The Rogues' Gallery

— At the police headquarters in the city of New York there is a department known as the Hogues’ Gallery, where are preserved the counterfeit presentments of a large and continuous series of enforced lodgers. Counterfeit presentments, did I say ? I should rather have said counterfeit misrepresentments ; for the most of these photographs are grotesque caricatures of their originals, totally inexplicable, until you learn the intent of the sitters. These have to be held forcibly while a negative is secured ; yet as no one can chain the features of the face, many of the countenances recorded by the camera exhibit a curious variety of grimace, — mouths askew, scowls on the brow, and all facial distortions that a whispering Mephistopheles could suggest at one’s ear. This is done, not with a view to any dramatic impersonation whatsoever, hut for the purpose of spoiling the chance of a later identification through the memorial photograph, obtained under such difficulties. Necessarily, the detective who employs this touching souvenir as a means of recognition of his man has always to make allowance for the superactivity of countenance and expression in the photograph which he preserves.

Now, I think this mode of masking the features by a violent grimace exceedingly ingenious on the part of the Rogues, who may have their own roguish satisfaction — not altogether without a touch of the artist — in the number, contrariety, and perplexity of portraits produced from one original.

Not at all with a view to be cynical, I remark that I find the world at large not a whit more anxious for an exact delineation by any accurate photograph process. Precious rogues that we are, we are all quite willing to “sit” for something else than ourselves ; only here it is not grimace which is employed, but an assumption (often most innocently unconscious) of that which we esteem as the highest type of the magnanimous, the chivalrous, the generous, the altogether lovely in human nature.