An artist’s head sits manifestly on the shoulders of JOHN TRUMBULL, born in 1756, a year after John Marshall, and living eight years beyond him. At his death in 1843, he left but few as aged. His busy pencil dropped in 1775 for the musket, and, resumed in 1777, has perpetuated in fifty-seven historical pictures, with the fidelity and love of personal friendship, the portraitures of most of the leading actors in the first period of our national story. He was President of the Academy of Fine Arts, from its formation, in 1816, until it gave place, in 1825, to the Academy of Design. His dress, it will be observed, was formally and scrupulously in the mode; his address was as dressy as his wristbands and frills. Quick-eyed mothers would at once, as he took his seat, warn the children, always attracted towards clean vestments, “not to dirty the gentleman’s clothes.” In 1761 ALBERT GALLATIN was born. Related to Neckar, he seems to have borrowed at the same time much of the financial ability of the French minister, and the ready wit, graceful imagination, and forceful word-power of the minister’s brilliant daughter, Madame de Staël. He crammed eighty-eight years full of remarkable activities, as ambassador to Russia, France, Great Britain, and Holland, as member of Congress, and as a weighty yet captivating and vivacious writer on banks, public credit, currency, and those subjects, ever rising, like cream, on the public pans, which are skimmed by the most skilfully handled ladles. Turning the page, we meet the thought-bearing faces of REMBRANDT PEALE, born in 1778, and below, that of his brother artist, WASHINGTON ALLSTON, the American Paul Veronese, who, Peale’s junior by a year, ceased his earthly work in 1853, seven years before him. The serenity of congenial pursuits gilds their portraitures, and lingers like an aureola around their heads. Upon Allston’s face there seems spread a listening look, as if straining to catch far-off notes, mingled with that gentle hush and composure, as if stilled by that music so subtily described by Wordsworth, which “Born of murmuring sound, had passed into his face.”