Dear Mr. Editor,--From various causes I have been absent from your columns as a contributor for some time, but not as a reader. The chief reason for this was the weather, which of late has been so hot and prostrating as to dry up both my ink and my energies. Now that the atmosphere is more cool, moist, and pleasant, my ink and my thoughts may flow together, and the resulting epistle may find a place on some page of the Photographic News; if not, I shall not be angry. I know that the world--and photography is my world--is not always mindful of its atoms. The great and immortal Cicero discovered that even he could be absent from Rome, and all Rome not know it. How much easier, then, for your readers not to discover my absence from your pages. But my inability to write and attend to other duties entailed more serious losses to myself. Amongst others I missed seeing the Royal Academy Exhibition, but found a compensating pleasure in going to see the Exhibition of National Portraits at South Kensington. What a school it is for photographers! What a variety of pose, arrangement, management of light and shade, is to be seen in that glorious collection of Vandykes, Hogarths, Gainsboroughs, Reynolds, Opies, Wilkies, Raeburns, Northcotes, Lawrences, Phillips, Shees, Richmonds, Grants, and many others of the present day! I hope many photographers have seen the collection. None ought to have missed the opportunity. All that saw must have profited by the sight. Portraits of great men that have been familiar to me in black and white for years were there before me in the rich mellow colouring of Vandyke, Reynolds, Wilkie, and Lawrence, and the mind seemed carried back into the past while looking at the works of those great artists. The exhibition will soon close, and all that have not seen it should endeavour to do so at once. There may never again be seen such a gathering together of the great of England, painted by England's greatest portrait painters. The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition was a great assemblage of the glory of England, but it was not so complete, nor so instructive, nor so comfortable to view as that now open at South Kensington. In addition to the paintings there is a large and valuable collection of rare engravings, both in mezzotints and in line. The latter collection alone would make a visit highly pleasing, and, in a sense, remunerative to every photographer. Art is beginning to take root in the minds of those who follow photography, either professionally or for amusement, and those exhibitions are the salt that "savoureth the earth," which in due time will bring forth rich fruits.