change, bit by bit; and in the land of centralization they naturally turn to the Academy or to the Government for the necessary authority as in Germany reformers turn to the Government alone - as in the United States they turn to the Government after having failed to make any serious impression on authors or master printers. It is only a little while ago that it was sought in Congress to pass a bill imposing the American Philological Association's list of changes on the Government Printing-Office; and there is no telling when the measure may be brought up again. Only the other day we ourselves were offered a communication recommending that, having the opportunity to fashion the unfortunate Filipinos in our own image, we should teach their helpless children an English orthography which does not exist except in the above association's pious wish and the actual practice (more or less timid and partial) of its followers, largely librarians who shuffle off two letters from catalogue. All this is of paltry worth beside the freedom which is the real genius of the English language, which enriches it from all tongues, naturalizes at once what it borrows, asks no other authority for what is correct spelling or syntax than the best usage, makes the historical Dictionary like the Oxford the mirror and monument of a splendid linguistic development - the record of countless experiments, successes, failures,

Revivals, too, of unexpected change;

and has no fear that the purity of the English tongue or the peculiar quality of English verse can sustain any lasting injury from a spirit of innovation like that surveyed by M. Lebierre in France for the past thirty-five years, and ever at work among ourselves.

OF PORTRAITURE1

ALL the arts employed in portraiture break down somewhere. Who can put his finger infallibly upon the true bust of Cæsar? Is the Stratford bust or the Droeshout print more like Shakspere, or is neither a veracious presentment? Shall Houdon, Peale, or Stuart fix for us the lineaments of Washington? May we rest in Carpenter's oil painting of Lincoln, or in Marshall's engraving, or in Saint-Gaudens's Chicago statue? But with Lincoln we are already in the age of the daguerreotype and the photograph. Yet this only increases our perplexity, so numerous and diverse are the camera's reports. Bad posing and focussing distort and vulgarize; and then the man himself, sun-pictured at various ages, undergoes great changes of expression, takes on new lines of care and responsibility and sadness, from beardless becomes bearded. In the end, everybody forms a sort of composite image of the great statesman, and selects whatever print or photograph comes nearest to this abstraction.

Photography from life does, indeed, enable us to form unerring inferences about the subject's ap

1 From the Nation, November 7, 1904, vol. 78, p. 267.

pearance, at least in a general way- the fashion of the hair, for one thing; the size and shape of the nose, mouth, and ears; the space between the eyes; the character of the brows; yet each liable to correction for untrue planes, prints out of focus, and the maladroitness or trick of the printing. Retouching, Rembrandtesque lighting, conceal features essential to be known, or falsify the complexion. Deliberate flattery is the fortune of many a photographer; but with the best intention to be honest, he may and perhaps must fall short quite as often as he produces something authentic. In a rather extended comparison of photographs submitted by candidates for teachers in our public schools, when (we are speaking of women) there is every motive for heightening personal attractiveness, we have found the original usually better than her effigy. In fact, as was said by an old sea-captain of "fast sailers," to get ahead the camera needs "a great deal of assistance."

Perhaps that age is most fortunate when one artistic memorial finds universal acceptance with contemporaries, and determines the conception of posterity. Still, being one, it must needs be popularized, and then begins the divagation that lends so much instructiveness, through grave copying of copies, to a collection of portraits of any historical personage. His admirers who buy for their walls are influenced partly by their ideal, partly by the art of

the reproduction, content to have, if not the real hero, a worthy tribute of genius in whatever form, graphic or glyptic.

Let us suppose that such a collector or admirer wishes to procure the genuine Jean Jacques Rousseau. Perplexed by the multitude of representations

full-face and profile; bonneted, peruked, and bare-headed, - divisible under some half-dozen types, he seeks a clue to the labyrinth. To sum up, he finds the death-mask made by Houdon, who used it for numerous busts; the pastel portrait made from life in 1753, by Maurice Quentin de la Tour - the original now preserved in the Musée de Saint-Quentin; the replica from the same hand, made in 1764 and now in the Musée Rath at Geneva; the oil painting made by Allan Ramsay in London in 1766, now in the National Gallery in Edinburgh. The wax modèle in relief made by Isaac Grosset the elder at the same date, who knows what has become of it? It is not included in the list of this artist's works given in the “Dictionary of National Biography." These are the sole authoritative standards.

Confining ourselves to the two paintings, we remark that Ramsay's portrait begot grander and finer engravings than La Tour's. His own country was not unmindful of the prophet, but Rousseau was a veritable lion in England; and whereas La Tour's work was a labor of love, Ramsay painted by order