Within two years of the issue of Tennyson’s volume, the illustrated periodical called _Once a Week_ was established, and its pages for many years afterwards bore admirable witness to the wide influence which these three great leaders were already exercising upon their generation. Indeed, it may be said that it is impossible to understand the real trend of this new movement, and to appreciate at their just worth the many and varying individualities engaged in its support, without a constant reference to these earlier volumes of a now defunct periodical. There we find in rich profusion the earlier, and in many cases the more interesting, experiments of men like Du Maurier, Charles Keene, Frederick Sandys, Frederick Walker, and John Tenniel, side by side with numerous illustrations by Millais himself. Even Mr. Whistler was an occasional contributor, though his work, except in its very earliest essays where he frankly accepts the ruling convention of the time, quickly takes a place apart as a thing of purely individual temperament. Afterwards, in the days of the Arts Club, I learned to know personally many of those men whose work I had loved when a boy as it appeared in the pages of _Once a Week_. Charles Keene, who had first been made known to me by his illustrations of Meredith’s novel of _Evan Harrington_, was a constant figure there during the time when he was already a valued member of the staff of _Punch_. He was a quaint and amiable character, with a head that suggested Don Quixote, and I recall him now as he used to sit for many an hour of the afternoon and evening with his cup of coffee kept hot upon the bars of the old fire-place in the front room of the Club, filling and refilling one of those tiny clay pipes dating from the period of Charles II., which had been unearthed during some building excavations in the City. Taciturn by habit, and perhaps by preference, he yet always willingly entered into conversation when the occasion arose. Sometimes I would go down and see him in his little house in Chelsea, and turn over his elaborately careful etchings of boats, made by the sea. It cannot be said, I think, that he was ever deeply stirred in his own work by the movement to [Illustration: To seek the wanderer, forth himself doth come And take him in his arms, and bear him home. So in this life, this grove of Ignorance, As to my homeward I myself advance, Sometimes aright, and sometimes wrong I go, Sometimes my pace is speedy, sometimes slow. _Life’s Journey._--GEORGE WITHER. From _English Sacred Poetry_. By FREDERICK SANDYS. Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. (Reproduced from their _Fifty Years’ Work_.) _By permission of Messrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd._ _To face page 115._ ]