The Cabinet Portrait - Gallery. Reproduced from photographs by W. and D.
Downey. Third Series. (Cassell and Co.)—This third series is as well executed and as interesting as its prede- cessors. There are thirty-six portraits, each accompanied by a few pages of letterpress. Naturally one compares such a series with the well-known volume of the Vanity Pair Album. The choice between the two is, whether one cares to have the face as it presents itself to the ordinary observer, or as it is interpreted by a skilful artist, who brings what he conceives to be its charac- teristics into prominence. Much may be std on both sides; all that we need be concerned about here is that the actual present- ments that we have in this volume are carefully given. We may mention among the portraits that seem to us particularly good :— Professor Henry Morley, Mr. L. Courtney, Mr. J. M. Barrie, Sir Sydney Waterlow, Sir William Thomson, Professor Blackie (born, we see, just a month before Lord Tennyson), Mr. Beerbohm Tree (who certainly looks an admirable Hamlet), and Mr. Diggle. We have no fault to find with the choice of subjects. Out of the thirty which remain—after setting aside the Queen, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, the Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, the Duke of Cambridge, and the Empress Eugenie—we have the following list :—Eminence, Political, Civil, or Social (in- cluding the champion lady lawn-tennis player), 11; Stage, 8; Literature and Science, 7; Art, the Army, Divinity, and Medi- cine, 1 each. But the distribution:is curious. The first division has many branches, so that the Stage, with its eight subjects, is easily ahead in popular interest, for such, we suppose, the choice represents.
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