But this preamble does not seek to excuse the meagre record it prefaces. A complete bibliography of such a fecund illustrator as Sir John Gilbert would need a volume to itself. To draw up detailed lists of all the various drawings in _The Illustrated London News_, _Punch_, and other prominent weeklies, would be a task needing almost as much co-operation as Dr. Murray's great Dictionary. The subject, if it proves to be sufficiently attractive, will doubtless be done piece by piece by future workers. I envy each his easy pleasure of pointing out the shortcomings of this work, for no keener joy awaits the maker of a handbook than gibbeting his predecessors, and showing by implication how much more trustworthy is his record than theirs. [Illustration: D. G. ROSSETTI 'THE MUSIC-MASTER' BY WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 1855 THE MAIDS OF ELFENMERE] Few artistic movements are so sharply defined that their origin can be traced to a particular moment, although some can be attributed more or less to the influence of one man. Even the pre-Raphaelite movement, clearly distinct as its origin appears at first glance, should not be dated from the formal draft of the little coterie, January 13th, 1851, for, as Mr. W. M. Rossetti writes, 'The rules show or suggest not only what we intended to do, but what had been occupying our attention since 1848. The day when we codified proved also to be the day when no code was really in requisition.' Nor has the autumn 1848 any better claim to be taken as the exact moment, for one cannot overlook the fact that there was Ford Madox Brown, a pre-Raphaelite, long before the pre-Raphaelites, and that Ruskin had published the first volume of _Modern Painters_. There can be little doubt that it was the influence of the so-called pre-Raphaelites and those in closest sympathy with them, which awakened a new interest in illustration, and so prepared the ground for the men of the sixties; but to confine our notice from 1857 to 1867--a far more accurate period--would be to start without sufficient reference to the work superseded by or absorbed into the later movement. So we must glance at a few of the books which preceded both the _Music-master_ of 1855 and the _Tennyson_ of 1857, either volume, the latter especially, being an excellent point whence to reckon more precisely 'the golden decade of British Art,' as Mr. Pennell terms it so happily.