decessors. 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.

* * * * *

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 the