Note A — PART I.
Reading edition
To estimate the comparative merits of successive Exhibitions is always to me a difficult matter. The sentence in the text expresses what I felt about the present Academy show while I was in the rooms and as I began writing; but, on treating of the pictures individually, I so often have to say that some painter is this year quite at his best that I infer the display of 1868 may probably be fully as good as that of 1867. I leave the text, however, unaltered, as faithful to a general impression.