Portrait painting is the _forte_, as it has always been the passion of this country. Happily for the inquisitive stranger, every rich man has all his progenitors and relatives on canvass. The walls of every public institution are crowded with benefactors and pupils, and no town hall is left without the heads of the corporation, or the representatives of the borough. The same impulse that prompts us to gaze with avidity on the persons of our cotemporaries, if there be any thing prominent in their character, or peculiar in their history, leads us to turn a curious and attentive eye on the likenesses of the {401} "mighty dead," whose souls as well as faces are thus in some degree transmitted to posterity. Next to my association with the living men of genius who render illustrious the names of Englishmen, no more sensible gratification has accrued to me from my residence in this country, than that of studying the countenances of their predecessors; no employment has tended more efficaciously to improve my acquaintance with the history of the nation, to animate research, and to quicken the spirit of competition. I quitted Oxford with a fervent wish that such an establishment might one day grace our own country. I have uttered an ejaculation to the same effect whenever the great monuments of industry and refinement which Europe displays exclusively, have fallen under my observation. We have indeed just grounds to hope that we shall one day eclipse the old world. "Each rising art by just gradation moves, Toil builds on toil, and age on age improves." The only paper in the _Didactics_, to which we have any decided objection, is a tolerably long article on the subject of _Phrenology_, entitled "Memorial of the Phrenological Society of ---- to the Honorable the Congress of ---- sitting at ----." Considered as a specimen of mere burlesque the _Memorial_ is well enough--but we are sorry to see the energies of a scholar and an editor (who should be, if he be not, a man of metaphysical science) so wickedly employed as in any attempt to throw ridicule upon a question, (however much maligned, or however apparently ridiculous) whose merits he has never examined, and of whose very nature, history, and assumptions, he is most evidently ignorant. Mr. Walsh is either ashamed of this article now, or he will have plentiful reason to be ashamed of it hereafter. COOPER'S SWITZERLAND. _Sketches of Switzerland. By an American. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard._