It is needless to say much about the Vanity Fair
Album, Seven- teenth Series. (Vanity Fair Office.)—The artists whose names are familiar as contributors to these volumes still (matinee at work, and still exhibit their usual characteristics. It would be invidious to indicate a preferences. Indeed, their merits, and what we cannot but consider their faults, have a curious resemblance. It is still the fact, as we have noticed it to be the fact before, that some of the portraits are likenesses and some are caricatures ; nor can we discern now, any more than we have been able to discern before, why some should be the one and some the other, except it be that to "them that have," in good looks there is given. Celebrities, of coarse, are not produced in sufficient numbers to satisfy the weekly demand of Vanity Fair ; hence there is not one person here depicted of the first rank, and some are almost absolutely un- known outside the narrow circle of what is called or calls itself "Society." This series of portraits, however, really possesses the historical value which is claimed for it. This can hardly be said to belong to the judgments, social, political, and literary, which accom- pany them. The verdicts of "Vanity Fair" mast, of course, be pervaded with the genius loci, and that, unless the place is very much changed from the days of Christian and Faithful, is not the spirit of just judgment. On morals, indeed, it does not often claim to pronounce ; • but now and then it has something to say about scholarship, and does not qaite hit the mark.
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