The National Portrait Gallery. (Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.)—This volume comes
before us with no preface, date, or editor's name, and without saying whether it is the first of a series or complete in itself. We believe, however, that it has been published monthly in parts, and that future volumes may be expected at regular intervals, as long as sub- scribers are forthcoming. The present volume contains some twenty portraits and biographies ; we cannot guess upon what principle these have been chosen, for in the Church and State, as well as other high employments, several names of greater public importance might have been found than those of Mr. John Walter, M.P., Mr. W. H. Smith, M.P., and Mr. Morley Punshon. It is trao that some of these have the command of valuable influence. The portraits are done in chromo-lithography, and because of their permanence this is a step in the right direction. We suppose autotype would have been too expen- sive, it could hardly fail to be more satisfactory. Truly the colour appears to have been " laid on with a trowel; " the complexions and hair, to say nothing of the attire of all these twenty gentlemen, are here almost identical in tint, and that is a kind of yellowish brown, which, so far as we know, does not really belong to any of them. At any rate, the attempt to present the very distinctive characteristics of Sir Garnet Wolseley and Mr. Carlyle after this fashion should not have been made. Apart from the very unpleasant colour, some of the likenesses are fairly good ; those of Lord Granville, Mr. Smith, and Sir Stafford Northcoto are perhaps the best, the most conspicuous failures being those of Mr. Gladstone, Archbishop Tait, and Sir A. Cock- burn. The rough places are made smooth in some notable instances, as when the (shall we say ?) bourgeoisie of Mr. Punshon almost dis- appears. We don't know why Lord Dufferin wears the "Blue Ribbon." The plan of the writer of the letter-press appears to have been to make things agreeable all round, by means of the most liberal distribution of laudatory epithets to all sorts of people of the most varying opinions, and so winning the approval of their followers at any rate.
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