I may now add, that a convex mirror in its place, i.e. so hung as to reflect distant objects only, and never come in contact with the face, is a pretty ornament. There is something dainty and amusing in seeing the liliputian world all alive and changing, moving across the convex surface, as one enjoys an ingenious mechanical toy, clock, or money-box, which nods at you, or crows, or what not. When a child, I held it a great and dreamy delight to walk about the floor gazing through a diminishing glass, and try now and again to run down the little hollows in the carpet of my father's painting-room. Van Eyck is fond of depicting a convex mirror in his gravest pictures, and its inly-pictured reflections carry the spectator oddly into Van Eyck's time like a dream within a dream, as you seem to catch the movement of windows or trees or seated men behind you, being really for the moment in that room wherein the Virgin sits and rocks her Child.

If introduced at all in our rooms, this convex mirror must not be regarded as a looking-glass, of which it possesses no qualification, but simply as an ingenious toy which sets its little panorama going for our mirth, and sometimes redoubles a ray of light.