A few months ago an interesting find was made in London—some old letters of Gainsborough's which had not seen the light before. In one of these letters there was a revelation—a revelation whichⒶalteration in the MS struck me forcibly. It exposed the fact that when a lady of quality sat for her portrait in that day, she invented a costume for the occasion; and she made it as fine and showy and beautiful and outlandish and theatrical as she could. The letter referred to is from Gainsborough to a titled lady who is dissatisfied with her portrait—her friendsⒶalteration in the MS thinkⒶalteration in the MS it does not look like her. The artist complains that an unusual dress is a disguise, and that a lady can not look much like herself in it; and that this condemned portrait of her ladyship would be recognizable by her friends as a good one if it were clothed as they have been used to seeing her clothed.

The artist was clearly right; an unaccustomed dress makes a very great change in a person. You have noticed this in private theatricals. WeⒶalteration in the MS have great difficulty in recognizing our young friends when they are dressed up in the bloomy costumes of Henry VIII's time or Marie Antoinette's.

And so at last we have found out why it is that our English ancestors of a century or so ago all look like foreigners. It is their clothes. We are not used to those clothes, and so the people in them do not look [begin page 436] as they ought to look—they are misrepresented to us. If those people could appear before us dressed as we ourselves are dressed, we should see them truly for the first time; they would then have a native and natural look, a friendly look, and we should see at once that they are blood kin to us, and not strangers and foreigners. Shakspeare, dressed as he ought to be dressed, would look Shakspeare, and cease to be a melon-headed and characterless Italian frump.

After thinking these things over, it occurred to me that it would be a benefaction to the world if I could enable it to seeⒶemendation its historic idols undistorted, unfalsified, for once, see them looking their true selves, and natural; and I perceived that this desirable thing could be done by dressing them down to date, clothing them as they would be clothed if they were now with us and moving about in the society which would be theirs—that of the Queen, and the President, and Mr. Gladstone, and Prince Bismarck, and Ibsen, and the poet laureate and the rest. So I copied several of the authentic great portraits—copied them exactly, in all details of face, form, feature, expression, attitude, but abolished their misinforming costumes and put upon them the truth-conveying familiar clothes of our own day. The result was surprising. Even to me, who expected much.

To me Adam had never appealed—at least never to my heart; never in any warm and sympathetic way; never as his fatherhood should appeal to his child; for I was not used to his skins and his fig-leaves, and they made him a stranger to me, and cold. But as soon as I had put upon his portrait the clothes which he would wear to-day in the street or in the park, he was a different man, and I loved him. My whole heart went out to him. I saw the real Adam for the first time, and the long dormant feeling of kinship rose powerfully in me, and I could not look upon the portrait with dry eyes.

The portrait from which I made my copy is the one in the collection of his HolinessⒶalteration in the MS the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, and is the only one now in existence which was taken from life. The one in the Vatican, held during many ages to be authentic, has within our time been discovered to be only a copy of the original above referred to.