CORRECT LIKENESS! ONLY A SHILLING! "ONLY a shilling, sir!-c'rect likeness, frame included!-done in one minute!" tographic portrait, went home astounded, and incontinently hanged himself in his studio. The example was not generally followed by his brethren; they bided their time, and ultimately reaped the reward of their patience and fortitude: what threatened at first to prove their ruin and annihilation, has proved instead their safety and inde finite multiplication. They took to photography, learned the collodion process, and, producing heads by the hundred a week, found their account in it. At first it was only the popular miniaturepainters-those whose exhibition gallery were the door-posts, and open entries of Oxford Street and the Strand-who did this; but gradually men of We defy any pedestrian to walk leisurely between the breakfast hour and sunset, along any frequented thoroughfare in London, without having the above brief sentence drummed upon the tympanum of his ear in a charming variety of tone and accent. Now it is vociferously announced with the gusto of an inventor who has just discovered an extraordinary secret, and is driven forth by some irresistible impulse to shout his Eureka in the streets; anon it is breathed into your ear in a kind of confidential whisper, by a man with unc-higher standing and greater pretensions began to tuous epidermis and a hooked nose, who holds in one hand a specimen, and with the other retains you by the button with the familiarity of an old acquaintance, and who, instead of saying "Done in one minute," says, "Dud id vod biddit;" and again it is bawled, like a costermonger's cry, in as matter-of-fact a way as though it were "taters three poun' tuppens." Sometimes the tariff is even lower than a shilling. Your “ c'rect likeness, frame included," is offered for sixpence; and in the galleries of art in Cowcross, Whitechapel, and Bethnal Green the figure is even halved again, and you may be done as low as threepence. Surely the depths of popular vanity and selfesteem were never so profoundly fathomed as they have been and still are by the photographic plummet. All the world has its correct likeness now, from the "oldest inhabitant" to the babe in long clothes. Of the two and a half millions of faces in London, it is likely that the odd half million would outnumber those who have never sat to the photographer's camera: how many have sat twice, thrice, ten times over, is a question not likely to be answered. Our own Betty, who is forty if she is a day, has been "done for sixpence' five times within our cognizance, and one can but guess what may be the case with Betties twenty years younger. do the same; some of them blended their old art with the new, but others abandoned the old altogether, and set about improving or developing the capabilities of the new. What is the case now? Go into the miniature-room of the Royal Academy, in this year of Grace '59, and see how many minia. ture painters exhibit, compared with the number who exhibited seven years ago. The fact that stares you in the face is just this: that photography has annihilated miniature-painting, with the exception of the very highest walk of that depart ment of art. People will not pay a high price for anything short of first-rate excellence, while lightpictures are to be had, for a few guineas at the utmost, surpassing in fidelity all the efforts of the painter's art, and wanting only in colour. It was the discovery of what are called positives on glass, and which made their appearance but a few years back, which created and fed the demand for popular photographs. There was a prejudice among skilled photographers against these productions, and they cried them down as unworthy of the profession; but they were faithful in point of likeness, they could be executed in two or three minutes, and consequently they were cheap. Cheap ness carried the day; they were produced by mil lions, and at this moment there are ten thousand makers of faces by this ready and simple mode. for ten that set about the business with pallet and brushes. The masses of the people, that is, the lower, middle, and the working classes, are the chief patrons of this style of art; and it is where the masses most abound that its professors are most plentiful. Along those thronged lines of route leading from the city towards the suburbs, in any direction, the popular photographers select their stations. It is in these places that the worker swarms in his hours of leisure, during the long summer evenings and on the Sunday afternoons. Sunday, therefore, in London, we are sorry to say, is the cheap photographer's grand day. On th day it is not at all unusual with him to do as much work, and turn as much money, as during the other six days of the week: then it is that he en gages an additional touter out of doors, and one or two additional assistants within. The touter penetrates the crowd, and picks up the servant girls, who can rarely resist his blandishments if It is on record-at any rate we remember read-they have a sixpence to spare. On a fine afternoon ing the tragedy in the "Times" newspaper-that the traffic is furious; the rival touters canvass one of the first miniature-painters who saw a pho- every passer-by, and unfortunate "subjects" are The entire aspect of the shop-world of London has undergone a material change since Mr. Archer invented the collodion process. The photographers' "cards" (which is the technical name for their show-boards) occupy at this moment, it is our opinion, taking the metropolis throughout, about as much space as the placards of the bill-sticker, with this notable difference, that they are always placed in the sight level, and it is next to impossible to miss one of them. There is a universal "great exhibition" of portraits always open-portraits of the great uncelebrated, done in lead-colour; and meanwhile the "cards" of the miniature painters, which used to line both sides of the way from Charing Cross to Aldgate, and from the Edgware Road to Fleet Ditch, have disappeared. The time-honoured inscription, "In this style, one guinea," has given place to an inscription tantamount to the shilling temptation quoted above. fought for, and dragged this way and that, like so much disputed property. Then sometimes comes the policeman to settle the dispute, or, by walking off with the disputants, to refer it to the arbitrement of the magistrates on the Monday. It is for the accommodation of the masses, too, that cheap photographs are taken by night. An American first introduced the night practice, by means of a peculiar light which he warranted as his own invention, but which rivals in trade were not slow to discover for themselves as soon as they witnessed its success. The night subjects are generally of a rough class, not much given to hypercriticism, or tender on the score of a blotch or two in background or drapery-which lenity is but a fair return for the convenience of being done cheap as dirt, up to eleven o'clock at night. Who are all these thousands of cheap photographers? and what are their antecedents? The answer to this question, we opine, would embrace a large and various description of men, and women too. Some of them, as already hinted, are cidevant miniature-painters; a round number of them are tradesmen who have failed in business; by no means a few are Jews; numbers more are artisans, clerks, and supernumeraries, who, wanting in regular employments, have taken to the facemaking trade in default of a better; others, again, are professional men unable to establish themselves in their professions, and others are foreign exiles. Among the women who practise the art, we know some who are widows with families, whom they thus support; and some who are journeymen's wives, who pursue it to eke out the unsatisfactory wages of their husbands. The truth is, that for the mere production of a positive picture on glass, the process is so easy that a child may master it, and the capital to be invested is so small, as to be within the reach of almost all ranks. Within a few minutes' walk of where we are now writing, there is a cobbler who supplements the labours of his lapstone by photographic experiments at sixpence a head; and a rag, bone, and grease collector, who not only does ditto, but, being an experimental philosopher, makes his own collodion. Besides the multitude of practitioners in London, and all the large towns and cities of the empire, there are a considerable army of them who travel the country in all directions. There is not a market-town, village, or hamlet, even in the remotest recesses of Wales, that has not been visited by the face-making photographer, and paid tribute to his art. Those who first explored the country districts reaped a capital harvest. The process was so wonderful, and the effect was so extraordinary, that they could command their own price; some of them literally coined money, and where they expected but a few days' employment, got stuck fast for months in the high tide of fortune-a state of things, however, which did not last very long. Another form of popular photography is that of the stereoscopic slides. These are now so cheap, that the stereoscope and a dozen slides may be bought for a few shillings. The demand for these is so immense as to support large establishments, and employ, it is said, nearly a million of capital. They are exhibited by hundreds of thousands in the shop windows, and embrace an endless variety of every imaginable subject. Portraits are comparatively few among them; but we have the Reverend Mr. Spurgeon and wife in their domestic retirement, another reverend gentleman and wife in the same blissful circumstances, and a few other celebrities. We have groups and conversation pictures-ghost scenes, for which the stereoscope is remarkably adapted-public buildings, exteriors and interiors, cities, towns, street scenes, coast scenes, dead game, fruit pieces, and landscapes innumerable. All that is rare and picturesque in England, Wales, and Scotland is brought home to the stereoscopist; we have everything noteworthy and historical in Syria, Palestine, Turkey, and Egypt; and, if report is to be relied on, we shall have, before the present year is out, veritable transcripts of scenery from India and China. The labour and the capital expended in the production of slides is something startling. We could refer to a travelling trio of friends who set out last year on a summer trip with the camera, who came home in the autumn loaded with negatives, and sold them at once for £2000. The stereoscopic publisher can afford a good price for copyright, for he has the advantage over all other publishers— his plates cannot be pirated successfully; they never wear out, but will print on to the crack of doom, and he need not print a single impression more than he has demand for. This stereoscope slide printing, by the way, is a business by itself, intrusted to men who understand enough of photography, and it need not be much, to do it successfully-and for the present is tolerably lucrative. Then a prodigious number of the slides are coloured, which being done by hand, adds from thirty to sixty per cent. to their value. The colouring is done in good part by females; young ladies do not object to the employment, and we know several thus engaged, who find it an agreeable mode of earning money. But if we are to look at the industrial side of the photographic art, we should know neither where to begin nor where to stop. The consumption of picture frames in London alone must be thousands daily; morocco cases, with gilded metal mats within, are hardly less numerous, which last article, we may notice in passing, has fallen by competition ninety per cent. in cost since the rise of photography. Then there are the paper flats for larger photographs-a new species of produc tion, but in demand literally by the ton. Then what shall be said of the lenses, which the opticians cannot make fast enough, and which cost from two to a hundred guineas each; of the cameras, ever undergoing some new improvement; of the standing machinery; and, lastly, not least but greatest item of all, of the chemicals? Who shall say how much gold and silver is literally spirited away in photographic operations? One item we will set down, because we have it on undeniable authority. A single firm has consumed, within the last twelve months, no less than a ton's weight, at the cost of £7000 for the raw metal, of silver, for the manufacture of nitrate of silver for photographic purposes. The whole stock was demanded and con sumed as fast as it was manufactured. What must be the number of the pictures produced, supposing cach to have required a single grain of the metal (and that would be a large average), to necessitate the consumption of a ton's weight of silver? And even the answer to this question would only give the pictorial results from the chemicals of a single manufacturing house. Photography, they say, is as yet but in its infancy: truly, it is a strapping babe, with a tolerable appetite for many things, the precious metals among the rest. What it is doomed to be, when it comes to years of discretion, remains to be seen. AMERICAN OYSTERS. THESE, and ice and granite, are among the great natural products of America. In Virginia alone it is estimated there are 1,580,000 acres of oysterbeds on the sea-coast, harbours, bays, rivers, and creeks; and allowing one-eighth of a bushel to every square yard, there are at least 784,000,000 bushels of oysters in the natural beds of Virginia. The tonnage employed in carrying these shell-fish from their natural beds amounts to not less than 100,000 tons, and the quantity carried away annually approximates 30,000,000 bushels. From one hundred and fifty to two hundred vessels, mostly schooners, are employed in carrying oysters to New Haven alone, the cargoes consisting of from two thousand to six thousand bushels. They are then replanted; where they remain from spring to fall, when they are taken up, opened, put into kegs or cans, which are afterward packed in boxes containing ice, and having a capacity equal to from twelve to twenty gallons each, and then shipped to the West and the South. This branch of the business is engrossed by some twenty firms, of whom at least one sends off daily from one thousand to fifteen hundred gallons; and so remunerative is the business that we are informed one firm has cleared in four years from 75,000 dollars to 100,000 dollars. Failure in the oyster trade is rarely known, and when ordinary sagacity is exercised, moderate success at least may generally be predicted. One branch of the trade, however, in which it is supposed a handsome profit could be realized, if properly managed, has not to my knowledge been attempted, and that is the exportation of oysters to Europe. The London oyster, as most persons know, is remarkable only for its disagreeable, coppery taste and high price. It is barely possible that, by long use of nauseous bivalves, the taste of our brethren of the "fast-anchored isle" may have become so perverted that at first they may reject our Absecoms and Maurice Coves as insipid; but the time will inevitably come when the American oyster will crown the board at the London coffeehouses, and the authors of future Noctes Ambrosiance will improvise songs in its praise. By means of steamships, oysters can be conveyed to Europe more rapidly than to some portions of the West, at which they are now delivered; and the trade will in time, it is quite probable, amount to more than a million of dollars.-Freedley's "Thousand Chances to make Money." A JUNE DAY AT STUDELEY PARK. OUR earliest impressions of Harrogate were derived from a draught of its sulphur waters, after they had been bottled, carried some three hundred miles, and kept half-corked for a few weeks. Their taste was then a sort of compound essence of nausea; and, inflicted as the draught had been as a punishment for a youthful offence, Harrogate, for many years, was associated in our minds with all that was repulsive and disgusting. Judge, then, of our altered feelings when, thirty years after the above occur rence, on repairing to the spot itself, we found that the place which had thus been vilified in our estimation, was one of the most agreeable of English watering. places; its air pure, bracing, and exhilarating; its hotels cheap and excellent to a degree;* its company simple and sociable, and even its waters by no means so bad as boyish experience had found them-some being pleasant to the palate, and all of them more or less beneficial to the system. We were willing on the spot to sign a recantation of the hard things we had thought of the place; and now that the railways issue such cheap return tickets, we may confidently promise a London reader who wants bracing air for a fortnight, that he cannot do better than spend that period in High Harrogate, especially during the month of September. Among the agreeable accompaniments of Har rogate are the numerous points for excursions which lie within an easy distance of it. Foremost in the list of these stands Studeley Park (containing the celebrated ruins of Fountains Abbey), situated some twelve miles from the Spa, and easily accessible by rail or car. It was on a lovely June day, warm and yet the heat tempered by a deliciously cool breeze, that we started for the purpose of exploring this spot, having heard its praises sounded by all the old stagers of our hotel. A short ride by rail, and a dash by car, through the quiet town of Ripon, upon whose streets a more than usual quantity of the dulness incidental to market towns seems to have settled, brought us, after a pleasant drive, to a fine avenue of trees crowned by an obelisk. It was but a short turn from this to the gate of Studeley Park, which now opened to the view, with an arti ficial lake beside it, terraced in the old-fashionel style. A fee of one shilling we found was demanded for our entrance, and this, although at first sight scarcely in keeping with our notion of a nobleman's demesne, (as Studeley Park is,) we were eventually reconciled to by seeing the perfect order in which it enabled the grounds to be kept, and the ample facilities in the way of guides which it insured. A very civil young man waited upon us, and ac commodated himself entirely to our wishes as to the rate of progress, allowing us to do the grounds in a leisurely way, instead of in that hot haste which too often marks the movements of guides in other places. Starting from the lake already noticed, the path If we are to have music here, let us have an old winds among a series of the tallest pines and firs musician in medieval costume, with sackbut or it was ever our lot to see. Between their open- dulcimer after the antique. But here is a scareings we catch presently a glimpse of a little rising crow figure, with a thin metal pipe on which he ground, diversified with timber, while at its base, blows an unmellifluous blast, quite out of keepdecked with a fair miniature temple, is a sheeting with the scene, and dissipating as they rise all of ornamental water cut into beautiful forms, and imaginative feelings and fancies. gleaming in a setting of verdant turf, like some bright plate-glass mirror. As we advance, we pause at each step to admire the Titanic members of the forest that we pass, tasselled pine, silver beech, or spreading elm, and, lost in tranquil enjoyment, gradually wind our way up a hill to a small summer-house upon its brow. The doors of this apartment the guide throws open with a dramatic air, that announces something of importance as awaiting us. And indeed it is a beautiful sight. Before us lies a charming valley, the rising grounds on each side well wooded, and a fair stream broken with a tiny cascade stealing gently along beside the old abbey, which is now seen, for the first time, about a mile off, its fine remains toned harmoniously down, and its tall tower rising in the air as bravely as if it were an erection of yesterday, instead of having for centuries been encountering the battling tempest and beating rain. Our path now turns to the abbey itself, by the side of the stream we have just named, on whose banks the monks in days of yore no doubt strolled to meditate on their breviary or to catch trout for the abbot's supper. We are reminded, as we listen to its gentle flow, of the different aspects of the abbey that have been reflected in its waters, and the latter seem with saddening emphasis to say, "Man may come, and man may go, But we flow on for ever." A little further on, and we are invited to quench our thirst at a fountain called Robin Hood's Well. As we are now in the county of that renowned freebooter, it seems quite possible (at least we are willing for the nonce to believe so) that he and Little John drank of its waters when they came to the abbey to get shrift from their father confessor for killing the king's deer. We cannot stop, however, to discuss the question, for a few steps further on, and we are abreast of Fountains Abbey itself. Turning away from this modern minstrel, with his shrill pi-pi-pi sounding in our ears, we descend a sloping ground, and pass by the mill (still in tolerable preservation,) which formerly ground the tithe sheaves paid to the abbey, and an old yew tree of great antiquity, beneath whose branches, for probably a thousand years, different generations of the children of Adam have sat. This remnant of the past is no bad preparative for the abbey itself, the door of which we now approach, a "mighty window, hollow in the centre," yawning over the gateway, with its stone tracery still entire. Meanwhile, as the guide fumbles for the key, we have time to recall to fancy the different groups that in days gone by have stood at this very entrance. Some lordly baron with his retainers or his lady, bent on pilgrimage; palmer with staff from Holy Land; papal legate on his easy-going mule; peasant and burgess of a type long gone by; and friars of every order and colour. Now all are gone, and a band of cockney tourists make summer holiday at the spot! But the door at last is opened, exposing to our view the main body of the church; no organ resounding through the lofty and massive columns, no beautiful stonework climbing, in imitation of forest tree, the lofty roof. On the contrary, the roof itself is naught but the blue cerulean, and the pavement is replaced with a carpet of green grass, sufficient to give the cows of the adjacent rectory ample pasturage. A feeling of strange silence pervades us as we wander down the deserted aisles; a silence still further heightened when we pace the adjoining crypt, so excellent in its preservation that we might almost expect to see the figure of some cowled brother flit across it. And so with all that re mains. We wander from chapter-house to refectory, ascend the reading gallery, visit the kitchen with its wide chimney, and the dungeon where perhaps some poor Lollard pined: all is desolation. The It lies on some lower ground on the opposite young ash springs from the ruined wall, and gay ⚫bank of the stream, right under our feet, stretch- wild flowers now wave where once perhaps costly ing into dimensions that show how important it hangings of arras adorned the guest-chamber. The inust have been in its palmy days of yore. We great point of interest is our Lady's Chapel, where shall descend to it presently by an adjoining pathare the graves of some of the old abbots, their inway; but just as we are rubbing up our old quota-Ah! could but one of those sleepers rise, how scriptions running back some six hundred years. tions, and looking at would he stare at all the changes under the sun that have taken place since his day. A popular transatlantic writer has given us an amusing account of an imaginary conversation held by him with an old folio, in the library of St. Pauls, in which the manners of the past time were made to contrast strangely with modern usages. In like manner, a dreamer in the old abbey here might easily conjure up a similar colloquy with one of the monks. Could the abbot, for instance, with his tomb here marked 1245, but open his lips again, of what strange times would his tongue discourse. It was during the long and useless reign of Henry III that he died; but doubtless he had lived in that of his predecessor John. Magna Charta and Runnymede must have formed the subject of discussion over the fire in the chapter-room, or the doings of our Lord the Pope, who in Henry's reign rode it roughshod over England, disgusting even ecclesiastics by his spoliation of benefices; or wild rumours in his day would come floating along about the Jews of Lincoln, who were in this reign plundered and trampled on for all sorts of imaginary crimes; or again, it might be that speculations were hazarded about the union that had just taken place between the kingdom of Cumberland and England; some O'Connell of the abbey, perhaps, prophesying all manner of disaster, and clamouring for ripale." 66 MODEL WORKMEN. I THINK I could make it very plain that even for the present life piety is the truest policy and the best possession. I believe, for instance, that the pious apprentice, who is prayerful and painstaking, will become a more accomplished artisan than his more infidel neighbour, who has nothing but selfinterest to stimulate, and nothing but his own cleverness to help him. And when that Christian apprentice becomes a journeyman, however bitter the world's prejudice against piety may be, I have no fear but that his Master in heaven will find for his servant employment on earth. The king of Babylon had no liking to Daniel's religion, but he could not rule his 127 provinces without Daniel's help. And the king of Egypt would have been glad to have Joseph's finance and Joseph's forethought, without Joseph's piety; but, as he could not get the one without the other, he put up with the piety for the sake of the skilful policy. And so, sooner or later, the Christian workman will make himself indispensable. If he won't do a job on Sunday, neither will he be tipsy or stupified with the previous day's debauch all Monday. If he will not tell a lie for his master, neither will he tell one to him; and surely that trade is bad where honesty is a bar to promotion. A real Christian is civil and obliging, whilst worldly men are apt to be saucy or sycophants by turns. A real Christian is a man of his word, a man who, though he should swear to his own hurt, changeth not; and he is a man whom you can count upon: and these are the men who are worth more than wages, and whom Some years ago, when visiting the Tower of London, we were struck with the emphasis of a text of scripture that had been engraved in one of the apartments, by some prisoner confined there centuries before. All the other objects in the room spoke of the flight of time, consisting as they did of articles that had once been in fashion, but had now fallen into disuse. That text of scripture, however, spake to us with the same freshness that it possessed for him who read it on that wall centuries before. To-day we are reminded of this incident; for now, as we stand at the foot of the old abbey tower, and read the words carved on it by its builder, "Honor and Glory to God, for ever and ever. Amen," we seem to recognise at least one permanent truth amidst much that is fluctuating. All around us bears the mark of transitoriness, but these words are as interest-wise employers would be sorry to let away. ing to us in the nineteenth century as they were in the thirteenth, when first inscribed on their mouldering ruins. We are just concluding our examination of the place, when a band of choral singers, who have come to the abbey on a holiday, suddenly raise a chant in the grounds. The music, softened by distance, rises and swells melodiously, and induces a train of thought deliciously soothing and in keeping with the spot still, solemnizing as the scene is, we cannot leave the abbey without feeling it is well that all this should be but a ruin. A few earnest men, it may be, groped here after the truth in much darkness; but, in the main, the building was devoted to a system erroneous and unscriptural. It is well, therefore, that the place is what it is-a ruin; and honest John Knox did not reason so badly after all, or so untruly to human nature, when he uttered his famous saying, "If you pull down the nest, the rooks will not return." On going out into the open air, opposite the burial-ground of the abbey, we are introduced by our guide to a famous echo. It is not quite so a good a one as that of which Paddy spoke, and which replied to his inquiry of "How do you do?" "Pretty well, I thank you;" still, it is not a bad one, and as a bystander of a poetic temperament cries out to the sleepers in the cemetery, "Sleep ye well?" the solitary word "Well!" that echoes back, sounds like an answer from the spirit land. Esteeming very highly the place which you hold in society, I am sanguine also as to the improvement of which your condition and yourselves are capable. When I remember how many of the painters and poets, the engineers and the linguists of modern Europe once were shoemakers and tailors, weavers and cotton-spinners, carpenters and blacksmiths, there is no degree of intelligence and mental elevation to which the man of industry may not aspire. And when I remember the abundant reading and sterling orthodoxy, the mellow wisdom and patriarchal piety, which I have encountered in Christian workmen elsewhere, men of a lofty presence and noble bearing, from whose withering glance vice and profanity skulked away, there is no height of personal or domestic piety to which any industrious man who now hears me may not hope to attain. I would be glad to show the better, because enduring benefits of true religion-its blessedness in sickness and old age, and at death, and in the world to come. But I pray you to begin, and begin forthwith. We live in a world of change and of death. There is but one way to secure a blessed immortality, and it is also the way to ensure a happy existence here below. Be at peace with God, through Jesus Christ, and you will find that the gospel is the riches of the poor, and godliness the greatest gain of the working-man.-Dr. James Hamilton. |