
accomplishments to account, and had become a
kind of celebrity. He bought them all. This
was at the height of the London season. At
its close she went abroad. At the beginning
of the next season she came again, and was
not quite so celebrated, but there were more
and various cartes de visites of her
published. At last he had to ask for the cartes by
name, for he grew doubtful in recognising her
face. Not four years had passed by, but she
had altered strangely. Her beauty was of the
evanescent kind. Then the man would arrange
his photographs like a suit of playing-cards by
the side of the first and beauteous photograph,
and, remembering the words that Clarendon
spake to Castlemaine, would hug himself with a
cruel joy. The woman was growing old. "Aha!
my lady," he would chuckle, "how sharp this
nose is, how sunken are those cheeks, how deep
are the lines under those eyes!" He got a
powerful magnifying-glass, and declared that
her rich wavy hair was thinning. He only
regretted that chromatic photography had not yet
been discovered. "If one could only see the
real colours of life, in place of these monotonous
tints of sepia and ochre," he muttered—"if one
could only see that her lips were pale, and her
cheek sallow, and that there was silver in her
hair!" But he consoled himself in. remarking
how thin her hands had grown, and what deep
"salt-cellars" were by her collar-bones. If this
man had been a poet, he might have added a
stanza to the "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" of
Alfred Tennyson.

From whichever point we regard it, this carte
de visite movement is full of strange features
and stranger helps to insight of mankind. It is
a most revolutionary movement. It has done
much—a thousand times more than ever
democrat or demagogue could do—to demolish the
Right Divine to govern wrong. From the cartes
de visite, we learn the astounding fact that kings
and queens are in dress and features precisely
like other people. Marvellous, preternatural,
as this may seem, it is true. Wings do
not grow upon the shoulders of monarchs.
They are compelled to tread like common
mortals; and many of them look like very coarse
and vulgar mortals, too. They have the same
number of arms and legs as us plebeians; nay,
more than that, some stoop unwieldily at the
shoulders, and others are unmistakably
bow-legged. Yes; bow-legged. In the grand old
days of Spanish etiquette, "the Queen of Spain
had no legs;" but this destructive carte de visite
mania has made short work of the fictions of
etiquette. The ex-Queen of Naples appears in
knickerbockers. The ex-King stands sulkily with
his hands in the pockets of a pair of very ill-made
peg-tops. The Emperor of Austria, in his scanty
white tunic, looks very much like a journeyman
baker listening to the second report of Mr.
Tremenhere; the bluff King of Holland has a
strong family likeness to Washington Irving's