were once considered to be as great as the authors whose ideas they interpreted, time has wreaked revenge at last. If a boy happens to read for the first time Thackeray's _Vanity Fair_ with its original illustrations, the humour and pathos of the masterpiece lose half their power when the ridiculously feeble drawings confront him throughout the book. This is not the case with Millais' illustrations to Trollope, or those by Fred Walker to Thackeray. The costume may appear grotesque, but the men and women are vital, and as real in the picture as in the literature. Lacking the virility of Hogarth, or the coarse animal vigour of Rowlandson, these caricaturists kept one eye on the fashion-book and one on the grotesque. It was 'cumeelfo' to depict the English maiden a colourless vapid nonentity, to make the villain look villainous, and the benevolent middle-aged person imbecile. Accidental deformities and vulgar personal defects were deemed worthy themes for laughter. The fat boy in _Pickwick_, the fat Joe Sedley in _Vanity Fair_, the _Marchioness and Dick Swiveller_, the _Quilps' Tea-Party_, and the rest, all belong to the order of humour that survives to-day in the 'knockabout artists,' or the 'sketch' performances at second-rate music-halls. Even the much-belauded _Fagin in the Condemned Cell_ appears a trite and ineffective bit of low melodrama to-day. We know the oft-repeated story of the artist's despondency, his failure to realise an attitude to express Fagin's despair, and how as he caught sight of his own face in the glass he saw that he himself, a draughtsman troubled by a subject, was the very model for one about to be hanged. All the personality of anecdote and the sentimental log-rolling which gathered round the pictures, that by chance were associated with a series of masterpieces in fiction, no longer fascinate us. We recognise the power of the writers, but wish in our hearts that they had never been 'illustrated,' or if so, that they had enjoyed the good fortune which belongs to the novelists of the sixties. But to refuse to endorse the verdict of earlier critics does not imply that there was no merit in these designs, but merely that their illustrators must be classed for the most part (Leech least of all) with the exaggerators--those who aimed at the grotesque--with Gilray or Baxter, the creator of _Ally Sloper_, and not with true satirists like Hogarth or Charles Keene, who worked in ways that are pre-eminently masterly, even if you disregard the humorous element in their designs.