The Agee of Female Beauty is a capital idea for
a picture- book ; but, instead of showing us one example of feminine cha- racter under all the various aspects that age, education, and cir- cumstances would produce at each successive stage of life, we have a medley of ill-assorted and not very interesting faces, ac- companied rather than illustrated by verses and tales, only in- directly tending to elucidate the different phases of woman's life. Miss FANNY CORBAU% launches the infant on the stream of time, in a cradle-shell, with a troop of attendant spirits hovering over the little sleeper; and BARRY CORNWALL wakes a strain prophetic of her future career. Other painters and poets then present to us other heroines, in whose fate they would in- terest us : but we look in vain in the pictured faces for the cha- racter developed in the narratives. ROCHARD'S " Maiden" is not eminently loveable; and CHALON'S " Coquette "—notw ithstand in g the string of hearts that she wears as the American warriors do the scalps of the slain—seems much less a coquette than his "Bride—who, to tell the truth, looks too bold for her situa- tion; and "the Mother," by Miss CoatiAux, has the air of a morning visiter to the "lying-in-room." The intense delight, the rapturous fondness, with which a mother gazes on her first-born, is not depicted in this handsome-featured face, with a com- placent look vacant of meaning. Mrs. NORTON, inspired by some more powerful impression than this picture would produce, has told a tale of a wife and a mother's sorrows, with the simple pathos that belongs to suffering alone : the story may be fiction, but the incidents and feelings are evidently heart-felt. "The Widow," by JOHN WRIGHT, is at ones the most real and lovely picture of the series : it is a sweet girlish face, with a retrospective glance of such mild sorrow that we may augur a second husband in prospect, and some little playfellows for the noble boy she clasps. The unaffected style of this portrait, so true to nature and so genuine in character, is most refreshing after the meretri- cious mannerism of the flimsy Leeks that abound in these pat- tern-books of painter's beauties.
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