We are now flaying our friends and submitting to be flayed ourselves, every few years or months or days, by the aid of the trenchant sunbeam which performed the process for Marsyas.  All the world has to submit to it,—­kings and queens with the rest.  The monuments of Art and the face of Nature herself are treated in the same way.  We lift an impalpable scale from the surface of the Pyramids.  We slip off from the dome of St. Peter’s that other imponderable dome which fitted it so closely that it betrays every scratch on the original.  We skim off a thin, dry cuticle from the rapids of Niagara, and lay it on our unmoistened paper without breaking a bubble or losing a speck of foam.  We steal a landscape from its lawful owners, and defy the charge of dishonesty.  We skin the flints by the wayside, and nobody accuses us of meanness.

These miracles are being worked all around us so easily and so cheaply that most people have ceased to think of them as marvels.  There is a photographer established in every considerable village,—­nay, one may not unfrequently see a photographic ambulance standing at the wayside upon some vacant lot where it can squat unchallenged in the midst of burdock and plantain and apple-Peru, or making a long halt in the middle of a common by special permission of the “Selectmen.”

We must not forget the inestimable preciousness of the new Promethean gifts because they have become familiar.  Think first of the privilege we all possess now of preserving the lineaments and looks of those dear to us.

  “Blest be the art which can immortalize,”

said Cowper.  But remember how few painted portraits really give their subjects.  Recollect those wandering Thugs of Art whose murderous doings with the brush used frequently to involve whole families; who passed from one country tavern to another, eating and painting their way,—­feeding a week upon the landlord, another week upon the landlady, and two or three days apiece upon the children; as the walls of those hospitable edifices too frequently testify even to the present day.  Then see what faithful memorials of those whom we love and would remember are put into our hands by the new art, with the most trifling expenditure of time and money.

This new art is old enough already to have given us the portraits of infants who are now growing into adolescence.  By-and-by it will show every aspect of life in the same individual, from the earliest week to the last year of senility.  We are beginning to see what it will reveal.  Children grow into beauty and out of it.  The first line in the forehead, the first streak in the hair are chronicled without malice, but without extenuation.  The footprints of thought, of passion, of purpose are all treasured in these fossilized shadows.  Family-traits show themselves in early infancy, die out, and reappear.  Flitting moods which have escaped one pencil of sunbeams are caught by another.  Each new picture gives us a new aspect of our friend; we find he had not one face, but many.