Has photography dealt hardly with portrait-painting as a branch of art, or has it benefited it by weeding out the feeble?  The Memorial Exhibition will assist in determining.  It will, we hope, allow the best living painters in this department to be fully represented by the side of their predecessors.  We shall then see if the Inmans, Neagles, and Sullys are an extinct species, and if the ranks of their pupils have melted away before the cannon-like camera.  We cannot believe that the sun, always exaggerating perspective except when rectified by the stereoscope, and more or less falsifying light and shade by the chemical effect of different rays, is to be the only limner of faces.  Thus imperfect even in mechanical execution, it seems impossible that he should supersede future Vandycks.  As Webster used to say to young lawyers, there is plenty of room up stairs.  Painters may fearlessly aim to get above the sun.  Take one of Sully’s women and compare it with the smoothest print softened into inanity by the dots of the retoucher of negatives—­the representative of the element of art in the process.  A difference exists equivalent to that between brain and no brain.  No woman, “primp” herself for the sitting as she may, can present her soul to the dapper gentleman under the canopy of black velvet as Sully saw it.  She does not know herself, as reflected in her lineaments, as he did; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the knight of the tripod does not know her at all.

The same is true of John Neagle as a perpetuator of character with the pencil.  Men were his best subjects.  In individualizing them he has had no superior, if an equal, among American artists.  His finish was not always good, and his coloring for that reason occasionally crude.  In female heads he was less happy:  character-painters generally are.  Stuart’s women are equally defective, but in a rather different way, being hard and angular in drawing.

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England is determined not to shrink from the solution of the time-honored problem of the result of the meeting between an irresistible force and an impregnable target.  Her iron-clads have piled pellicle on pellicle of iron till two feet thick has become their normal shell.  Everything thinner has been punctured, and now an eighty-ton gun, to cost sixty thousand pounds, is getting ready to perforate that.  There must be a stopping-point for all this somewhere.  Perhaps the fate of armor afloat may soon be settled finally by the torpedo, as its efficiency on land was disposed of by the bullet, and the men-at-arms of the sea no longer lord it over hosts of wooden yeomanry.  Happy the nation that can look on with its hands firmly in its pockets while others lavish their treasure in seeking the new philosopher’s stone!

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Nero:  An Historical Play.  By W.W.  Story.  Edinburgh and London:  Wm. Blackwood & Sons; New York:  Scribner, Welford & Armstrong,