One peculiarity of my present way of life is, that it brings me into contact with all sorts of characters.  I almost feel, by this time, as if I had painted every civilized variety of the human race.  Upon the whole, my experience of the world, rough as it has been, has not taught me to think unkindly of my fellow-creatures.  I have certainly received such treatment at the hands of some of my sitters as I could not describe without saddening and shocking any kind-hearted reader; but, taking one year and one place with another, I have cause to remember with gratitude and respect—­sometimes even with friendship and affection—­a very large proportion of the numerous persons who have employed me.

Some of the results of my experience are curious in a moral point of view.  For example, I have found women almost uniformly less delicate in 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 recognizably presented to the view of others.