There is wisdom (some have hinted to me) in preferring a card to a sheet of paper; not only because “I promise to pay” might possibly be written ab extra over one’s signature, but also because (and far more probably) any special “fad,” political, social, or religious, might be added above—­to all seeming—­your written approbation:  e.g., I was told in America that my autographed opinion in favour of Unitarianism had been so seen at Boston.  Some zealots for a “cause” even go so far as that.  My safe course is to write “the handwriting of so-and-so,” where from total ignorance of my correspondent I cannot honestly say “I am truly yours.”

Other forms of authorial homage are to be met with in the way of complimentary photographs, and oil or water-colour portraits.  Like all other book celebrities, I have had to stand for minutes or sit for days, dozens of times; and seeing that, wherever I have been on my Reading Tours, on this side of the Atlantic or the other, photographic “artists” have continually “solicited the honour,” the result has been that I used to keep “a book of horrors,” proving how variously and oftentimes how vulgarly one’s features come out when the impartial sun portrays them.  As with the contradictory critiques about one’s writings, so also is it with the conflicting apparitions of comeliness or ugliness in the heliotyped exploits of different—­some of them indifferent—­photographers.  Several, however, have succeeded well with me; as Sarony in New York, Elliott & Fry of Baker Street and Brighton, Negretti & Zambra at the Crystal Palace, and divers others; but one need not reckon up “our failures,” as Brummell’s valet has it.

As to the several oil portraitures of me, there is extant a splendid full-length of myself and my brother Dan, with large frilled collars and the many-buttoned suits of the day, when we were severally ten and nine years old, now hanging at Albury, painted by my great-uncle, Arthur William Devis, the celebrated historical painter:  this has been exhibited among works of the British old masters in Pall Mall.  Also, there is one by T.W.  Guillod, in my phase as an author at twenty-seven; another is by the older Pickersgill, so dark and lacking in Caucasian comeliness that the engraving therefrom in one of my books makes me look like a nigger, insomuch that some Abolitionists claimed me as all the more their favourite for my black blood!  On the other hand, Mr. Edgar Williams has made me much too florid; while recently that rising young artist, Alfred Hartley, has caught my true likeness, and has depicted me aptly and well, as may now be seen in the picture-gallery of the Crystal Palace.  Then Mr. Willert Beale (Walter Maynard by literary nom de pinceau et de plume, for he is both a painter and an author) has lately portrayed me in crayons, life-sized, an unmistakable likeness; and years ago Monsieur Rochard, in a large water-coloured drawing, made me look very French, quite a petit-maitre, in which disguise I was engraved for some book of mine:  all the above, except Rochard’s, having been done complimentarily.  In America Mr. Pettit’s life-sized oil portrait is the most noticeable.