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.