a packet into my hand, said in a pretty, shy manner, 'Will you, please, read this, Mr. Smith?' and disappeared. The packet contained the Story of Elizabeth'; after reading it I had it put into type for the CORNHILL, and sent a proof to her father. When I next saw him I asked if he had read it. 'No,' he said; 'I tried to, but I broke down.' This was only one of a thousand indications of Thackeray's sensibility and of the great love between the father and daughter.

The first article Miss Thackeray wrote for the MAGAZINE was called 'Little Scholars,' and was printed in the fifth number. Thackeray sent it to me with a letter containing the following passage:

And in the meantime comes a little contribution called "Little Scholars, " which I send you and which moistened my paternal spectacles. It is the article I talked of sending to Blackwood"; but why should CORNHILL lose such a sweet paper, because it was my dear girl who wrote it? Papas, however, are bad judges-you decide whether we shall have it or not!'

I find a characteristic postscript to this letter.

Mrs. C-- growls-is satisfied-says she shan't write any more-and invites me to dinner.'

I must say that I think our success was well deserved. Our contributors gave the new magazine of their very best. No other group equally brilliant had ever been brought together before within the covers of one magazine. During the first year there were articles from the following writers:

ANTHONY TROLLOPE
SIR JOHN BOWRING

G. H. LEWES

REV. F. MAHONY (FATHER
PROUT)

SIR JOHN BURGOYNE

THORNTON HUNT

ALLEN YOUNG

MRS. ARCHER CLIVE

M. J. HIGGINS (JACOB OMNIUM)
THOMAS HOOD

ALFRED TENNYSON

GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA
R. MONCKTON MILNES

MRS. GASKELL

FREDERICK GREENWOOD
HERMAN MERIVALE

REV. S. R. HOLE

JOHN RUSKIN

ADELAIDE PROCTER
HENRY COLE
E. S. DALLAS
ALBERT SMITH
JOHN HOLLINGSHEAD
SIR HENRY THOMPSON
LAURENCE OLIPHANT
MISS THACKERAY
GEORGE MACDONALD
JAMES HINTON
MATTHEW ARNOLD
MRS. BROWNING

SIR JOHN W. KAYE
FITZJAMES STEPHEN
EDWARD TOWNSEND

T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE
LORD LYTTON

CHARLES LEVER
FREDERICK LOCKER

The CORNHILL MAGAZINE during many years contained illustrations, and it was no less distinguished for its artistic merit than

for its literature. Among the artists whose drawings appeared in the magazine were the following:

JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS

F. SANDYS

F. LEIGHTON

RICHARD DOYLE

FREDERICK WALKER

GEORGE DU MAURIER

SIR NOEL PATON
CHARLES KEENE

F. W. BURTON

S. L. FILDES

HUBERT HERKOMER

G. D. LESLIE
MARCUS STONE

MRS. ALLINGHAM

F. DICKSEE

E. J. PINWELL

I may possibly at a future time ask the Editor of 'THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE' to allow me to submit to him a few jottings from my memory of some of these writers and artists.

Although we did our best to make the new venture a success, yet accidents will happen, and the launch of the CORNHILL was attended with one somewhat exasperating business blunder. When I had got the first number ready for press I was rather knocked up, and went with my wife for a three weeks' holiday to the Lakes. Those three weeks indirectly cost us a considerable loss in the advertising pages of the CORNHILL. I left instructions with my staff not to make any advertising contracts without reference to me. They received offers extending over twelve months at 6. 68. or 71. 78. a page-sufficiently good rates for magazines with the ordinary circulation. They forwarded these proposals to me, intimating that, unless they heard from me to the contrary by a given date, they would close with them. There was delay in the letter reaching me, and the contracts were made at those rates. But with the circulation reached by the CORNHILL the mere printing and paper cost us much more than the amounts we were to receive under the contracts. When I returned to London I made the rate twenty guineas per page.

In this connection I had a rather curious exposition of the science of advertising. The rate we charged was high; but measured against our circulation it was really much lower than that of any other magazine; and I was a little surprised that, considering the enormous publicity our pages offered to advertisers, they were not better filled. I found myself at a dinner-party sitting next to a well-known advertiser, and I thought I would try to get a solution of the puzzle. I began by saying I was not a canvasser for advertisements, but I wanted information. You advertise largely,' I said, 'in a certain magazine. You pay five guineas a page, and you know that the circulation of that magazine is not 10,000 copies. The CORNHILL has a circulation of more than

100,000 copies; we charge twenty guineas a page for advertisements; yet I don't find that advertisements come in to the extent I expected. If a circulation of 10,000 copies is worth five guineas a page, a circulation of 100,000 copies ought to be worth fifty guineas a page. And as we only charge twenty guineas, our rates are, proportionately, lower by more than fifty per cent. than those of other magazines. Why don't advertisers take advantage of what we offer?' Ah!' said the great advertiser, 'you evidently know nothing about it'; and he proceeded to expound to me, on the authority of his large experience, the true secret of advertising.

6

'We don't consider,' he said, 'that an advertisement seen for the first time by a reader is worth anything. The second time it is seen counts for a little-not much. The third time the reader's attention is arrested; the fourth time he reads the advertisement through; the fifth time he is probably a purchaser. It takes time to soak in. It is the number of the impressions that tells. Now you see,' he said, 'I can advertise five times in most magazines for twenty-five guineas; but five times in the CORNHILLwould cost me 100 guineas.'

This theory that it takes a number of impressions to make an advertisement effective is, perhaps, correct. I certainly had had an example of what my interlocutor meant many years previously, during my drives twice a week to Box Hill, to see my father during his last illness. On a tree by the roadside was a flaming placard, announcing some trumpery penny publication. The placard depicted a young woman, with long black hair, thrusting a dagger into the heart of a ruffianly looking man, with the blood spurting all over the neighbourhood. When I first saw the placard my eyes scarcely dwelt for a moment on it. It awakened no curiosity. But after seeing it twice a week for six weeks, that girl's figure had so 'soaked in' that I felt impelled to go and buy the publication.

We lightened our labours in the service of the CORNHILL by monthly dinners. The principal contributors used to assemble at my table in Gloucester Square every month while we were in London; and these CORNHILL dinners were very delightful and interesting. Thackeray always attended, though he was often in an indifferent state of health. At one of these dinners Trollope was to meet Thackeray for the first time and was eagerly looking forward to an introduction to him. Just before dinner I took him up to Thackeray and introduced him with suitable

empressement. Thackeray curtly said, 'How do?' and, to my wonder and Trollope's anger, turned on his heel! He was suffering at the time from an ailment which, at that particular moment, caused him a sudden spasm of pain; though we, of course, could not know this. I well remember the expression on Trollope's face at that moment, and no one who knew Trollope will doubt that he could look furious on an adequate-and sometimes on an inadequate-occasion! He came to me the next morning in a very wrathful mood, and said that, had it not been that he was in my house for the first time, he would have walked out of it. He vowed he would never speak to Thackeray again, and so forth. I did my best to soothe him; though rather violent and irritable, he had a fine nature with a substratum of great kindliness, and I believe he left my room in a happier frame of mind than when he entered it. He and Thackeray afterwards became close friends.

These CORNHILL dinners gave rise to another incident which at this distance of time seems trivial enough, but which, at the moment, caused some indignation in my own immediate circle.

Mr. Edmund Yates, who had had a dispute with Thackeray which ended in Mr. Yates's compulsory withdrawal from the Garrick Club, did me the honour of writing an article for a New York paper disparaging the CORNHILL MAGAZINE, making a false statement as to its falling circulation, and describing one of these dinners, at none of which he was present. Yates represented me as a good man of business, but an entirely unread person; and, by way of throwing ridicule on the CORNHILL functions, told-or rather mistold-a story of what had been said at one of the dinners.

6

The story in the New York paper was made the subject of an article, of the sneering type, in the Saturday Review.' The Saturday Review's' article left me quite undisturbed, but my wife, who was ill at the time, was much annoyed, and Thackeray, with generous sympathy, rebuked the 'Saturday' in a brilliant

Roundabout Paper,' entitled 'On Screens in Dining-Rooms.' That a publisher should be criticised for his dinners, and for the conversations that did not take place there, is this,' asked Thackeray, 'tolerable press practice, legitimate joking, or honourable warfare?' Shortly after the Saturday Review' article appeared, Trollope walked into my room and said he had come to confess that he had given Yates the information on which his article was founded. He expressed the deepest regret, and said:

'I told the story not against you, but against Thackeray.' I am afraid I answered him rather angrily. Trollope, however, took it very meekly, and said: 'I know I have done wrong, and you may say anything you like to me.'

The house at which these CORNHILL dinners took place had been previously occupied by Mr. Sadleir, notorious for his frauds, who was found dead on Hampstead Heath with a silver cream-jug by his side which had contained prussic acid. By some defect in the construction of the house, when the front door was opened the drawing-room door also slowly opened, and the wind lifted the carpet in slight waves. Thackeray, whose humour was sometimes of a grim sort, was never tired of suggesting that it was Sadleir's ghost come in search of some deeds which had been hidden under the floor. Why, he would demand in anxious tones, did I not have the carpet taken up and the deeds discovered? He pretended to account for my indifference on the subject to his own satisfaction by saying: 'I suppose you think any deeds you find will be forged?'1

The monthly dinners were not our only alleviations of the regular routine of business. Whenever any new literary arrangement with Mr. Thackeray was pending, he would playfully suggest that he always found his mind clearer for business at Greenwich than elsewhere, especially if his digestion were assisted by a certain brown hock, at 158. a bottle, which Mr. Hart, the landlord, used to produce. On these occasions Sir Charles Taylor, a very agreeable and prominent member of the Garrick Club, a friend of Thackeray, and an acquaintance of mine, was always present. Beyond an occasional witticism, Sir

Two years since I had the good fortune to partake of some admirable dinners in Tyburnia-magnificent dinners indeed, but rendered doubly interesting from the fact that the house was that occupied by the late Mr. Sadleir. One night the late Mr. Sadleir took tea in that dining-room, and, to the surprise of his butler, went out, having put into his pocket his own cream-jug. The next morning, you know, he was found dead on Hampstead Heath, with the creamjug lying by him, into which he had poured the poison by which he died. The idea of the ghost of the late gentleman flitting about the room gave a strange interest to the banquet. Can you fancy him taking his tea alone in the dining. room? He empties that cream-jug and puts it in his pocket; and then he opens yonder door, through which he is never to pass again. Now he crosses the hall: and hark! the hall door shuts upon him, and his steps die away. They are gone into the night. They traverse the sleeping city. They lead him into the fields, where the grey morning is beginning to glimmer. He pours something from a bottle into a little silver jug. It touches his lips, the lying lips. Do they quiver a prayer ere that awful draught is swallowed? When the sun rises they are dumb.'-Roundabout Papers.