Without forcing the theory too far, it may be admitted that the idea of _Once a Week_ owes more to these serial novels than to any previous enterprise. Be that as it may, the plan of the magazine, as we find in a postscript (to vol. i.), was at once 'ratified by popular acceptance.' Further, its publishers admit that its circulation was adequate and its commercial success established, after only thirty-six numbers had appeared. It is no new thing for the early numbers of magazines and papers to contain glowing accounts of their phenomenal circulation; but, in this case, there can be no doubt that the self-congratulation is both well deserved and genuine. To _Once a Week_ may be accorded the merit of initiating a new type of periodical which has survived with trifling changes until to-day. Its recognition of 'fiction' and 'pictures,' as the chief items in its programme, has been followed by a hundred others; but the editing, which made it readable as well as artistic, is a secret that many of its imitators failed to understand. Although _A Good Fight_ (afterwards rewritten and entitled _The Cloister and the Hearth_) is the only novel within its pages that has since assumed classic rank, yet the average of its art--good as it was--is not as far above the standard of its literature, as the illustrations of its predecessors fell below the text they professed to adorn. In sketching the life-history of other illustrated magazines it seemed best to follow a chronological order, because the progress of the art of illustration is reflected more or less faithfully in the advance and retrogression they show. But the thirteen volumes which complete the first series of _Once a Week_ may be considered better in a different way. For to-day it is prized almost entirely for its pictures, and they were contributed for the most part by the same artists year after year. While in other periodicals you find, with every new volume, a fresh relay of artists, _Once a Week_, during its palmy days, was supported by the same brilliant group of draughtsmen, who admitted very few recruits, and only those whose great early promise was followed almost directly by ample fulfilment. The very first illustration is a vignette by John Leech to a rhymed programme of the magazine by Shirley Brooks. But Leech, who died in 1864, cannot be regarded as a typical illustrator of 'the sixties'--not so much because his work extended only a few years into that decade, as that he belonged emphatically to the earlier school, and represented all that is _not_ characteristic of the period with which this book is concerned.