This will be easily understood, if we reflect that here is the point where more muscles of expression converge than at any other.  From above comes the elevator of the angle of the mouth; from the region of the cheek-bone slant downwards the two zygomatics, which carry the angle outwards and upwards; from behind comes the buccinator, or trumpeter’s muscle, which simply widens the mouth by drawing the corners straight outward; from below, the depressor of the angle; not to add a seventh, sometimes well marked,—­the “laughing muscle” of Santorini.  Within the narrow circle where these muscles meet the ring of muscular fibres surrounding the mouth the battles of the soul record their varying fortunes and results.  This is the “noeud vital”—­to borrow Flourens’s expression with reference to a nervous centre,—­the vital knot of expression.  Here we may read the victories and defeats, the force, the weakness, the hardness, the sweetness of a character.  Here is the nest of that feeble fowl, self-consciousness, whose brood strays at large over all the features.

If you wish to see the very look your friend wore when his portrait was taken, let not the finishing artist’s pencil intrude within the circle of the vital knot of expression.

We have learned many curious facts from photographic portraits which we were slow to learn from faces.  One is the great number of aspects belonging to each countenance with which we are familiar.  Sometimes, in looking at a portrait, it seems to us that this is just the face we know, and that it is always thus.  But again another view shows us a wholly different aspect, and yet as absolutely characteristic as the first; and a third and a fourth convince us that our friend was not one, but many, in outward appearance, as in the mental and emotional shapes by which his inner nature made itself known to us.

Another point which must have struck everybody who has studied photographic portraits is the family likeness that shows itself throughout a whole wide connection.  We notice it more readily than in life, from the fact that we bring many of these family-portraits together and study them more at our ease.  There is something in the face that corresponds to tone in the voice,—­recognizable, not capable of description; and this kind of resemblance in the faces of kindred we may observe, though the features are unlike.  But the features themselves are wonderfully tenacious of their old patterns.  The Prince of Wales is getting to look like George III.  We noticed it when he was in this country; we see it more plainly in his recent photographs.  Governor Endicott’s features have come straight down to some of his descendants in the present day.  There is a dimpled chin which runs through one family connection we have studied, and a certain form of lip which belongs to another.  As our cheval de bataille stands ready saddled and bridled for us just now, we must indulge ourselves