The Sun.
London, England, 1857-04-27 00:00:00

LIVING CELEBRITIES.

PHOTOGRAPHED BY MESSRS. lIIALTLL AND POLY-
BLANK. NOS. I. TO XII.
A dozen of these wonderful Portraits have now
made their appearance. And they appear, by their
marvellous beauty as woks of Art, and stilf more
! by their marvellous truthfulness and exactitude :,s
copies of Nature, to demand from us some more.
than usually emphatic expression of our very sin-
cere and unaffected admiration. It.is their mead.
It is their due. They are—we repeat—wonderful.
They are literally like ,Shadows in the Glass ( f
Twelve of our "Living Celebrities." The actual
reflections of the bodily appearance of these twelve
eminent men—to a line, to a shade, to a hair. In-
teresting now that they are still moving and
breathing among us. How interesting when, in
Lheitiicseeirofena-ure, they shill have passed away
an7l tidies shell he scanned by posterity,
and not merely by their contemporaries !
Fancy looking over a collection of naull and
Polyblank Photographs of the age, not of Victoria,
but of Anne or Elizabeth. Examining in succes-
sion shadows in, the grass "horn the very life," of
pale little lameter Pope ; of be-wigged and be-
scented Congreve ; of Swift, with a face all a-flame
with passion a. cl genius ; and Addison, with his
flushed more by wine than by emotion ! Or better
still, turning over prints taken by the sunbeant from
the actually " i elleete I features" of burly' Ben; of
bearded Raleigh, with his cap a-wry and a feather in
it ; of BacoA, looking wisdom out of his astute eyes ;
of Sidney, the smooth-checked hero of the boudoir
and the baetle-field ; and " best beautiful " of all,
the glorious c untenance, the veritable eyes, brow,
mouth, mothtsche, even the dimple of laughter
near the lips of handsome Will Shakspere ! 'Fancy
that. Well—after times may look back to some of
these faces with a kindred iutere-t as to faithful
limnings of men eminent in their way in the Age
of Victoria. We don't pay any one of these gentle-
men the preposterous compliment of likening them
in any way to Popes or Shaksperes. But we do
assert that these photographic portraits of them are
deeply and peculiarly interesting now that they
themselves are " Living Celebrities," and that they
will be still more wonderfully interesting when in
the eoutee of events they shall, alas ! have b, come
every one of them "Dead Celebrities ! " They have
already done their best themselves to immortalise
their " Names." The Messrs. Maull and Poly-
blank have now in turn done their best to perpe-
tuate their "Features." How attractive (even
during their lifetime) the series has been rendereii
by the very .diversity of the collection, the subjects
chosen for it sufficiently indicate in he mere enu-
meration. Here is the Cuvier of his time—Pro-
fessor Richard Owen, a perfect master of Anatomy.
Here is Babington Macaulay, the Tacitus and Gib-
hon of our generation. Here is England's, the
World's Engineer Robert Stephenson. era
John Roebuck, the "Dissenting Minister " of the
House of Commons. Here is Edward Baily, the
Sculptor of Eve, who through that Eve has
given us a glimpse of Paradise. Here is Sammi
Warren, the Watcher by the Deathbed in that
weird " Diary of a Physician"—the keen and
caustic Satirist of "Ten Thousand a Year." Here
is the learned Master of the Mint, Professor Gra-
ham. Here Edward Ward, one of the most youthful,
one of the most gifted, and one of the most popular
of our Royal Academicians. Here is the wise and
witty Lord Chief Justice of England, John Lord.
Campbell. Here George Cruiksimak, the Hogarth
of the Etching Needle, the Prince of Caricaturists.
Here (the latest of these all but miraculous sun-
pictures) Rowland Hill, the Author of the Penny
Postage, and, therefore as such, Everybody's
Benefactor. Twelve undoubted "Living Celebri-
ties." The very men themselves looking out
upon us vividly and life-like from the paper under
our hand--as vividly as they might look in upon us
from the threshold—framed in the doorway. We
long to see added to the list of "Living Celebri-
ties "in this really exquisite collection of Photo-
graphic Portraits—great names like those, for ex-
ample of Charles Dickens, and Buiwer Lytton, and
Alfred Tennyson, and Henry Brougham, and
William Thackeray. We await their aippe'arance—
and while doing so, we wish cordial success to the
enterprise, the ingenious and remarkable enterprise
of the Messrs. Maull and Polyblank.