There are other examples of half-length portraits with landscape backgrounds, wherein the horizontal line passes right through the eyes of the principal figure, one of which I will mention. It is that of the "Virgin and Child," by Lorenzo di Credi. In this picture the horizontal line passes right through the eyes of the Virgin without interfering with the interest of the chief object. Several examples of an opposite character are to be seen in the National Gallery, with the horizon of the landscape background much too low in the picture. It is needless to call special attention to them. After carefully examining the works already named, and comparing them with the natural effects to be observed daily, it will be quickly seen which is a truthful picture in this respect, and which is a false one. SHARPNESS AND SOFTNESS _V._ HARDNESS. The discussion on "Sharpness: what is it?" at the meeting of the South London Photographic Society in May, 1861, and the more recent discussion on "Focussing" at the last meeting of the same Society, seem to me to have lost much of their value and importance to photographers for want of a better definition of the term _hardness_ as applied to art, and as used by _artists_ in an _artistic sense_. Webster, in his second definition of the word "hardness," gives it as "difficulty to be understood." In that sense Mr. Wall succeeded admirably when he gave the term _concentration_, in reply to Mr. Hughes, who asked Mr. Wall what he meant by _hardness_. Fairholt gives the _art meaning_ of the word as "want of refinement; academic drawing, rather than artistic feeling." But even that definition would not have been sufficiently comprehensive to convey an adequate idea of the meaning of the term in contradistinction to the word _sharpness_, and I cannot but think that Mr. Wall failed in his object in both papers, and lost considerable ground in both discussions, by not giving more attention to the nice distinctions of the two terms as used in art, and explaining their artistic meanings more clearly.