inappropriate, and the afternoon's labour would
very likely result in that disastrous phenomemon,
an unrecognisable likeness.

Now what is the photographic ordeal after
this? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

But, just as the sufferings which we are called
on to undergo have in this age been reduced,
so also, alas! have the powers of endurance,
and so the same human being, who once bore a
journey of three days and nights by coach,
grumbles at a two hours' whirl by railway; and
he who has known the horrors of a month or so
of sittings, finds that to wait an hour or so in a
photographer's gallery, going right through all
the portraits on the wall and table, exhausts his
patience. When at last he is released from the
waiting-saloon and mounts to the operating-room
above, that he is in the worst possible cue for the
performance in which he is to take a part. He
feels at once dazzled and oppressed by that glare
of light above his head. It makes him blink, it
closes up his eyes, it gives him a sense of having
been up all night. The properties about the
room, too, are bewildering. There are all sorts
of things appropriate to all the different
professions which different sitters may be expected
to follow. There is a piece of complicated wheel-
work for a mechanician, a pair of globes for a
geographer, a nautical compass for the mariner, and
a pair of compasses for a civil engineer. There,
too, is a palette and an easel for the artist, a
book for the divine, an empty brief for the
lawyer, an hour-glass for the philosopher, and
an inkstand and a pen with a tremendous feather
in it for the author. Lastly, there is a wretched
painted scene which is intended to take the
public in as a landscape-background, but the
honest instrument will never fall into the scheme,
and hating the landscape always proclaims it for
the sham which it is. This background is
intended for private and non-professional persons,
and there is also a pillar and a curtain—but who
are those for? What is the profession of that
unhappy and misguided wretch who is supposed
to pass his life in a perpetual environment of
pillar and curtain? There may have been
persons so situated once, but now we turn our
pillars into letter boxes, and the curtain draperies
into ladies' cloaks rich in festoons of crimson.

The thirty seconds which the light requires
to take a likeness are so utterly exhausting,
that if there were one more necessary I believe
no human being could go through with the
thing. The horrible necessity of keeping
motionless is an incentive, of almost irresistible
force, to violent action. Terrific are the temptations
of those thirty seconds. You feel that you
must make a face, yell, spring up, and cut a
frantic caper. You say to yourself: "Suppose
I were to sneeze, to choke; suppose I were
to burst out into a rude guffaw? I will, I
must! Suppose I were to squint; I think I am
squinting. The brass knob on which I am told
to fix my eyes is getting muzzy; it is huge in
size; it revolves; I can't see it. My hands are
tingling, swelling, bursting. All is dizzy before
me—I shall explode!"

There is, in truth, much that will always be
adverse to the production of an agreeable
photographic likeness; but at the same time, it is
quite as true that a very great deal might be done
by a little more knowledge, thought, and
painstaking, to render such portraits infinitely more
pleasant than they are generally found to be.

People who are considered good-looking, and
those even who are beautiful, have a hundred
different aspects, and to seize the best one
and reproduce it is a function of Genius and
not of Chemicals. If you have had a friend
whom you have wished to show off to another
friend, have you not often been disappointed
that the first was "in such bad looks" as
really not to look even pretty? The person
who was expected to be struck with admiration
has wondered at your taste, and you have been
obliged to own that there was matter for
disappointment. Even in nature, out-of-door nature,
this is so. The view which you saw from the
hills above the old French town, with the evening
sun lighting up the rich plain, making the
mountains in the distance amethysts, and the
river a line of gold, while the one cloud shadow
lay over the old cathedral tower and blackened
it, so that all the rest sparkled the more—what
is that very same scene when the sky is grey, and
the mountains grey too, and plain and river and
cathedral are all of one monotonous slate-colour!

But though it may take a Reynolds to do
justice to the beauty of the living creature, and
a Turner to reproduce that of the mountain
and the plain, there is much to be got out of
the Photographic Lens—which it would be
wickedness to disparage—infinitely more than
it is ordinarily made to convey to us. There
are one or two simple matters which might be
borne in mind by photographers with immense
advantage to their sitters, and to their own
reputations as well. They do not yet quite
understand their trade.

The two great main considerations which
should occupy the mind of every photographer
are these: What is the best view he can take of
his sitter, and what the effect of light and shade
which will be most becoming to that sitter's
countenance. On these two considerations the
success of the portrait entirely depends.

Now as to the question of view there is some
tolerable amount of understanding manifested
by the great body of photographers. The sitter
is generally so placed that the most favourable
aspect of his face may come before the lens,
and so that the rapid perspective to which he is
subjected shall distort him as little as may be.
It is pretty well known that if his legs are
nearer the machine than his body the first will
be disproportionately large for the last; that if
his hand is stretched out towards the artist, it
will be twice the size it ought to be, and that
even the fact of his nose being nearer the
camera than the rest of the face will give to
that central feature a large and swollen aspect.

Such general rules as these, applying equally
to all sitters, are then pretty well understood.
But this is not enough. The photographic
artist who would wish to produce a really
successful portrait, should study the special defects