Few persons of taste have failed to make themselves acquainted with the works of Bewick, the father of English wood-engraving. In them we have everything the most truthful and poetical. Wide, wild moor, the desolation of winter, with the solitary worn-out horse, forgotten in the snowy waste; the falling fane, the crumbling tower; scenes on northern shores,—rocks and sea-fowl, wrecks and tempests.[77] He delights to show us in his famous tailpieces such pictures as the ragged rapscallions that abound in streets, graceless and cruel; beggars and strollers with bear, monkey, or trumpet; lame soldiers and wounded men, real or sham; the belated traveller in the rain; the snow-man of our childhood; the tipplers with their delightful tall, twisted-stemmed wine-glasses, all “regardless of their doom,” or returning with faltering steps from the tavern; the man on the stepping-stones, bowed down with his burden, the poor mewing cat turning round and round at sea in a tub. Among his principal engravings Bewick gives us in his “Quadruped,” and with a delicacy and force that no modern workman has equalled, for instance, the lion rearing a majestic crest, and “we seem to hear his awful voice, rolling like thunder along the ground, and cowing all nature into silence;”[78] the tiger with his fearful glittering eye, that only Rubens or RiviÈre can paint. Among birds we may recall the woodcuts of the moping thoughtful owl; the water ouzle, with his white waistcoat, sacred to the rocks of the Dove; and the carrion crow wheeling round the gibbet. All these are capital examples of Bewick’s skill; they are, indeed, as fine as they can be, and rendered with the magic touch, with that wonderful feeling for nature which just make the difference between the plodding draughtsman and the born artist. Many persons can “draw,” but very few can draw even tolerably. And Bewick chose, like Hogarth, to portray humanity in some of its degradations, and to call up our feelings against violence and wickedness and the abuse of man’s high quality. He shrank not from the gibbet, he saw its educational value, and, with absolute fidelity, he gives us many examples of the time-honoured horror, standing out stark and bare against the bleak sky.

In a late year of the last century a man was hung in chains in the north of England,—but the particular place we have not been able to identify. And we lift the long-forgotten crime up to notice now because it forms the subject of a tailpiece by Bewick to the Introduction to “Carrion Birds.”[79] The print is here roughly reproduced because it exhibits some particular features. The head is tied up in a white cloth, with a tender touch of feeling, and the body fastened up in irons with Doric simplicity; the post is stuck full of thousands of nails, like the example near Carlisle, to prevent men from coming and climbing and stealing the body away—a precautionary measure recalling the sentry of Roman times.[80]