The well-known engraved heading represents a view of London from the Thames, as it was then,--St. Paul's towering in the centre, and the Lord Mayor's procession in State barges passing up the river. The first engraving is a 'View of the Conflagration of the City of Hamburgh,' which began on May 5th, and continued for several days. A great part of the city was destroyed, and more than one hundred lives were lost. As marking an epoch in the history of the Pictorial Press, I reprint this engraving and some others from the early numbers. The next cut is apparently a view of some town in Italy or France; but there is no name to the engraving or any reference to it in the surrounding text, which is all about the dreadful railway accident between Paris and Versailles which had then just occurred, whereby fifty persons were killed, and one hundred and fifty were more or less injured. On the next page are views of the city of Cabul and the fortress of Ghuznee, just then the seat of stirring events. The columns of 'Foreign Intelligence,' 'The Court and Haut Ton,' 'Births, Marriages, and Deaths,' were each headed by a small woodcut, an example of which is given here. There is also an illustration of ladies' fashions, accompanied by a gushing, descriptive letter from Paris, beginning: 'Dear Mr. Editor, I feel an inexpressible delight in inditing my first communication to your lady readers, upon the fashions of the _haut ton_ of this _ville de gaitè_. So suddenly and with such power has the sun lately shot forth, that there is no end to invention in our spring fashions.' [Illustration: FASHIONS FOR MAY, 1842. FROM THE 'ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS,' MAY 14, 1842.] It would appear that illustrated police reports were to have formed part of the attractions of the paper, and several small cuts dealing with humorous subjects are scattered through the early numbers. The cases were evidently selected with a view to provoke merriment rather than to indulge a morbid taste for criminal records, and seem to show that the paper in its early days possessed something of the frolicsomeness of youth, and did not consider a joke beneath its dignity. It had its wild oats to sow, and was not indisposed to emulate its contemporary _Punch_, then also a young joker. The first illustrations of the kind relate to a case at the Mansion House before Sir Peter Laurie, where the manager of a matrimonial institution sought to defend his establishment from the strictures of that celebrated 'putter-down.' A few pages further on we come upon two facetious advertisements, one of them professing to have been called forth by the report of the above case at the Mansion House:--