asking me about my terms, and less generous in remunerating me for my
services, than men. On the other hand, men, within my knowledge, are
decidedly vainer of their personal attractions, and more vexatiously
anxious to have them done full justice to on canvas, than women. Taking
both sexes together, I have found young people, for the most part, more
gentle, more reasonable, and more considerate than old. And, summing up,
in a general way, my experience of different ranks (which extends, let
me premise, all the way down from peers to publicans), I have met
with most of my formal and ungracious receptions among rich people of
uncertain social standing; the highest classes and the lowest among
my employers almost always contrive--in widely different ways, of
course--to make me feel at home as soon as I enter their houses.

The one great obstacle that I have to contend against in the practice
of my profession is not, as some persons may imagine, the difficulty
of making my sitters keep their heads still while I paint them, but
the difficulty of getting them to preserve the natural look and the
every-day peculiarities of dress and manner. People will assume
an expression, will brush up their hair, will correct any little
characteristic carelessness in their apparel--will, in short, when they
want to have their likenesses taken, look as if they were sitting for
their pictures. If I paint them under these artificial circumstances,
I fail, of course, to present them in their habitual aspect; and my
portrait, as a necessary consequence, disappoints everybody, the sitter
always included. When we wish to judge of a man's character by his
handwriting, we want his customary scrawl dashed off with his common
workaday pen, not his best small text traced laboriously with the finest
procurable crow-quill point. So it is with portrait-painting, which is,
after all, nothing but a right reading of the externals of character
recognisably presented to the view of others.