BETWEEN the years 1767 and 1785, travellers going southward to Newcastle along the right bank of the Tyne must frequently have encountered a springy, well-set lad walking, or oftener running, rapidly in the opposite direction. During the whole of that period, which begins with Thomas Bewick's apprenticeship and closes with the deaths of his father and mother, he never ceased to visit regularly the little farm at Cherryburn where he was born.

'Dank and foul, dank and foul,

By the smoky town in its murky cowl,'

is the Tyne at Newcastle, where he lived his working life; but at Ovingham, where he lies buried, and whence you can see the remains of his birthplace, it still flows

'Clear and cool,

By laughing shallow, and dreaming pool,'

like the river in the 'Water-Babies,' and one can easily conceive with what an eagerness the country-bred engraver's-apprentice must have turned, in those weekly escapes from the great, gloomy manufacturing city, to the familiar sights and sounds of nature which had filled his boyhood with delight. To his love for these things we are indebted for his best work; it was his intimate acquaintance with them that has kept his memory green; and, even when he was an old man, they prompted some of the most effective passages of those remarkable recollections which, despite their longueurs et langueurs, present so graphic a picture of his early life. 'I liked my master,' he says; 'I liked the business; but to part from the country, and to leave all its beauties behind me, with which I had been all my life charmed in an extreme degree,—and in a way I cannot describe,—I can only say my heart was like to break.' And then he goes on to show how vivid still, at a distance of sixty years, was that first scene of separation. 'As we passed away, I inwardly bade farewell to the whinny wilds, to Mickley bank, to the Stob-cross hill, to the water-banks, the woods, and to particular trees and even to the large hollow old elm, which had lain perhaps for centuries past, on the haugh near the ford we were about to pass, and which had sheltered the salmon-fishers, while at work there, from many a bitter blast.'

As an artist on wood, as the reviver of the then disused art of Xylography—a subject hedged round with many delicate and hairsplitting controversies—it is not now necessary to speak of Bewick. Nor need anything be said here of his extraordinary skills—a skill still unrivalled—in delineating those 'beautiful and interesting aerial wanderers of the British Isles,' as he styles them in his old-fashioned language, the birds of his native country. In both of these respects, although he must always be accomplished, he may one day be surpassed. But as regards his vignettes or tailpieces ('tale-pieces' they might be called, since they always tell their story), it is not likely that a second Bewick will arise. They were imitated in his own day; they are imitated still—only to prove once more how rare and exceptional is the peculiarly individual combination that produced them. Some of his own pupils, Luke Clennell, for instance, working under his eye and in his atmosphere, have occasionally trodden hard upon his heels in landscape; others, as Robert Johnson, have caught at times a reflex of his distinctive humour; but, as a rule, a Bewick tailpiece of the best period is a thing per se, unapproachable, inimitable, unique; and they have contributed far more—these labours of his play-time—to found his reputation than might be supposed. If you ask a true Bewickian about Bewick, he will begin by dilating upon the markings of the Bittern, the exquisite downy plumage of the Short-eared Owl, the lustrous spring coat of the Starling, the relative and competitive excellences of the Woodcock and the White Grouse; but sooner or later he will wander off unconsciously to the close-packed pathos of the microscopic vignette where the cruel cur is tearing at the worried ewe, whose poor little knock-kneed lamb looks on in trembling terror; or to the patient, melancholy shapes of the black and white horses seen vaguely through the pouring rain in the tailpiece to the Missal Thrush; or to the excellent jest of the cat stealing the hypocrite's supper while he mumbles his long-winded grace. He will tell you how Charles Kingsley, the brave and manly, loved these things; how they fascinated the callow imagination of Charlotte BrontË in her dreary moorland parsonage; how they stirred the delicate insight of the gentle, pure-souled Leslie; and how Ruskin (albeit nothing if not critical) has lavished upon them some of the most royal of his epithets. *

'No Greek work is grander than the angry dog,' he says, referring to a little picture of which an early proof, on the old rag-paper held by collectors to be the only fitting background for a Bewick, now lies before us. A tramp, with his wallet or poke at his side, his tattered trousers corded at the knees, and his head bound with a handkerchief under his shapeless hat, has shambled, in his furtive, sidelong fashion, through the open gates of a park, only to find himself confronted by a watchful and resolute mastiff. He lifts his stick, carved rudely with a bird's head, the minute eye and beak of which are perfectly clear through a magnifying glass, and holds it mechanically with both hands across his body, just as tramps have done immemorially since the days of the Dutchman Jacob Gats, in whose famous 'Emblems' there is an almost similar scene. The dog, which you may entirely cover with a shilling, is magnificent. There is not a line in its body which does not tell. The brindling of the back, the white marking of the neck and chest—to say nothing of the absolute moral superiority of the canine guardian to the cowering interloper—are all conveyed with the strictest economy of stroke. Another tailpiece, to which Ruskin gives the adjective 'superb,' shows a man crossing a river, probably the Tyne. The ice has thawed into dark pools on either side, and snow has fallen on what remains. He has strapped his bundle and stick at his back, and, with the foresight taught of necessity in those bridgeless days, is astride upon a long bough, so that if by any chance the ice gives way, or he plumps into some hidden fissure, he may still have hope of safety. From the bows of the moored ferryboat in the background his dog anxiously watches his progress. When its master is safe across, it will come bounding in his tracks. The desolate stillness of the spot, the bleak, inhospitable look of the snow-clad landscape, are admirably given. But Bewick is capable of even higher things than these. He is capable of suggesting, in these miniature compositions, moments of the keenest excitement, as, for example, in the tailpiece to the Baboon in the second edition of the 'Quadrupeds.' A vicious-looking colt is feeding in a meadow; a little tottering child of two or three plucks at its long tail. The colt's eye is turned backward; its heel is ominously raised; and over the North Country stile in the background a frightened relative comes rushing. The strain of the tiny group is intense; but as the little boy was Bewick's brother, who grew up to be a man, we know that no harm was done. Strangely enough, the incident depicted is not without a hitherto unnoticed parallel. Once, when Hartley Coleridge was a child, he came home with the mark of a horse hoof impressed unmistakably upon his pinafore. Being questioned, he admitted that he had been pulling hairs out of a horse's tail; and his father could only conclude that the animal, with intentional forbearance, had gently pushed him backward. *

In describing the tailpiece to the Baboon, we omitted to mention one minor detail, significant alike of the artist and his mode of work. The presence of a strayed child in a field of flowers is not, perhaps, a matter which calls urgently for comment. But Bewick leaves nothing unexplained. In the shadow of a thicket to the left of the spectator is the negligent nurse who should have watched over her charge, but who, at this precise moment of time, is wholly engrossed by the attentions of an admirer whose arm is round her waist; Nor is it in those accessories alone which aid the story that Bewick is so careful. His local colouring is scrupulously faithful to nature, and, although not always an actual transcript of it, is invariably marked by that accuracy of invention which, as some one said of Defoe, 'lies like truth.' Nothing in his designs is meaningless. If he draws a tree, its kind is always distinguishable; he tells you the nature of the soil, the time of year, often the direction of the wind. Referring to the 'little, exquisitely finished inch-and-a-half vignette' of the suicide in the 'Birds,' Henry Kingsley (of whom, equally with his brother Charles, it may be said, in the phrase of the latter, Il sait son Bewick) notes that the miserable creature has hanged himself 'in the month of June, on an oak bough, stretching over a shallow trout stream, which runs through carboniferous limestone.' Sero sed serio is the motto which Bewick has written under the dilapidated, desperate figure, whose dog, even as the dog of Sikes in 'Oliver Twist,' is running nervously backwards and forwards in its efforts to reach its pendent, motionless, strangely silent master. These legends and inscriptions, characteristic of the artist, are often most happily effective. Generally, like the Justissima Tellus of the vignette of the ploughman, or the Grata sume of the spring at which Bewick himself, on his Scotch tour, is drinking from the 'flipe' of his hat, they simply add to the restful or rural beauty of the scene; but sometimes they supply the needful key to the story. In the tailpiece to the Woodchat, for example, a man lies senseless on the ground. His eyes are closed, and his hat and wig have fallen backward. Is he dead, or in a fit, or simply, drunk? He is drunk. On a stone hard, by is the date '4 June, 1795,' and he has obviously been toasting the nativity of his Majesty George the Third.

But clearness of message, truth to nature, and skill in compressed suggestion are not Bewick's sole good qualities. He does not seem to have known much of Hogarth—perhaps the Juvenalian manner of that great graphic satirist was not entirely to his taste—but he is a humourist to some extent in Hogarth's manner, and, after the fashion of his day, he is a moralist. He delights in queer dilemmas and odd embarrassments. Now it is a miserly fellow who fords a river with his cow to save the bridge toll. The water proves deeper than he expected; the cow, to whose tail he is clinging, rather enjoys it; her master does not. Now it is an old man at a standstill on an obstinate horse. It is raining heavily, and there is a high wind.

He has lost his hat and broken his stick, but he is afraid to get down because he has a basket of excited live fowl on his arm. Occasionally the humour is a little grim, after the true North Country fashion. Such is the case in the tailpiece to the Curlew where a blacksmith (or is it a tanner?) looks on pitiless at the unhappy dog with a kettle dangling at its tail; such, again, in the vignette of the mischievous youngster who leads the blind man into mid-stream. As a moralist, Bewick is never tired of exhibiting the lachrimo rerum, the brevity of life, the emptiness of fame. The staved-in, useless boat; the ruined and deserted cottage, with the grass growing at the hearthstone; the ass rubbing itself against the pillar that celebrates the 'glorious victory;' the churchyard, with its rising moon, and its tombstone legend, 'Good Times, bad Times, and all Times got over,' are illustrations of this side of his genius. But the subject is one which could not be exhausted in many papers, for this little gallery is Bewick's 'criticism of life,' and he had seventy-five years' experience. His final effort was a ferryman waiting to carry a coffin from Eltringham to Ovingham; and on his death-bed he was meditating his favourite work. In a lucid moment of his last wanderings he was asked of what he had been thinking, and he replied, with a faint smile, that he had been devising subjects for some new Tailpieces.