Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/525

Rh to give us the fruit of the sober contemplation he gets from the weed, and the vivacity produced by the fluid, without filling his pages with the odor of either.

Bating these narcotic and spirituous traits, "Putnam's Magazine" and the "Atlantic Monthly" were made upon the model of "Blackwood." In the form of the page, the type used, the general make-up, and the character and number of the articles, these magazines followed their original pretty closely, as it was doubtless intended that they should do; for, as we have said, then "Blackwood" was the ideal magazine. But their conductors reduced the length of the articles, and gave them more variety, and, in general, insisted upon a lighter style of writing than had been usual in the pages of the old original "Maga." "Putnam" may be regarded as being the pioneer of genuine magazine literature in the United States. Little or no excuse for its quality need be made on the ground that it was the first of its kind. In its pages appeared books which have won their authors wide-spread and apparently enduring reputations.

And now the English literary magazine assumes a new and yet more attractive phase. Mr. Thackeray establishes "The Cornhill Magazine," which achieves at once so great a success that the author of "Vanity Fair" sets up his chariot, at which his fellow-writers who have not written "Vanity Fair," or set up the "Cornhill," sneer—Mr. Thackeray's chariot! And the sneerers have the best of it, as they so often do; they have their reward, and a sweet, ennobling reward it is; for ere long Mr. Thackeray has to dismount from his chariot, and again, ere long, from his editorial chair. But the "Cornhill" has made its impression, and secured for itself a long and vigorous life. It has general excellence on ground common to it and to other magazines; but it is distinguished by its fairly-printed open page, which has the attractive look of that of a handsome book, by its social articles, and by a kind of illustration entirely new in magazines. Other monthly magazines had been printed which it resembled somewhat in the two former particulars, although not in such a manner as to take at all from its own freshness of seeming; but its illustrations were new in style, and often very beautiful. Not a few of them were drawn by Millais and Du Maurier. They united freedom of touch with faithfulness to nature in a manner before unknown. The wood engraving was worthy of the designs, and, like them, its style was new. Some of Millais's full page illustrations to Anthony Trollope's "Orley Farm," which first appeared in "The Cornhill," are as worthy of preservation as a fine picture by Frère or Meissonier or Willhelms. "The Cornhill," with all its beauty and even elegance of appearance, its attractive and easily-read page (these merits being great-