The lasting regret that we cannot know more of the bright, sincere, and genuine people of the world is increased by the fact that they are all different from each other. Was it not Madame de Sevigne who said she had loved several different women for several different qualities? Every real person--for there are persons as there are fruits that have no distinguishing flavor, mere gooseberries--has a distinct quality, and the finding it is always like the discovery of a new island to the voyager. The physical world we shall exhaust some day, having a written description of every foot of it to which we can turn; but we shall never get the different qualities of people into a biographical dictionary, and the making acquaintance with a human being will never cease to be an exciting experiment. We cannot even classify men so as to aid us much in our estimate of them. The efforts in this direction are ingenious, but unsatisfactory. If I hear that a man is lymphatic or nervous-sanguine, I cannot tell therefrom whether I shall like and trust him. He may produce a phrenological chart showing that his knobby head is the home of all the virtues, and that the vicious tendencies are represented by holes in his cranium, and yet I cannot be sure that he will not be as disagreeable as if phrenology had not been invented. I feel sometimes that phrenology is the refuge of mediocrity. Its charts are almost as misleading concerning character as photographs. And photography may be described as the art which enables commonplace mediocrity to look like genius. The heavy-jowled man with shallow cerebrum has only to incline his head so that the lying instrument can select a favorable focus, to appear in the picture with the brow of a sage and the chin of a poet. Of all the arts for ministering to human vanity the photographic is the most useful, but it is a poor aid in the revelation of character. You shall learn more of a man's real nature by seeing him walk once up the broad aisle of his church to his pew on Sunday, than by studying his photograph for a month.