author prefixed,
may be found to bear very high prices indeed. An autograph of
Shakespeare has been sold of late for considerably more than an hundred
guineas. What price would some early edition of his works bear, with
his likeness in calotype fronting the title? Corporations and colleges,
nay, courts and governments, would outbid one another in the purchase.
Or what would we not give to be permitted to look even on a copy of the
_Paradise Lost_ with a calotype portrait of the poet in front--serenely
placid in blindness and adversity, solacing himself, with upturned
though sightless eyes, amid the sublime visions of the ideal world?
How deep the interest which would attach to a copy of Clarendon's
_History of the Civil War_, with calotypes of all the more remarkable
personages who figured in that very remarkable time--Charles, Cromwell,
Laud, Henderson, Hampden, Strafford, Falkland, and Selden,--and with
these the Wallers and Miltons and Cowleys, their contemporaries and
coadjutors! The history of the Reform Bill could still be illustrated
after this manner; so also could the history of Roman Catholic
Emancipation in Ireland, and the history of our Church Question in
Scotland. Even in this department--the department of historic
illustrations--we anticipate much and interesting employment for the
photographer.

We have two well-marked drawings before us, in which we recognise
the capabilities of the art for producing pictures of composition.
They are _tableaux vivants_ transferred by the calotype. In the
one[Footnote: See Frontispiece] a bonneted mechanic rests over his
mallet on a tombstone--his one arm bared above his elbow; the other
wrapped up in the well-indicated shirt folds, and resting on a piece
of grotesque sculpture. There is a powerful sun; the somewhat
rigid folds in the dress of coarse stuff are well marked; one half
the face is in deep shade, the other in strong light; the churchyard
wall throws a broad shadow behind, while in the foreground there is a
gracefully chequered breadth of intermingled dark and light in the
form of a mass of rank grass and foliage. Had an old thin man of
striking figure and features been selected, and some study-worn
scholar introduced in front of him, the result would have been a
design ready for the engraver when employed in illustrating the
_Old Mortality_ of Sir Walter. The other drawing presents a
_tableau vivant_ on a larger scale, and of a much deeper interest.
It for