PHOTOGRAPHIC "GLIMPSES OF THE MOON."
Professor Phillips, than whom Endymion was not a more fervent admirer of the moon, has succeeded in inducing her, not merely to sit for her portrait, but even to paint it. When
"His great bright eye most silently
Up to the moon is cast,"
we may be sure that
"Right graciously
She looketh down on him,"
since she allows him to carry away so many softened images of her charms. For other men she exists only in apogee or in perigee, but he possesses her also in effigy, and can contemplate her at his leisure, when her face is "gone from the gaze" of ordinary mortals. Nevertheless he intends, with a liberality that does him honour, to make his fellow men partners of his good fortune, and has therefore entrusted her relative, and namesake, the late eminent printseller of Threadneedle Street, with the preparation of engravings from the aforesaid photographs. Punch is happy to present the world with a prospectus of these engravings, which are three in number. The first depicts her as she appeared on her "conjunction with Jupiter." She is attired in her bridal dress, a robe of white aërophane, spangled with stars; Jupiter is just stepping forward to "endow her with his ring;" and Charles's Wain waits in the background to convey the happy couple to their destination. The second picture is evidently meant to be a companion to the first, for in it she is represented on the wane, whilst the celestial Bootes, who has been holding the horses' heads, is once more putting the ribbons into the hand of Charles.
In the last plate of the series, the "expression of her features," (as was said of the young lady who wore a wreath of roses) is "more thoughtful than before," and we scarcely need to be told by the accompanying letterpress, that she has just been reading in the afternoon's Sun an account of the difficulties by which her beloved brother, the Emperor of China, is surrounded.