That this admirably conducted illustrated weekly revolutionised English illustration is granted on all sides. Its influence for good or ill was enormous. With its first number, published on December 4, 1869, we find a definite, official date to close the record of the 'sixties'; one by mere chance, chronologically as well as technically, appropriate. Of course the break was not so sudden as this arbitrary limit might suggest. The style which distinguished the _Graphic_ had been gradually prepared before, and if Mr. William Small is credited with the greatest share in its development, such a statement, incomplete as most generalities must needs be, holds a good part of the truth, if not the whole. The work of Mr. Small introduced new qualities into wood-engraving; which, in his hands and those of the best of his followers, grew to be meritorious, and must needs place him with those who legitimately extended the domain of the art of drawing for the engraver. But to discuss the style which succeeded that of the sixties would be to trespass on new ground, and that while the field itself is all too scantily searched. Mr. Ruskin dubbed the new style 'blottesque,' but, as we have seen, he was hardly more enamoured of the manner that immediately preceded it. Many of the surviving heroes of the sixties contributed to the _Graphic_. Charles Green appears in vol. i. with _Irish Emigrants_, G. J. Pinwell with _The Lost Child_ (January 8, 1870), A. Boyd Houghton has a powerful drawing, _Night Charges_, and later, the marvellous series of pictures recording his very personal visit to America. William Small, R. W. Macbeth, S. L. Fildes, Hubert Herkomer, and a crowd of names, some already mentioned frequently in this book, bore the weight of the new enterprise. But a cursory sketch of the famous periodical would do injustice to it. The historian of the seventies will find it takes the place of _Once a Week_ as the happy hunting-ground for the earliest work of many a popular draughtsman and painter--that is to say, the earliest work after his student and experimental efforts. To declare that it still flourishes, and with the _Daily Graphic_, its offspring, keeps still ahead of the popular average, is at once bare truth and the highest compliment which need be paid. The illustrated weeklies in the sixties were almost as unimportant, relatively speaking, as are the illustrated dailies to-day. Yet to say that the weeklies did fair to monopolise illustration at the present time is a common truth, and, remembering what the _Daily Graphic_ and the _Daily Chronicle_ have already accomplished, to infer that the dailies will do likewise before 1900 has attained its majority is a prophecy that is based upon a study of the past. CHAPTER VII: SOME ILLUSTRATED BOOKS OF THE PERIOD BEFORE 1860