In another feature it resembled _Punch_ more than any previous periodical. In _The London Charivari_ many of the pictures have always been inserted quite independently of the text. Some have a title, and some a brief scrap of dialogue to explain their story; but the picture is not there to elucidate the anecdote, so much as the title, or fragment of conversation, helps to elucidate the picture. Unless an engraving be from a painting, or a topographical view, the rule in English magazines then, as now, is that it must illustrate the text. This is not the place to record an appreciation of the thorough and consistent way in which the older illustrators set about the work of reiterating the obvious incident, depicting for all eyes to see what the author had suggested in his text already, for it is evident that a design untrammelled by any fixed programme ought to allow the artist more play for his fancy. Nevertheless, the less frequent illustrations to its serial fiction are well up to the level of those practically independent of the text. In _Once a Week_ there are dozens of pictures which are evidently purely the invention of the draughtsman. That a modest little poem, written to order usually, satisfies the conventions of established precedent, need not be taken as evidence that traverses the argument. _Once a Week_ ranked its illustrators as important as its authors, which is clearly an ideal method for an illustrated periodical to observe. To write up to pictures has often been attempted; were not _The Pickwick Papers_ begun in this way? But the author soon reversed the situation, and once more put the artist in a subordinate place. It is curious to observe that readers of light literature had been satisfied previously with a very conventional type of illustration. For, granting all sorts of qualities to those pictures by Cruikshank, 'Phiz,' and Thackeray, which illustrated the Dickens, Ainsworth, Lever, and Thackeray novels, you can hardly refer the source of their inspiration to nature, however remotely. Their purpose seems to have been caricature rather than character-drawing, sentimentality in place of sentiment, melodrama in lieu of mystery, broad farce instead of humour. These aims were accomplished in masterly fashion, perhaps; but is there a single illustration by Cruikshank, 'Phiz,' Thackeray, or even John Leech, which tempts us to linger and return again and again purely for its art? Its 'drawing' is often slipshod, and never infused by the perception of physical beauty that the Greeks embodied as their ideal, that ideal which the illustrators of _Once a Week_, especially Walker, revived soon after this date. Nor are they inspired by the symbolists' regard for nature, which attracted the 'primitives' of the Middle Ages, and their legitimate followers the pre-Raphaelites. Indeed, as you study the so-called 'immortal' designs which illustrate the early Victorian novels, you feel that if many of the artists