Curiously enough, the weakest illustrations under the régime he inaugurated so happily are those by the editor himself. Thackeray's designs to Lovel the Widower, and the one example by G. A. Sala in the first volume, link the new periodical with the past. They belong to the caricature type of illustrations which had been accepted by the British public as character-drawing. Like the 'Phiz' plates for Dickens's works, and many of John Leech's sketches, they have undoubtedly merit of a sort, but not if you consider them as pictures pure and simple. Later experience shows that an illustration to a story, which catches the spirit of the writer, and realises in another medium the characters he had imagined, may also be fine art—art as self-sufficient and as wholly beautiful as that of a Dürer wood-cut or a Rembrandt etching. The masterpieces of modern illustrations to fiction which the Cornhill Magazine contains would by themselves suffice to prove this argument up to the hilt. The collection of drawings chiefly by Millais, Walker, and Leighton, in a volume of carefully-printed impressions, from one hundred of the original wood-blocks, issued under the title of the Cornhill Gallery in 1864, may in time to come be prized as highly as Bible Wood-cuts, The Dance of Death, or the Liber Studiorum. It is true that the pictures aimed only to fulfil their actual purpose, and it may be argued, reasonably enough, that a picture which illustrates a story is for that very reason on a different level to a self-contained work—inspired solely by the delight of the artist in his subject. But, in their own way, they touched high-water mark. Upon one of Dürer's blocks he is said to have written in Latin, 'Better work did no man than this,' and on many a Cornhill design the same legend might have been truly inscribed.

It is true that most of the etchings and wood-cuts beside which they deserve to be ranked are untrammelled autograph work throughout, and that here the drawing done direct on the block was paraphrased by an engraver. Not always spoilt, sometimes (as even the draughtsman himself admitted), improved in part, but still with the impress of another personality added. And this argument might be extended to prove that an engraving by another craftsman can never be so interesting as an etching from a master's hand, or a block cut by its designer. Yet, without forcing such comparison, we may claim that the engravings in Once a Week, Good Words, and the Cornhill enriched English art to lasting purpose.

Although sets of the Cornhill Magazine are not difficult to procure, and a large number of people prize them in their libraries, yet by way of bringing together those scattered facts of interest which pertain to our subject, it may be as well to indicate briefly the principal contents of the first thirty-two volumes which cover the period to which this book is limited.

In 1860 we find six full-page illustrations to Lovel the Widower, three to The Four Georges, two to Roundabout Papers, all by Thackeray, to whom they are all formally attributed in the Cornhill Gallery. Possibly one, entirely unlike the style of the rest to The Four Georges, is from another hand—the fact that it is not included in the reprint seems to confirm this suspicion. Millais' first contributions included Unspoken Dialogue, 'Last Words,' and the beginning of the illustrations to Framley Parsonage, which he equalled often but never excelled. F. Sandys is represented by Legends of the Portent (i. p. 617), and Frederick Leighton by The Great God Pan (ii. p. 84) to Mrs. Browning's poem. Ariadne in Naxos, an outline-drawing in a decorative frame, is unsigned, and so strangely unlike the style of the magazine that it provokes curiosity.

In 1861 Thackeray started illustrating his serial story, The Adventures of Philip, but, after four full-page drawings, relinquished the task to Fred Walker, who at first re-drew Thackeray's compositions, but afterwards signed his work with the familiar 'F. W.' We may safely attribute eight solely to him. Millais continued his series of drawings to illustrate Framley Parsonage, and has besides one other, entitled Temptation (iii. p. 229). A series of studies of character, The Excursion Train, by C. H. Bennett, is a notable exception to the practice of the magazine, which printed all its 'pictures' on plate-paper apart from the text, the blocks in the text (always excepting the initial letters) being elsewhere limited to diagrams elucidating the matter and obviously removed from consideration as pictures. This year Doyle began those outline pictures of Society which attained so wide a popularity.

FREDERICK SANDYS

'CORNHILL MAGAZINE'
VOL. I. p. 62

LEGEND OF
THE PORTENT

FREDERICK SANDYS