He used often to tell me of his visits to Thackeray’s house, where he went to settle with the great novelist the subject of the next illustration. During a considerable part of the time Thackeray was ill and confined to his room, and the young draughtsman would sit at the side of the bed and listen to the details of the story as they came from Thackeray’s own lips. [Illustration: THE UNJUST JUDGE From _The Parables of our Lord_. By Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A. Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. (Reproduced from their _Fifty Years’ Work_.) _To face page 111._ ] CHAPTER IX DESIGN AND ENGRAVING It was inevitable that the new movement in Art, with its deeper research of truth in the rendering of human form and the facts of outward nature, should have led to a renewed study of certain forgotten qualities of design. And it is, indeed, impossible to understand the aim and impulse of the leaders of this new movement without reference to the engraved work of the time. It was a necessity of the straitened means which affected nearly all of them that they should at first employ themselves in the work of illustration, and there is no higher tribute to the genius which this new spirit had evoked than is to be found in the engraved work that was produced in England during the ten or fifteen years dating from the middle fifties. When he was little more than a boy, and before he had gained any accomplishment as a painter, Rossetti had already produced some beautiful work in black and white, and we know from their published illustrations that Millais and Holman Hunt were already striving in the same direction. The first important display of this renewed energy in design is to be found in the illustrated edition of Tennyson’s _Poems_ published in 1857, for there, side by side with much that belongs to an earlier manner, the drawings of Hunt and Millais and Rossetti stand out with vivid distinctness as a separate achievement. Not that even at that time these three artists ought to be considered as actuated by a single motive; the individuality of each had been already asserted, and it was hardly necessary for Mr. Hunt in his recently published _Reminiscence_ to labour the point that the aims of Rossetti were not in their essence the aims of Millais and himself. Nor, on the other hand, can the supremacy of Rossetti in regard to imaginative impulse and power be rightly challenged by any one who has had the opportunity of studying the work of the time.