PORTRAIT PAINTING.
The good portrait painter always flatters; for it is his business, not, indeed, to alter and amend features, complexion, or mien, but to select and fix (which it demands genius and sense to do) the best appearance which these ever do wear. Happy the creature of sense and passion who has always with him that self which he could take pleasure in contemplating! Happy—to pass graver considerations—the fair one whose countenance continues as youthful as her attire! When Queen Elizabeth's wrinkles waxed deep and many, it is reported that an unfortunate master of the mint incurred disgrace by a too faithful shilling; the die was broken, and only one mutilated impression is now in existence. Her maids of honour took the hint, and were thenceforth careful that no fragment of looking-glass should remain in any room of the palace. In fact, the lion-hearted lady had not heart to look herself in the face for the last twenty years of her life; but we nowhere learn that she quarrelled with Holbein's portraitures of her youth, or those of her stately prime of viraginity by De Heere and Zucchero.
He who has "neither done things worthy to be written, nor written things worthy to be read," takes the trouble of transmitting his portrait to posterity to very little purpose. If the picture be a bad one, it will soon find its way to the garret; if good, as a work of art, it will perpetuate the fame, probably the name, indeed, of the artist alone. These are the obscurorum virorum imagines which, as Walpole said, "are christened commonly in galleries, like children at the Foundling Hospital, by chance"—Q. Rev.