1921] on Chronicles of Cornhill 397 



Curiosity for the new thing had impelled many to buy who found 

 that the bulk of the material was, to borrow a modern Americanism r 

 too highbrow for their real taste. Moreover, the early death of 

 Thackeray himself on Christinas Eve, I860, following his retirement 

 from the editor's chair in May 1862, deprived the magazine of one of 

 its leading attractions. Then arose, what Mrs. Browning had early 

 foreseen, the competition of other magazines, which expanded year 

 after year, until with the vast growth of an uncritical reading public, 

 a fresh order of magazines, more ephemeral in character, in their 

 turn devoured the earlier competitors of the " Cornhill." That the 

 11 Cornhill " itself survived the years of stress is due to the devotion 

 of George Smith's successors to his creation, and the ideals it 

 represented. According to these ideals, it was to be a literary 

 magazine not in the sense of merely discussing literary subjects, but 

 in the sense of treating each subject with the responsiveness of thought 

 to feeling and of word to thought, which differentiates literature 

 from that which is not literature. Being neither a journal nor a 

 review, the "Cornhill" stood aside from current politics, book reviewing, 

 ephemeral topics, the clash of controversial opinion as such, along 

 with theology. In all else it looked for form as well as substance, 

 for warmth as well as light. Essays might teach, but they should 

 not be didactic ; descriptions must not be a catalogue of experiences* 

 but must be projected anew through living facets of a personality. 



The essay, then, has always been one of the cardinal features of 

 the " Cornhill." The other was the serial. Both began with 

 Thackeray, and both have continued in unbroken descent to the 

 present time. Save for an occasional interval of a month or two, 

 between the end of one and the beginning of another, it has been 

 steadily maintained ; indeed, for many years two serials were running 

 simultaneously, and sometimes they were overlapped by a third. 



It is remarkable to see what an array of first-class novelists 

 contributed to pages of the " Cornhill." Some had already achieved 

 fame, like Thackeray himself, and Trollope, and George Eliot, and 

 Wilkie Collins ; others, like Lady Ritchie from her very first effort, 

 and like Stevenson and Thomas Hardy, Stanley Weyinan, Conan 

 Doyle and Merriman, found the " Cornhill " their chief stepping-stone 

 to popular appreciation. Here are Mrs. Gaskell, George Macdonald 

 and George Meredith, Charles Lever and Charles Reade, William 

 Black, and R. D. Blackmore, Mrs. Oliphant and Henry James ; here 

 is the sombre genius of George Gissing, the fun of F. Anstey, and 

 George A. Birmingham, whose pseudonym conveys a jest in its very 

 initials ; here are Anthony Hope, A. E. W. Mason, and H. A. Yachell, 

 Mrs. Humphry Ward, and Lady Clifford (Mrs. de la Pasture) and the 

 author of " Elizabeth and her German Garden," to name no more ; 

 in short five out of six have been novelists of the front rank. 



Among the general articles one or two features of the " Cornhill " 

 may be noted which have marked it from its earliest days. Anne 



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