We have not counted them, but we are informed, and have no difficulty in believing, that there are 450 portraits (or thereabouts) in this the eighty-second exhibition of the Royal Academy. A very large number, out of 1456 works of art. Adding the portraits in the three other exhibitions, we attain a total of which, even after deducting drawings and miniatures, it is impossible for us to notice one fourth-part. And we must particularly remark, with respect to portraits and landscapes, what also applies in a less degree to the less numerous classes of pictures, that we have unavoidably--on account of our limited space to deal with so compendious a subject, and also because we would not reduce this article to a mere catalogue--omitted notice of many artists and pictures whose claims are undoubted to mention more or less honourable; as we have also forborne, for the same reason, and much more willingly, certain censures which we should have been justified in inflicting. Concerning portraits, however, we would gladly have been rather more diffuse, had we not still to take some notice, within the compass of a very few pages, of those exhibitions to which as yet we have done little more than incidentally refer. The restoration to the galleries of purchasers and studios of painters, of the five hundred pictures exhibited this year by the British Institution, diminishes the interest now attaching to that exhibition, and induces us to be tolerably brief in our notice of some of its leading features. No. 52, _The Post Office_, by F. Goodall, is a pretty picture enough, but displays no genius, and the subject suggests a comparison with Wilkie, which is not favourable. Mr Bullock's _Venus and Cupid_, No. 124, is about as sickly a piece of blue and pink as we remember to have seen. Mr Sant's _Rivals_ gives the impression of a copy from the lid of a French plum-box. We have surely seen the Frenchified group in some engraving of Louis XV's times. Mr Woolmer's _Syrens_ displays some imagination, but the colouring is very bad. The sky is exaggerated, and the water seems to have flowed from a cesspool, suggesting unsavoury ideas of the extent of its contamination by the dead bodies that float upon it. It is a picture, nevertheless, that one is apt to look at twice. T. Clark's _The Horses of Rhesus captured by Ulysses and Diomed_, has plenty of faults, certainly, but it has also boldness and spirit, and makes us think the painter may hereafter do better things. No. 205, _Lance reproving his Dog_--left unfinished by the late Sir A. W. Callcott, and completed by J. Callcott Horsley--includes a pretty bit of landscape, and the dog is not bad; but, as a whole, the picture does not strike us as remarkable. No. 231, _A French Fishing Girl_, by T. K. Fairless, is a nice bit of colouring, very fresh and judicious; and R. M'Innes's _Detaining a Customer_, tells its story well, and is of careful finish, but insipid colouring. Lady Macbeth, by T. F.