Robert Landor, (a true poet like his great brother, if ever there was one) says finely in his Impious Banquet, There is a pause near death when men grow bold Toward all things else: Before that awful pause, whenever the thought is brought home to us, we feel ourselves near enough to grow indifferent to them, and to perceive the vanity of all earthly pursuits, those only excepted which have the good of our fellow creatures for their object, and tend to our own spiritual improvement. But this is entering upon a strain too serious for this place; though any reflection upon the lapse of time and the changes that steal on us in its silent course leads naturally to such thoughts. _Omnia paulatim consumit longior ætas, Vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo. Ipse mihi collatus enim non ille videbor; Frons alia est, moresque alii, nova mentis imago, Voxque aliud mutata sonat._[1] [Footnote 1: PETRARCH.] Sir Thomas Lawrence was told one day that he had made a portrait which he was then finishing, ten years too young, “Well,” he replied, “I have; and I see no reason why it should not be made so.” There was this reason: ten years if they bring with them only their ordinary portion of evil and of good, cannot pass over any one's head without leaving their moral as well as physical traces, especially if they have been years of active and intellectual life. The painter therefore who dips his brush in Medea's kettle, neither represents the countenance as it is, nor as it has been. “And what does that signify?” Sir Thomas might ask in rejoinder.—What indeed! Little to any one at present, and nothing when the very few who are concerned in it shall have passed away,—except to the artist. The merits of his picture as a work of art are all that will then be considered; its fidelity as a likeness will be taken for granted, or be thought of as little consequence as in reality it then is. Yet if Titian or Vandyke had painted upon such a principle, their portraits would not have been esteemed as they now are. We should not have felt the certainty which we now feel, that in looking at the pictures of the Emperor Charles V. and of Cortes; of King Charles the Martyr, and of Strafford, we see the veritable likeness and true character of those ever-memorable personages. Think of the changes that any ten years in the course of human life produce in body and in mind, and in the face, which is in a certain degree the index of both. From thirty to forty is the decade during which the least outward and visible alteration takes place; and yet how perceptible is it even during that stage in every countenance that is composed of good flesh and blood! For I do not speak of those which look as if they had been hewn out of granite, cut out of a block, cast in bronze, or moulded either in wax, tallow, or paste. Ten years!