Of course I know the cry is raised that the public will have those wax productions; but as one of the public I have not yet had my own likeness taken quite right. For instance, in repose, I hang my head on one side, and I have always been made to hold it straight up, like a soldier at 'attention.' Again, my nose is neither of a Greek nor Roman caste, and yet I never do get that nose put in as I see it in a mirror, or as its humpy shadow is cast upon the wall; or, as a gentleman once closed up a wordy, if not very convincing number of reasons against my having the qualities to make a poet, painter, or passable labourer, by exclaiming, 'Why, just look at your nose; did you ever know a clever man with a nose like that?' This photographed nose of mine has afforded me and others some amusement; sometimes it has been so refined that I fell to reviling nature for being so far inferior to the artist who finished it off so well. Once it came home a splendid Roman, with the light upon it so intensified by pencil-work that it stood out in bold enough relief to have won a Waterloo, if big noses could have done that. I have one portrait, which I am keeping to leave to posterity: it is so Byronic and spiritual that future young ladies will no longer wonder why my wife married me. This refined likeness and my love-songs together ought to do the trick. Yet I have some photographs very near perfection: one representing my two little daughters, done by Tunny. Professor John Ruskin writes: 'The face of the child on the spectator's right hand is the loveliest in expression I ever saw in a photograph.' Also some by my friend Mr. John Foster[5] of Coldstream cattle-pieces, and landscapes breathing of balmy atmospheric effect. He gets up to work outside at three o'clock on summer mornings, the hour when nature is like a blushing virgin, all dewy loveliness and purity. In France and England there is a school rising, who with the brush are trying to compete with the camera--_the Impressionists_, who, along with the camera, are yet fated to produce a great revolution in art. They aim at giving the impression, effect, or sensation of an instantaneous action or emotion or phase; not the phase exactly, but the swift impression which it leaves upon the mind of the spectator, with form, as it were--that is, with paints and brushes striving to embody the soul of nature, and when the two are joined the result will be _perfection_.