corner table with pen and
ink, and flatteringly requested an autograph for each of her 100 guests!
of course, even this was graciously conceded,--though rather too much of
a good thing, I thought.

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 ther