Do you believe in the story of the origin of portrait--the Grecian maid and her lover? I cannot--for I have often tried my hand, and such frights were the result, that it would have been a cure for love. For lack of the art of portrait-painting, we have really no idea what mankind were like before the time of our Eighth Harry. What we see could not possibly be likenesses, because they are not humanity. But in Holbein's heads, such as the royal collection, published by Chamberlaine, we begin to see what men and women were. What our early Henrys and Edwards were: what the court or the people were, we cannot know; they are buried in the night of art, like the brave who lived before the time of Agamemnon. Perhaps it is quite as well--"_omne ignotum pro mirifico_"--and who would lose the pleasure of wonder and conjecture, with all its imaginary phantasmagoria? We might have a mesmeric _coma_ that might put us in possession of the past, if it can of the future--and gratify curiosity wofully at the expense of what is more valuable than that kind of truth. A mesmeric painter may take the portrait of Helen of Troy, and you may knock at your twenty neighbours' doors, and find perhaps a greater beauty, especially if chronology be trusted as to her age at the Trojan war. Would you like to see a veritable portrait of Angelica--or of your Orlando in his madness? The great portrait-painter--the sun, in his diurnal course all over the world, may be, for aught we know, photographing mankind, and registering us, too; and, if we are to judge from the specimens we do see, the collection cannot be very flattering. Who dares call the sun a flatterer? "... Solem quis dicere falsum Audeat?" At the very moment that you are sitting to your man, to be set off with smirk and smile and the graces of art, you are perhaps making a most formidable impression elsewhere. You would not like to "Look upon this picture, _and_ on this." Some poor country people have an unaccountable dislike to having their portraits taken. Savages think them second selves, and that may be bewitched and punished; possibly something of this feeling may be at the bottom of the dislike. I was once sketching in a country village, and an old woman went by, and I put her into the picture. Some, looking over me, called out to her that her likeness was taken. She cried, because she had not her best cap and gown on. I was once positively driven from a cottage door, because a woman thought I was "taking her off." I know not but that it was a commendable wish in the old woman to appear decent before the world, and so might have been the fine lady's wish-- "Betty, put on a little red, One surely need not look a fright when dead."