CHAPTER VII.

REVIVAL OF WOOD ENGRAVING.

English Wood-Cuts in 1712 -- Howel’s Medulla Historiæ Anglicanæ -- Maittaire’s Classics 1713 -- E. Kirkall -- His Chiaro-Scuros -- Cuts in Croxall’s Æsop, 1722 -- J. B. Jackson -- Chiaro-Scuros Engraved by Him at Venice, 1738-1742 -- French Wood Engravers, 1710-1768; J. M. Papillon, M. Le Sueur, and P. S. Fournier -- English Wood-Cuts, 1760-1772 -- Cuts in Sir John Hawkins’s History of Music, 1776 -- Thomas Bewick -- His First Wood-Cuts, in Hutton’s Mensuration, 1768-1770 -- Cuts by Him in a Hieroglyphic Bible -- In Fables, 1779-1784 -- His Cut of the Chillingham Bull -- His Quadrupeds, British Birds, and Fables -- John Bewick -- Cuts by Him in Emblems of Mortality, and Other Books -- Poems by Goldsmith and Parnell -- Somerviles’s Chase -- Robert Johnson, Designer of Several of the Tail-Pieces in Bewick’s Works -- Charlton Nesbit -- Luke Clennell -- William Harvey -- Robert Branston -- John Thompson, and Others.

Although wood engraving had fallen into almost utter neglect by the end of the seventeenth century, and continued in a languishing state for many years afterward, yet the art was never lost, as some persons have stated; for both in England and in France a regular succession of wood engravers can be traced from 1700 to the time of Thomas Bewick. The cuts which appear in books printed in Germany, Holland, and Italy during the same period, though of very inferior execution, sufficiently prove that the art continued to be practised in those countries.

The first English book of this period which requires notice is an edition of Howel’s Medulla Historiæ Anglicanæ, octavo, printed at London in 1712.[VII-1] There are upwards of sixty wood-cuts in this work, and the manner in which they are executed sufficiently indicates that the engraver must have either been self-taught or the pupil of a master who did not understand the art. The blocks have, for the most part, been engraved in the manner of copper-plates; most of the lines, which a regular wood engraver would have left in relief, are cut in _intaglio_, and hence in the impression they appear white where they ought to be black. The bookseller, in an address to the reader, thus proceeds to show the advantages of those cuts, and to answer any objection that might be urged against them on account of their being engraved on wood. “The cuts added in this edition are intended more for use than show. The utility consists in these two particulars. 1. To make the better impression on the memory. 2. To show more readily when the notable passages in our history were transacted; which, without the knowledge of the names of the persons, are not to be found out, by even the best indexes. As for example: In what reign was it that a rebellious rout, headed by a vile fellow, made great ravage, and appearing in the King’s presence with insolence, their captain was stabbed upon the spot by the Lord-Mayor? Here, without knowing the names of some of the parties, which a world of people are ignorant of, the story is not to be found by an index; but by the help of the cut, which catches the eye, is soon discovered. We all have heard of the piety of one of our queens who sucked the poison out of her husband’s wound, but very few remember which of them it was, which the cut presently shows. The same is to be said of all the rest, since we have chosen only such things as are NOTABILIA in the history to describe in our sculptures.--And if it be objected that the graving is in wood, and not in copper, which would be more beautiful; we answer, that such would be much more expensive too. And we were willing to save the buyer’s purse; especially since even the best engraving would not better serve the purposes above-said.”

[Footnote VII-1: Small wood-cuts appear to have been frequently used about this time in newspapers, for what the Americans call a “caption” to advertisements. “The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out a proper method to catch the reader’s eye, without which many a good thing may pass over unobserved, or be lost among commissions of bankrupts. Asterisks and hands were formerly of great use for this purpose. Of late years the N.B. has been much in fashion, as also _little cuts and figures_, the invention of which we must ascribe to the author of spring trusses.”--Tatler, No. 224, 14th September 1710. The practice is not yet obsolete. Cuts of this kind are still to be found in country newspapers prefixed to advertisements of quack medicines, horse-races, coach and steam-boat departures, sales of ships, and the services of _equi admissorii_.]

Though no mark is to be found on any of those cuts, I am inclined to think that they were executed by Edward Kirkall, whose name appears as the engraver of the copper-plate frontispiece to the book. The accounts which we have of Kirkall are extremely unsatisfactory. Strutt says that he was born at Sheffield in 1695; and that, visiting London in search of improvement, he was for some time employed in graving arms, stamps, and ornaments for books. It is, however, likely that he was born previous to 1695; for the frontispiece to Howel’s Medulla is dated 1712, when, if Strutt be correct, Kirkall would be only seventeen. That he engraved on wood, as well as on copper, is unquestionable; and I am inclined to think that he either occasionally engraved small ornaments and head-pieces on type-metal for the use of printers, or that casts in this kind of metal were taken from some of his small cuts.[VII-2]

[Footnote VII-2: Some of the cuts in an edition of Dryden’s plays, 6 vols. 12mo. published by Tonson and Watts in 1717, have evidently been either engraved on some kind of soft metal or been casts from a wood block. In the corner of such cuts, the marks of the pins, which have fastened the engraved metal-plate to a piece of wood below, are quite apparent.]

The head-pieces and ornaments in Maittaire’s Latin Classics, duodecimo, published by Tonson and Watts, 1713, were probably engraved on wood by Kirkall, as his initials, E. K., are to be found on one of the tail-pieces. Papillon speaks rather favourably of those small cuts, though he objects to the uniformity of the tint and the want of precision in the more delicate parts of the figures, such as the faces and hands. He notices the tail-piece with the mark E. K. as one of the best executed; and he suspects that these letters were intended for the name of an English painter--called _Ekwits_, to the best of his recollection,--who “taught the arts of painting and of engraving on wood to J. B. Jackson, so well known to the printers of Paris about 1730 from his having supplied them with so large a stock of indifferent cuts.”[VII-3]

[Footnote VII-3: Papillon, Traité de la Gravure en Bois, tom. i. p. 323.]

The cuts in Croxall’s edition of Æsop’s Fables, first published by J. and R. Tonson and J. Watts, in 1722, were, in all probability, executed by the same person who engraved the head-pieces and other ornaments in Maittaire’s Latin Classics, printed for the same publishers about nine years before; and there is reason to believe that this person, as has been previously observed, was E. Kirkall. Bewick, in the introduction prefixed to his “Fables of Æsop and others,” first printed in 1818, says that the cuts in Croxall’s edition were “on metal, in the manner of wood.” He, however, gives no reason for this opinion, and I very much question its correctness. After a careful inspection I have not been able to discover any peculiar mark which should induce me to suppose that they had been engraved on metal; and without some such mark indicating that the engraved surface had been fastened to the block to raise it to the height of the type, I consider it impossible for any person to decide merely from the appearance of the impressions that those cuts were printed from a metallic surface. The difference, in point of impression, between a wood-cut and an engraving on type-metal in the same manner, or a cast in type-metal from a wood-cut, is not to be distinguished. A wood engraver of the present day, when casts from wood-cuts are so frequently used instead of the original engraved block, decides that a certain impression has been from a cast, not in consequence of any peculiarity in its appearance denoting that it is printed from a metallic surface, but from certain marks--little flaws in the lines and minute “picks”--which he knows are characteristic of a “cast.” When a cast, however, has been well taken, and afterwards carefully cleared out with the graver, it is frequently impossible to decide that the impression has been taken from it, unless the examiner have also before him an impression from the original block with which it may be compared; and even then, a person not very well acquainted with the practice of wood engraving and the method of taking casts from engraved wood-blocks, will be extremely liable to decide erroneously.

Though it is by no means improbable that a person like Kirkall, who had been accustomed to engrave on copper, might attempt to engrave on type-metal in the same manner as on wood, and that he might thus execute a few small head-pieces and flowered ornaments, yet I consider it very unlikely that he should _continue to prefer metal_ for the purpose of relief engraving after he had made a few experiments. The advantages of wood over type-metal are indeed so great, both as regards clearness of line and facility of execution, that it seems incredible that any person who had tried both materials should hesitate to give the preference to wood. If, however, the cuts in Croxall’s Æsop were really engraved on metal in the manner of wood, they are, as a series, the most extraordinary specimens of relief engraving for the purpose of printing, that have ever been executed. When Bewick stated that those cuts were engraved on metal, I am inclined to think that he founded his opinion rather on popular report than on close and impartial examination of the cuts themselves; and it is further to be observed that Thomas Bewick, with all his merits as a wood engraver, was not without his weaknesses as a man; he was not unwilling that people should believe that the art of wood engraving was lost in this country, and that the honour of its re-discovery, as well as of its subsequent advancement, was due to him. Though he was no doubt sincere in the opinion which he gave, yet those who know him are well aware that he would not have felt any pleasure in calling the attention of his readers to a series of wood-cuts executed in England upwards of thirty years before he was born, and which are not much inferior--except as regards the animals--to the cuts of fables engraved by himself and his brother previous to 1780.[VII-4] The cuts in Croxall’s Æsop not only display great improvement in the engraver, supposing him to be the same person that executed the head-pieces and ornaments in Maittaire’s Latin Classics printed in 1713, but are very much superior to any cuts contained in works of the same kind printed in France between 1700 and 1760.[VII-5]

[Footnote VII-4: “The Fables of Mr. John Gay,” with cuts by Thomas and John Bewick, was published in 1779. “Select Fables, a new edition improved,” with cuts by the same, appeared in 1784; both in duodecimo, printed by T. Saint, Newcastle-on-Tyne. The cuts in the latter work are considerably better than those in the former. Several of the cuts which originally appeared in those two works are to be found in “Select Fables; with cuts designed and engraved by Thomas and John Bewick, and others,” octavo, printed for Emerson Charnely, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1820.]

[Footnote VII-5: The cuts in two different editions of Æsop’s Fables, published at Paris,--the one by Charles Le Clerc in 1731, and the other by J. Barbou in 1758,--are most wretchedly executed. The mark of Vincent Le Sueur appears on the frontispiece to Le Clerc’s edition.]

Many of the subjects in Croxall are merely reversed copies of engravings on copper by S. Le Clerc, illustrative of a French edition of Æsop’s Fables published about 1694. The first of the preceding cuts is a fac-simile of one of Le Clerc’s engravings; and the second is a copy of the same subject as it appears in Croxall. The fable to which they both relate is the Fox and the Goat.

The above cut is by no means one of the best in Croxall: it has not been selected as a specimen of the manner in which those cuts are executed, but as an instance of the closeness with which the English wood-cuts have been copied from the French copper-plates. In several of the cuts in Bewick’s Fables of Æsop and others, the arrangement and composition appear to have been suggested by those in Croxall; but in every instance of this kind the modern artist has made the subject his own by the superior manner in which it is treated: he restores to the animals their proper forms, represents them _acting_ their parts as described in the fable, and frequently introduces an incident or sketch of landscape which gives to the whole subject a natural character. The following copy of the Fox and Goat, in the Fables of Æsop and others, 1818-1823, will serve to show how little the modern artist has borrowed in such instances from the cuts in Croxall, and how much has been supplied by himself.

Between 1722 and 1724, Kirkall published by subscription twelve chiaro-scuros engraved by himself, chiefly after designs by old Italian masters. In those chiaro-scuros the outlines and the darker parts of the figures are printed from copper-plates, and the sepia-coloured tints afterwards impressed from wood-blocks; though they possess considerable merit, they are deficient in spirit, and will not bear a comparison with the chiaro-scuros executed by Ugo da Carpi and other early Italian wood engravers. Most of them are too smooth, and want the bold outline and vigorous character which distinguish the old chiaro-scuros: what Kirkall gained in delicacy and precision by the introduction of mezzotint, he lost through the inefficient engraving of the wood-blocks. One of the largest of those chiaro-scuros is a copy of one of Ugo da Carpi’s--Æneas carrying his father on his shoulders--after a design by Raffaele. In Walpole’s Catalogue of Engravers, a notice of Kirkall’s “new method of printing, composed of etching, mezzotinto, and wooden stamps,” concludes with the following passage: “He performed several prints in this manner, and did great justice to the drawing and expression of the masters he imitated. This invention, for one may call it so, had much success, much applause, no imitators.--I suppose it is too laborious and too tedious. In an opulent country where there is great facility of getting money, it is seldom got by merit. Our artists are in too much hurry to gain it, or deserve it.”

About 1724 Kirkall published seventeen views of shipping, from designs by W. Vandevelde, which he also called “prints in chiaro-scuro.” They have, however, no just pretensions to the name as it is usually understood when applied to prints, for they are merely tinted engravings worked off in a greenish-blue ink. These so-called chiaro-scuros are decided failures.

Kirkall engraved, on copper, the plates in Rowe’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, folio, published by Tonson, 1718; the plates for an edition of Inigo Jones’s Stonehenge, 1725; and a frontispiece to the works of Mrs. Eliza Haywood, which is thus alluded to in the Dunciad:

“See in the circle next Eliza placed, Two babes of love close clinging to her waist; Fair as before her works she stands confest, In flowers and pearls by bounteous Kirkall drest.”

A considerable number of rude and tasteless ornaments and head-pieces, with the mark F. H., engraved on wood, are to be found in English books printed between 1720 and 1740. Several of them have been cast in type-metal,[VII-6] as is evident from the marks of the pins, in the impressions, by which they have been fastened to the blocks; the same head-piece or ornament is also frequently found in books printed in the same year by different printers. Some of the best headings and tail-pieces of this period occur in a volume of “Miscellaneous Poems, original and translated, by several hands. Published by Mr. Concanen,” London, printed for J. Peele, octavo, 1724. The subjects are, Apollo with a lyre; Minerva with a spear and shield; two men sifting corn; Hercules destroying the hydra; and a man with a large lantern. They are much superior to any cuts of the same kind with the mark F. H.; and from the manner in which they are executed, I am inclined to think that they are the work of the person who engraved the cuts in Croxall’s Æsop. The following is a fac-simile of one of the best of the cuts that I have ever seen with the mark F. H. It occurs as a tail-piece at the end of the preface to “Strephon’s Revenge: A Satire on the Oxford Toasts,” octavo, London, 1724.[VII-7]

[Footnote VII-6: It is not unlikely that the frequency of such casts has induced many persons to suppose that most of the cuts of this period were “_engraved_ on metal in the manner of wood.”]

John Baptist Jackson, an English wood engraver, was, according to Papillon, a pupil of the person who engraved the small head-pieces and ornaments in Maittaire’s Latin Classics, published by Tonson and Watts in 1713; and as the cuts in Croxall’s Æsop were probably engraved by the same person, as has been previously observed, it is not unlikely that Jackson, as his apprentice, might have some share in their execution. Though these cuts were much superior to any that had appeared in England for about a hundred years previously, wood engraving seems to have received but little encouragement. Probably from want of employment in his own country, Jackson proceeded to Paris, where he remained several years, chiefly employed in engraving head-pieces and ornaments for the booksellers. Papillon, who seems to have borne no good-will towards Jackson, thus speaks of him in the first volume of his “Traité de la Gravure en Bois.”

[Footnote VII-7: Two cuts, with the same mark, are to be found in Thoresby’s Vicaria Leodinensis, 8vo. London, 1724; one at the commencement of the preface, and the other at the end of the work.]

“J. Jackson, an Englishman, who resided several years in Paris, might have perfected himself in wood engraving, which he had learnt of an English painter, as I have previously mentioned, if he had been willing to follow the advice which it was in my power to give him. Having called on me, as soon as he arrived in Paris, to ask for work, I for several months gave him a few things to execute in order to afford him the means of subsistence. He, however, repaid me with ingratitude; he made a duplicate of a flowered ornament of my drawing, which he offered, before delivering to me the block, to the person for whom it was to be engraved. From the reproaches that I received, on the matter being discovered, I naturally declined to employ him any longer. He then went the round of the printing-offices in Paris, and was obliged to engrave his cuts without order, and to offer them for almost nothing; and many of the printers, profiting by his distress, supplied themselves amply with his cuts. He had acquired a certain insipid taste which was not above the little mosaics on snuff-boxes; and with ornaments of this kind, after the manner of several other inferior engravers, he surcharged his works. His mosaics, however delicately engraved, are always deficient in effect, and display the engraver’s patience rather than his talent; for the other parts of the cut, consisting of delicate lines without tints or a gradation of light and shade, want that force which is necessary to render the whole striking. Such wood engravings, however deficient in this respect, are yet admired by printers of vulgar taste, who foolishly pretend that they most resemble copper-plates, and that they print better than cuts of a picturesque character, and containing a variety of tints.

“Jackson, being obliged, through destitution, to leave Paris, where he could get nothing more to do, travelled in France; and afterwards, being disgusted with his profession, he accompanied a painter to Rome, from whence he went to Venice, where, as I am informed, he married, and subsequently returned to England, his native country.”[VII-8]

[Footnote VII-8: Traité de la Gravure en Bois, tom. i. pp. 327, 328.]

Though Papillon speaks disparagingly of Jackson, the latter was at least as good an engraver as himself. Jackson appears to have visited Paris not later than 1726, for Papillon mentions a vignette and a large letter engraved by him in that year for a Latin and French dictionary, printed in 1727 by the brothers Barbou; and it is likely that he remained there till about 1731. In an Italian translation of the Lives of the Twelve Cæsars, printed there in quarto 1738, there is a large ornamental title-page of his engraving; and in the same year he engraved a chiaro-scuro of Christ taken down from the cross, from a painting by Rembrandt,[VII-9] in the possession of Joseph Smith, Esq. the British consul at Venice, a well-known collector of pictures and other works of art. Between 1738 and 1742, when residing at Venice, he also engraved twenty-seven large chiaro-scuros,--chiefly after pictures by Titian, G. Bassano, Tintoret, and P. Veronese,--which were published in a large folio volume in the latter year. They are very unequal in point of merit; some of them appearing harsh and crude, and others flat and spiritless, when compared with similar productions of the old Italian wood engravers. One of the best is the Martyrdom of St. Peter Dominicanus, after Titian, with the date 1739; the manner in which the foliage of the trees is represented is particularly good. On his return to England he seems to have totally abandoned the practice of wood engraving in the ordinary manner for the purpose of illustrating or ornamenting books; for I have not been able to discover any English wood-cut of the period that either contains his mark, or seems, from its comparative excellence, to have been of his engraving. Finding no demand in this country for wood-cuts, he appears to have tried to render his knowledge of engraving in chiaro-scuro available for the purpose of printing paper-hangings. In an “Essay on the Invention of Engraving and Printing in Chiaro Oscuro,”[VII-10] published in his name in 1754, we learn that he was then engaged in a manufacture of this kind at Battersea. The account given in this essay of the origin and progress of chiaro-scuro engraving is frequently incorrect; and from several of the statements which it contains, it would seem that the writer was very imperfectly acquainted with the works of his predecessors and contemporaries in the same department of wood engraving. From the following passage, which is to be found in the fifth page, it is evident that the writer was either ignorant of what had been done in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even in his own age, or that he was wishful to enhance the merit of Mr. Jackson’s process by concealing what had recently been done in the same manner by others. “After having said all this, it may seem highly improper to give to Mr. Jackson the merit of inventing this art; but let me be permitted to say, that an art recovered is less little than an art invented. The works of the former artists remain indeed; but the manner in which they were done is entirely lost: the inventing then the manner is really due to this latter undertaker, since no writings, or other remains, are to be found by which the method of former artists can be discovered, or in what manner they executed their works; nor, in truth, has the Italian method since the beginning of the sixteenth century been attempted by any one except Mr. Jackson.” What is here called the “Italian method,” that is, the method of executing chiaro-scuros entirely on wood, was practised in France at the end of the seventeenth century: and Nicholas Le Sueur had engraved several cuts in this manner about 1730, the very time when Jackson was living in Paris. The principles of the art had also been applied in France to the execution of paper-hangings upwards of fifty years before Jackson attempted to establish the same kind of manufacture in England. Not a word is said of the chiaro-scuros of Kirkall,[VII-11] from whom it is likely that Jackson first acquired his knowledge of chiaro-scuro engraving: with the exception of the outlines and some other parts in these chiaro-scuros being executed in mezzotint, the printing of the rest from wood-blocks is precisely the same as in the Italian method.

[Footnote VII-9: This painting, which is wholly in chiaro-scuro, is now in the National Gallery, to which it was presented by the late Sir George Beaumont.]

[Footnote VII-10: The title at length is as follows: “An Essay on the Invention of Engraving and Printing in Chiaro Oscuro, as practised by Albert Durer, Hugo di Carpi, &c., and the Application of it to the making Paper Hangings of taste, duration, and elegance, by Mr. Jackson of Battersea. Illustrated with Prints in proper colours.” 4to. London, 1754.]

[Footnote VII-11: There can be no doubt that the mention of Kirkall’s name is purposely avoided. The “attempts” of Count Caylus, who executed several chiaro-scuros by means of copper-plates and wood-blocks subsequent to Kirkall, are noticed; but the name of Nicholas Le Sueur, who assisted the Count and engraved the wood-blocks, is never mentioned. It is also stated in the Essay, page 6, that some of the subjects begun by Count Caylus were finished by Mr. Jackson, and “approved by the lovers and promoters of that art in Paris.”]

The Essay contains eight prints illustrative of Mr. Jackson’s method; four are chiaro-scuros, and four are printed in “proper colours,” as is expressed in the title, in imitation of drawings. They are very poorly executed, and are very much inferior to the chiaro-scuros engraved by Jackson when residing at Venice. The prints in “proper colours” are egregious failures. The following notices respecting Mr. Jackson are extracted from the Essay in question.

“Certainly Mr. Jackson, the person of whom we speak, has not spent less time and pains, applied less assiduity, or travelled to fewer distant countries in search of perfecting his art, than other men; having passed twenty years in France and Italy to complete himself in drawing after the best masters in the best schools, and to see what antiquity had most worthy the attention of a student in his particular pursuits. After all this time spent in perfecting himself in his discoveries, like a true lover of his native country, he is returned with a design to communicate all the means which his endeavours can contribute to enrich the land where he drew his first breath, by adding to its commerce, and employing its inhabitants; and yet, like a citizen of it, he would willingly enjoy some little share of those advantages before he leaves this world, which he must leave behind him to his countrymen when he shall be no more.”

“During his residence at Venice, where he made himself perfect in the art which he professes, he finished many works well known to the nobility and gentry who travelled to that city whilst he lived in it.--Mr. Frederick, Mr. Lethuillier, and Mr. Smith, the English consul at Venice, encouraged Mr. Jackson to undertake to engrave in chiaro-oscuro, blocks after the most capital pictures of Titian, Tintoret, Giacomo Bassano, and Paul Veronese, which are to be found in Venice, and to this end procured him a subscription. In this work may be seen what engraving on wood will effectuate, and how truly the spirit and genius of every one of those celebrated masters are preserved in the prints.

“During his executing this work he was honoured with the encouragement of the Right Honourable the Marquis of Hartington, Sir Roger Newdigate, Sir Bouchier Wrey, and other English gentlemen on their travels at Venice, who saw Mr. Jackson drawing on the blocks for the print after the famous picture of the Crucifixion painted by Tintoret in the albergo of St. Roche. Those prints may now be seen at his house at Battersea.--Not content with having brought his works in chiaro-oscuro to such perfection, he attempted to print landscapes in all their original colours; not only to give to the world all the outline light and shade, which is to be found in the paintings of the best masters, but in a great degree their very manner and taste of colouring. With this intent he published six landscapes,[VII-12] which are his first attempt in this nature, in imitation of painting in _aquarillo_ or water-colours; which work was taken notice of by the Earl of Holderness, then ambassador extraordinary to the republic of Venice; and his excellency was pleased to permit the dedication of those prints to him, and to encourage this new attempt of printing pictures with a very particular and very favourable regard, and to express his approbation of the merit of the inventor.”

[Footnote VII-12: I have only seen one of these landscapes; and from it I form no very high opinion of the others. It is scarcely superior in point of execution to the prints in “proper colours” contained in the Essay.]

John Michael Papillon, one of the best French wood engravers of his age, was born in 1698. His grandfather and his father, as has been previously observed, were both wood engravers. In 1706, when only eight years old, he secretly made his first essay in wood engraving; and when only nine, his father, who had become aware of his amusing himself in this manner, gave him a large block to engrave, which he appears to have executed to his father’s satisfaction, though he had previously received no instructions in the art.[VII-13] The block was intended for printing paper-hangings, the manufacture of which was his father’s principal business. Though until the time of his father’s death, which happened in 1723, Papillon appears to have been chiefly employed in such works, and in hanging the papers which he had previously engraved, he yet executed several vignettes and ornaments for the booksellers, and sedulously endeavoured to improve himself in this higher department of his business.

[Footnote VII-13: Papillon, in the Supplement to his “Traité de la Gravure en Bois,” page 6, gives a small cut--a copy of a figure in a copper-plate by Callot--engraved by himself when nine years old. If the cut be genuine, the engraver had improved but little as he grew older.]

Shortly after the death of his father he married; and, having given up the business of engraving paper-hangings, he laboured so hard to perfect himself in the art of designing and engraving vignettes and ornaments for books, that his head became affected; and he sometimes displayed such absence of mind that his wife became alarmed, fancying that “he no longer loved her.” On his assuring her that his behaviour was the result of his anxiety to improve himself in drawing and engraving on wood, and to write something about the art, she encouraged him in his purpose, and aided him with her advice, for, as she was the daughter of a clever man, M. Chaveau, a sculptor, and had herself made many pretty drawings on fans, she had some knowledge of design. Papillon’s fits of absence, however, though they may have been proximately induced by close application and anxiety about his success in the line to which he intended to apply himself in future, appear to have originated in a tendency to insanity, which at a later period displayed itself in a more decided manner. In 1759, in consequence of a determination of blood to the head, as he says, through excessive joy at seeing his only daughter, who had lived from the age of four years with her uncle, combined with a recollection of his former sorrows, his mind became so much disordered that it was necessary to send him to an hospital, where, through repeated bleedings and other remedies, he seems to have speedily recovered. He mentions that in the same year, four other engravers were attacked by the same malady, and that only one of them regained his senses.[VII-14]

[Footnote VII-14: Traité de la Gravure en Bois, Supplement, tom. iii. p. 39. In the first volume, page 335, he alludes to the disorder as “un accident et une fatalité commune à plusieurs graveurs, aussi bien que moi.” Has the practice of engraving on wood or on copper a tendency to induce insanity? Three distinguished engravers, all from the same town, have in recent times lost their reason; and several others, from various parts of the country, have been afflicted with the same distressing malady. These facts deserve the consideration of parents who design to send their sons as pupils to engravers. When there is the least reason to suspect a hereditary taint of insanity in the constitution of the youth, it perhaps would be safest to put him to some other business or profession where close attention to minute objects is less required.]

Papillon’s endeavours to improve himself were not unsuccessful; the cuts which he engraved about 1724, though mostly small, possess considerable merit; they are not only designed with much more feeling than the generality of those executed by other French engravers of the period, but are also much more effective, displaying a variety of tint and a contrast of light and shade which are not to be found in the works of his contemporaries. In 1726, in order to divert his anxiety and to bring his cuts into notice, he projected _Le petit Almanach de Paris_, which subsequently was generally known as “Le Papillon.” The first that he published was for the year 1727; and the wood-cuts which it contained equally attracted the attention of the public and of connoisseurs. Monsieur Colombat, the editor of the Court Calendar, spoke highly of the cut for the mouth of January; the cross-hatchings, he said, were executed in the first style of wood engraving, and he kindly predicted to Papillon that he would one day excel in his art. From this time he seems to have no longer had any doubt of his own abilities, but, on the contrary, to have entertained a very high opinion of them. He appears to have considered wood engraving as the highest of all the graphic arts, and himself as the greatest of all its professors, either ancient or modern.

From this, to him, memorable epoch,--the publication of “Le petit Almanach de Paris,” with cuts by PAPILLON,--he appears to have been seldom without employment, for in the Supplement to the “Traité de la Gravure en Bois,” he mentions that in 1768, the “Collection of the Works of the Papillons,” presented by him to the Royal Library, contained upwards of _five thousand_ pieces of his own engraving. This “Recueil des Papillons,” which he seems to have considered as a family monument “ære perennius,” is perpetually referred to in the course of his work. It consisted of four large folio volumes containing specimens of wood engravings executed by the different members of the Papillon family for three generations--his grandfather, his father, his uncle, his brother, and himself.

Papillon was employed not only by the booksellers of his own country, but also by those of Holland. A book, entitled “Historische School en Huis-Bybel,” printed at Amsterdam in 1743, contains two hundred and seventeen cuts, all of which appear to have been either engraved by Papillon himself, or under his superintendence. His name appears on several of them, and they are all engraved in the same style. From a passage in the dedication, it seems likely that they had appeared in a similar work printed at the same place a few years previously. They are generally executed in a coarser manner than those contained in Papillon’s own work, but the style of engraving and general effect are the same. The cut on the next page is a copy of the first, which is one of the best in the work. To the left is Papillon’s name, engraved, as was customary with him, in very small letters, with the date, 1734.

Papillon’s History of Wood Engraving, published in 1766, in two octavo volumes, with a Supplement,[VII-15] under the title of “Traité Historique et Pratique de la Gravure en Bois,” is said to have been projected, and partly written, upwards of thirty years before it was given to the public. Shortly after his being admitted a member of the Society of Arts, in 1733, he read, at one of the meetings, a paper on the history and practice of wood engraving; and in 1735 the Society signified their approbation that a work written by him on the subject should be printed. It appears that the first volume of such a work was actually printed between 1736 and 1738, but never published. He does not explain why the work was not proceeded with at that time; and it would be useless to speculate on the possible causes of the interruption. He mentions that a copy of this volume was preserved in the Royal Library; and he charges Fournier the younger, who between 1758 and 1761 published three tracts on the invention of wood engraving and printing, with having availed himself of a portion of the historical information contained in this volume. The public, however, according to his own statement, gained by the delay; as he grew older he gained more knowledge of the history of the art, and “invented” several important improvements in his practice, all of which are embodied in his later work. In 1758 he also discovered the memoranda which he had made at Monsieur De Greder’s, in 1719 or 1720, relative to the interesting twins, Alexander Alberic Cunio and his sister Isabella, who, about 1284, between the fourteenth and sixteenth years of their age, executed a series of wood engravings illustrative of the history of Alexander the Great.[VII-16] However the reader may be delighted or amused by the romantic narrative of the Cunio, Papillon’s reputation as the historian of his art would most likely have stood a _little_ higher had he never discovered those memoranda. They have very much the character of ill-contrived forgeries; and even supposing that he believed them, and printed them in good faith, his judgment must be sacrificed to save his honesty.

[Footnote VII-15: The Supplement, or “Tome troisième,” as it is also called, though dated 1766, was not printed until 1768, as is evident from a “Discours Nuptial,” at page 97, pronounced on 13th June 1768. Two of the cuts also contain the date 1768.]

[Footnote VII-16: Papillon’s account of the Cunio, with an examination of its credibility, will be found in chapter i. pp. 26-39.]

The first volume of Papillon’s work contains the history of the art; it is divided into two parts, the first treating of wood engraving for the purpose of printing in the usual manner from a single block, and the second treating of chiaro-scuro. He does not trace the progress of the art by pointing out the improvements introduced at different periods; he enumerates all the principal cuts that he had seen, without reference to their execution as compared with those of an earlier date; and, from his desire to enhance the importance of his art, he claims almost every eminent painter whose name or mark is to be found on a cut, as a wood engraver. He is in this respect so extremely credulous as to assert that Mary de Medici, Queen of Henry IV. of France, had occasionally amused herself with engraving on wood; and in order to place the fact beyond doubt he refers to a cut representing the bust of a female, with the following inscription: “MARIA MEDICI. F. M.D.LXXXVII.” “The engraving,” he observes, with his usual _bonhomie_, “is rather better than what might be reasonably expected from a person of such quality; it contains many cross-hatchings, somewhat unequal indeed, and occasionally imperfect, but, notwithstanding, sufficiently well engraved to show that she had executed several wood-cuts before she had attempted this. I know more than one wood engraver--or at least calling himself such--who is incapable of doing the like.” In 1587, the date of this cut, Mary de Medici was only fourteen years old; and since its execution, according to Papillon, shows that she was then no novice in the art, she must have acquired her practical knowledge of wood engraving at rather an early age,--at least for a princess. Papillon never seems to have considered that F is the first letter of “FILIA” as well as of “FECIT,” nor to have suspected that the cut was simply a portrait of Mary de Medici, and not a specimen of her engraving.

From the following passage in the preface, he seems to have been aware that his including the names of many eminent painters in his list of wood engravers would be objected to. “Some persons, who entertain a preconceived opinion that many painters whom I mention have not engraved on wood, may perhaps dispute the works which I ascribe to them. Of such persons I have to request that they will not condemn me before they have acquainted themselves with my researches and examined my proofs, and that they will judge of them without prejudice or partiality.” The “researches” to which he alludes, appear to have consisted in searching out the names and marks of eminent painters in old wood-cuts, and his “proofs” are of the same kind as that which he alleges in support of his assertion that Mary de Medici had engraved on wood,--a fact which, as he remarks, “was unknown to Rubens.” The historical portion of Papillon’s work is indeed little more than a confused catalogue of all the wood-cuts which had come under his observation; it abounds in errors, and almost every page affords an instance of his credulity.

In the second volume, which is occupied with details relative to the practice of the art, Papillon gives his instructions and enumerates his “inventions” in a style of complacent self-conceit. The most trifling remarks are accompanied by a reference to the “Recueil des Papillons;” and the most obvious means of effecting certain objects,--such means as had been regularly adopted by wood engravers for upwards of two hundred years previously, and such as in succeeding times have suggested themselves to persons who never received any instructions in the art,--are spoken of as important discoveries, and credit taken for them accordingly. One of his fancied discoveries is that of lowering the surface of a block towards the edges in order that the engraved lines in those parts may be less subject to the action of the _plattin_ in printing, and consequently lighter in the impression. The Lyons Dance of Death, 1538, affords several instances of blocks lowered in this manner, not only towards the edges, but also in the middle of the cut, whenever it was necessary that certain delicately engraved lines should be lightly printed, and thus have the appearance of gradually diminishing till their extremities should scarcely be distinguishable from the paper on which they are impressed. Numerous instances of this practice are frequent in wood-cuts executed from 1540 to the decline of the art in the seventeenth century. Lowering was also practised by the engraver of the cuts in Croxall’s Æsop; by Thomas Bewick, who acquired a knowledge of wood engraving without a master; and by the self-taught artist who executed the cuts in Alexander’s Expedition down the Hydaspes, a poem by Dr. Thomas Beddoes, printed in 1792, but never published.[VII-17] As the same practice has recently been claimed as an “invention,” it would seem that some wood engravers are either apt to ascribe much importance to little things, or are singularly ignorant of what has been done by their predecessors. Such an “invention,” though unquestionably useful, surely does not require any particular ingenuity for its discovery; such “discoveries” every man makes for himself as soon as he feels the want of that which the so-called invention will supply. The man who pares the cork of a quart bottle in order to make it fit a smaller one is, with equal justice, entitled to the name of an inventor, provided he was not aware of the thing having been done before: such an “adaptation of means to the end” cannot, however, be considered as an effort of genius deserving of public commendation.

[Footnote VII-17: This poem was privately printed and never published. It was written expressly in imitation of Dr. Darwin, some of whose friends had contended that his style was inimitable, but were deceived into a belief that this poem was written by him, until the real author avowed himself. In the Advertisement prefixed to it Dr. Beddoes speaks thus of the engraver of the cuts: “The engravings in the following pages will be praised or excused when it is known that they are the performance of an uneducated and uninstructed artist, if such an application be not a profanation of the term, in a remote village. All the assistance he received was from the example of Mr. Bewick’s most masterly engravings on wood.” The name of this self-taught artist was Edward Dyas, who was parish-clerk at Madeley, Shropshire, where the book was printed. The _compositor_, as is stated in the same Advertisement, was a young woman.--See _Bibliotheca Parriana_, p. 513.]

In Papillon’s time it was not customary with French engravers on wood to have the subject perfectly drawn on the block, with all the lines and hatchings pencilled in, and the _effect_ and the different tints indicated either in pencil or in Indian ink, as is the usual practice in the present day. The design was first drawn on paper; from this, by means of tracing paper, the engraver made an outline copy on the block; and, without pencilling in all the lines or washing in the tints, he proceeded to “translate” the original, to which he constantly referred in the progress of his work, in the same manner as a copper-plate engraver does to the drawing or painting before him. Papillon perceived the disadvantages which resulted from this mode of proceeding; and though he still continued to make his first drawing on paper, he copied it more carefully and distinctly on the block than was usual with his contemporaries. He was thus enabled to proceed with greater certainty in his engraving; what he had to effect was immediately before him, and it was no longer necessary to refer so frequently to the original. To the circumstance of the drawings being perfectly made on the block, Papillon ascribes in a great measure the excellence of the old wood engravings of the time of Durer and Holbein.

Papillon, although always inclined to magnify little things connected with wood engraving, and to take great credit to himself for trifling “inventions,” was yet thoroughly acquainted with the practice of his art. The mode of thickening the lines in certain parts of a cut, after it has been engraved, by scraping them down, was frequently practised by him, and he explains the manner of proceeding, and gives a cut of the tools required in the operation.[VII-18] As Papillon, previous to the publication of his book, had contributed several papers on the subject of wood engraving to the famed Encyclopédie, he avails himself of the second volume of the Traité to propose several additions and corrections to those articles. The following definition proposed to be inserted in the Encyclopédie, after the article GRATUIT, will afford some idea of the manner in which he is accustomed to speak of his “inventions.” The term which he explains is “GRATTURE ou GRATTAGE,” literally, “SCRAPING,” the practice just alluded to. “This is, according to the new manner of engraving on wood, the operation of skilfully and carefully scraping down parts in an engraved block which are not sufficiently dark, in order to give them, as may be required, greater strength, and to render the shades more effective. This admirable plan, utterly unknown before, was accidentally discovered in 1731 by M. Papillon, by whom the art of wood engraving is advanced to a state tending to perfection, and approaching more and more towards the beauty of engraving on copper.” The tools used by Papillon to scrape down the lines of an engraved block, and thus render them thicker and, consequently, the impression darker, differ considerably in shape from those used for the same purpose by modern wood engravers in England. This tool now principally used is something like a copper-plate engraver’s burnisher, and occasionally a fine and sharp file is employed.

[Footnote VII-18: “Manière de Gratter les tailles déjà gravées pour les rendre plus fortes, afin de les faire ombrer davantage.”--Supplément du Traité de la Gravure en Bois, p. 50.]

In Papillon’s time the French wood engravers appear to have held the graver in the manner of a pen, and in forming a line to have cut _towards them_ as in forming a down-stroke in writing, and to have engraved on the longitudinal, and not the cross section of the wood. Modern English wood engravers, having the rounded handle of the graver supported against the hollow of the hand, and directing the blade by means of the fore-finger and thumb, cut the line _from them_; and always engrave on the cross section of the wood. Papillon mentions box, pear-tree, apple-tree, and the wood of the service-tree, as the best for the purposes of engraving: box was generally used for the smaller and finer cuts intended for the illustration or ornament of books; the larger cuts, in which delicacy was not required, were mostly engraved on pear-tree wood. Apple-tree wood was principally used by the wood engravers of Normandy. Next to box, Papillon prefers the wood of the service-tree. The box brought from Turkey, though of larger size, he considers inferior to that of Provence, Italy, or Spain.

Although Papillon’s _modus operandi_ differs considerably from that of English wood engravers of the present day, I am not aware of any supposed discovery in the modern practice of the art that was not known to him. The methods of lowering a block in certain parts before drawing the subject on it, and of thickening the lines, and thus getting more _colour_, by scraping the surface of the cut when engraved, were, as has been observed, known to him; he occasionally introduced cross-hatchings in his cuts;[VII-19] and in one of his chapters he gives instructions how to insert a _plug_ in a block, in order to replace a part which had either been spoiled in the course of engraving or subsequently damaged. One of the improvements which he suggested, but did not put in practice, was a plan for engraving the same subject on two, three, or four blocks, in order to obtain cross-hatchings and a variety of tints with less trouble than if the subject were entirely engraved on the same block. Such cuts were not to be printed as chiaro-scuros, but in the usual manner, with printer’s ink. It is worthy of observation that Bewick in the latter part of his life had formed a similar opinion of the advantages of engraving a subject on two or more blocks, and thus obtaining with comparative ease such cross-lines and varied tints as could only be executed with great difficulty on a single block. He, however, proceeded further than Papillon, for he began to engrave a large cut which he intended to finish in this manner; and he was so satisfied that the experiment would be successful, that when the pressman handed to him a proof of the first block, he exclaimed, “I wish I was but twenty years younger!”

[Footnote VII-19: Several cuts in which cross-hatching is introduced occur in the “Traité de la Gravure en Bois;” and the author refers to several others in the “Recueil des Papillons” as displaying the same kind of work. He considers the execution of such hatchings as the test of excellence in wood engraving; “for,” he observes, “when a person has learnt to execute them he may boast of having mastered one of the most difficult parts of the art, and may justly assume the name of a wood engraver.”--Tom. ii. p. 90.]

Papillon, in his account of the practice of the art, explains the manner of engraving and printing chiaro-scuros; and in illustration of the process he gives a cut executed in this style, together with separate impressions from each of the four blocks from which it is printed. There is also another cut of the same kind prefixed to the second part of the first volume, containing the history of engraving in chiaro-scuro. Scarcely anything connected with the practice of wood engraving appears to have escaped his notice. He mentions the effect of the breath in cold weather as rendering the block damp and the drawing less distinct; and he gives in one of his cuts the figure of a “mentonnière,”--that is to say, a piece of quilted linen, like the pad used by women to keep their bonnets cocked up,--which, being placed before the mouth and nostrils, and kept in its place by strings tied behind the head, screened the block from the direct action of the engraver’s breath.

He frequently complains of the careless manner in which wood-cuts were printed;[VII-20] but from the following passage we learn that the inferiority of the printed cuts when compared with the engraver’s proofs did not always proceed from the negligence of the printer. “Some wood engravers have the art of fabricating proofs of their cuts much more excellent and delicate than they fairly ought to be; and the following is the manner in which they contrive to obtain tolerably decent proofs from very indifferent engravings. They first take two or three impressions, and then, to obtain one to their liking, and with which they may deceive their employers, they only ink the block on those places which ought to be dark, leaving the distances and lighter parts without any ink, except what remained after taking the previous impressions. The proof which they now obtain appears extremely delicate in those parts which were not properly inked; but when they come to be printed in a page with type, the impression is quite different from the proof which the engraver delivers with the blocks; there is no variety of tint, all is hard, and the distance is sometimes darker than objects in the fore-ground. I run no great risk in saying that all the three _Le Sueurs_ have been accustomed to practise this deception.”[VII-21]

[Footnote VII-20: He complains in another part of the work that many printers, both compositors and pressmen, by pretending to engrave on wood, had brought the art into disrepute. They not only spoiled the work of regular engravers, but _dared_ to engrave wood-cuts themselves.]

[Footnote VII-21: Traité de la Gravure en Bois, tom. ii. p. 365.]

All the cuts in Papillon’s work, except the portrait prefixed to the first volume,[VII-22] are his own engraving, and, for the most part, from his own designs. The most of the blocks were lent to the author by the different persons for whom he had engraved them long previous to the appearance of his work.[VII-23] They are introduced as ornaments at the beginning and end of the chapters; but though they may enable the reader to judge of Papillon’s abilities as a designer and engraver on wood, beyond this they do not in the least illustrate the progress of the art. The execution of some of the best is extremely neat; and almost all of them display an effect--a contrast of black and white--which is not to be found in any other wood-cuts of the period. A few of the designs possess considerable merit, but in by far the greater number simplicity and truth are sacrificed to ornament and French taste. Whatever may be Papillon’s faults as a historian of the art, he deserves great credit for the diligence with which he pursued it under unfavourable circumstances, and for his endeavours to bring it into notice at a time when it was greatly neglected. His labours in this respect were, however, attended with no immediate fruit. He died in 1776, and his immediate successors do not appear to have profited by his instructions. The wood-cuts executed in France between 1776 and 1815 are generally much inferior to those of Papillon; and the recent progress which wood engraving has made in that country seems rather to have been influenced by English example than by his precepts.

[Footnote VII-22: The portrait was engraved “_in venerationis testimonium_,” and presented to Papillon by Nicholas Caron, a bookseller and wood engraver of Besançon. The following complimentary verses are engraved below the portrait:

“Tu vois ici les traits d’un Artiste fameux Dont la savante main enfanta des merveilles; Par ses travaux et par ses veilles Il resuscita l’Art qui le trace à tes yeux.”

Papillon speaks favourably of Caron as a wood engraver; he says that “he is much superior to Nioul, Jackson, Contat, Lefevre, and others his contemporaries, and would at least have equalled the Le Sueurs had he applied himself to drawing the figure.”]

[Footnote VII-23: From several of those blocks not less than sixty thousand impressions had been previously taken, and from one of them four hundred and fifty-six thousand had been printed.]

Nicholas Le Sueur--born 1691, died 1764,--was, next to Papillon, the best French wood engraver of his time. His chiaro-scuros, printed entirely from wood-blocks, are executed with great boldness and spirit, and partake more of the character of the earlier Italian chiaro-scuros than any other works of the same kind engraved by his contemporaries.[VII-24] He chiefly excelled in the execution of chiaro-scuros and large cuts; his small cuts are of very ordinary character; they are generally engraved in a hard and meagre style, want variety of tint, and are deficient in effect.

[Footnote VII-24: In the chiaro-scuros from original drawings in the collection of Monsieur Crozat, with the figures etched by Count Caylus, the wood-blocks from which the sepia-coloured tints were printed were engraved by Nicholas Le Sueur.--About the same period Arthur Pond and George Knapton in England, and Count M. A. Zanetti in Italy, executed in the same manner several chiaro-scuros in imitation of drawings and sketches by eminent painters. The taste for chiaro-scuros seems to have been revived in France by the Regent-Duke of Orleans, who declared that Ugo da Carpi’s chiaro-scuros afforded him more pleasure than any other kind of prints.]

P. S. Fournier, the younger, a letter-founder of considerable reputation,--born at Paris 1712, died 1768,--occasionally engraved on wood. Papillon says that he was self-taught; and that he certainly would have made greater progress in the art had he not devoted himself almost exclusively to the business of type-founding. Monsieur Fournier is, however, better known as a writer on the history of the art than as a practical wood engraver. Between 1758 and 1761 he published three tracts relating to the origin and progress of wood engraving, and the invention of typography.[VII-25] From these works it is evident that, though he takes no small credit to himself for his practical knowledge of wood engraving and printing, he was very imperfectly acquainted with his subject. They abound in errors which it is impossible that any person possessing the knowledge he boasts of should commit, unless he had very superficially examined the books and cuts on which he pronounces an opinion. He seems indeed to have thought that, from the circumstance of his being a wood engraver and letter-founder, his decisions on all doubtful matters in the early history of wood engraving and printing should be received with implicit faith. Looking at the comparatively small size of his works, no writer, not even Papillon himself, has committed so many mistakes; and his decisions are generally most peremptory when utterly groundless or evidently wrong. He asserts that Faust and Scheffer’s Psalter, 1457-1459, is printed from moveable types of wood, and that the most of the earliest specimens of typography are printed from the same kind of types; and in the fulness of his knowledge he also declares that the text of the Theurdank is printed not from types, but from engraved wood-blocks. Like Papillon, he seems to have possessed a marvellous sagacity in ferreting out old wood engravers. He says that Andrea Mantegna engraved on wood a grand triumph in 1486; that Sebastian Brandt engraved in 1490 the wood-cuts in the Ship of Fools,[VII-26] after the designs of J. Locher; and that Parmegiano executed several wood-cuts after designs by Raffaele. He decides positively that Albert Durer, Lucas Cranach, Titian, and Holbein were wood engravers, and, like Papillon, he includes Mary de Medici in the list. Papillon appears to have had good reason to complain that Fournier had availed himself of his volume printed in 1738. His taste appears to have been scarcely superior to his knowledge and judgment: he mentions a large and coarsely engraved cut of the head of Christ as one of the best specimens of Albert Durer’s engraving; and he says that Papillon’s cuts are for excellence of design and execution equal to those of the greatest masters!

[Footnote VII-25: The following are the titles of those tracts, which are rather scarce. They are all of small octavo size, and printed by J. Barbou. 1. Dissertation sur l’Origine et les Progrès de l’Art de Graver en Bois, pour éclaircir quelques traits de l’Histoire de l’Imprimerie, et prouver que Guttemberg n’en est pas l’Inventeur. Par Mr. Fournier le Jeune, Graveur et Fondeur de Caractères d’Imprimerie, 1758. 2. De l’Origine et des productions de l’Imprimerie primitive en taille en Bois, 1759. 3. Remarques sur un Ouvrage intitulé, Lettre sur l’Origine de l’Imprimerie, &c. 1761. This last was an answer to a letter written by M. Bär, almoner of the Swedish chapel in Paris, in which the two former tracts of Fournier were severely criticised.--Fournier was also the author of a work in two small volumes, entitled “Manuel Typographique, utile aux Gens de lettres, et à ceux qui exercent les differentes parties de l’Art de l’Imprimerie.”]

[Footnote VII-26: The cut here introduced is the first in the _Stultifera Navis_, or “Ship of Fools,” and is copied from Pyason’s edition of 1509. The following lines accompany it:

“----this is my mynde, this one pleasoure have I, Of bokes to have great plenty and aparayle. I take no wysdome by them; nor yet avayle Nor them perceyve not: And then I them despyse. Thus am I a foole and all that serve that guyse.”]

From a passage in one of Fournier’s tracts--Remarques Typographiques, 1761,--it is evident that wood engraving was then greatly neglected in Germany. It relates to the following observation of M. Bär’s, almoner of the Swedish chapel at Paris, on the length of time necessary to engrave a number of wooden types sufficient to print such a work as Faust and Scheffer’s Psalter: “M. Schœpflin declares that, by the general admission of all experienced persons, it would require upwards of six years to complete such a work in so perfect a manner.” The following is Fournier’s rejoinder: “To understand the value of this remark, it ought to be known that, so far from there being many experienced wood engravers to choose from, M. Schœpflin would most likely experience some difficulty in finding one to consult.” The wood-cuts which occur in German books printed between 1700 and 1760 are certainly of the most wretched kind; contemptible alike in design and execution. Some of the best which I have seen--and they are very bad--are to be found in a thin folio entitled “Orbis Literatus Germanico-Europaeus,” printed at Frankfort in 1737. They are cuts of the seals of all the principal colleges and academical foundations in Germany. The art in Italy about the same period was almost equally neglected. An Italian wood engraver, named Lucchesini, executed several cuts between 1760 and 1770. Most of the head-pieces and ornaments in the Popes’ Decretals, printed at Rome at this period, were engraved by him; and he also engraved the cuts in a Spanish book entitled “Letania Lauretana de la Virgen Santissima,” printed at Valencia in 1768. It is scarcely necessary to say that these cuts are of the humblest character.

Though wood engraving did not make any progress in England from 1722 to the time of Thomas Bewick, yet the art was certainly never lost in this country; the old stock still continued to put forth a branch--_non deficit alter_--although not a golden one. Two wood-cuts tolerably well executed, and which show that the engraver was acquainted with the practice of “lowering,” occur in a thin quarto, London, printed for H. Payne, 1760. The book and the cuts are thus noticed in Southey’s Life of Cowper, volume I. page 50. The writer is speaking of the Nonsense Club, of which Cowper was a member.

“At those meetings of

Jest and youthful Jollity, Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides,

there can be little doubt that the two odes to Obscurity and Oblivion originated, joint compositions of Lloyd and Colman, in ridicule of Gray and Mason. They were published in a quarto pamphlet, with a vignette, in the title-page, of an ancient poet safely seated and playing on his harp; and at the end a tail-piece representing a modern poet in huge boots, flung from a mountain by his Pegasus into the sea, and losing his tie-wig in the fall.” The following is a fac-simile of the cut representing the poet’s fall. He seems to have been tolerably confident of himself, for, though the winged steed has no bridle, he is provided with a pair of formidable spurs.

The cuts in a collection of humorous pieces in verse, entitled “The Oxford Sausage,” 1764, are evidently by the same engraver, and almost every one of them affords an instance of “lowering.” At the foot of one of them, at page 89, the name “Lister” is seen; the subject is a bacchanalian figure mounted on a winged horse, which has undoubtedly been drawn from the same model as the Pegasus in Colman and Lloyd’s burlesque odes. In an edition of the Sausage, printed in 1772, the name of “T. Lister” occurs on the title-page as one of the publishers, and as residing at Oxford. Although those cuts are generally deficient in effect, their execution is scarcely inferior to many of those in the work of Papillon; the portrait indeed of “Mrs. Dorothy Spreadbury, Inventress of the Oxford Sausage,” forming the frontispiece to the edition of 1772, is better executed than Monsieur Nicholas Caron’s votive portrait of Papillon, “the restorer of the art of wood engraving.”

In 1763, a person named S. Watts engraved two or three large wood-cuts in outline, slightly shaded, after drawings by Luca Cambiaso. Impressions of those cuts are most frequently printed in a yellowish kind of ink. About the same time Watts also engraved, in a bold and free style, several small circular portraits of painters. In Sir John Hawkins’s History of Music, published in 1776, there are four wood-cuts; and at the bottom of the largest--Palestrini presenting his work on Music to the Pope--is the name of the engraver thus: _T. Hodgson. Sculp._ Dr. Dibdin, in noticing this cut, in his Preliminary Disquisition on Early Engraving and Ornamental Printing, prefixed to his edition of the Typographical Antiquities, says that it was “done by Hodgson, the master of the celebrated Bewick.”[VII-27] If by this it is meant that Bewick was the apprentice of Hodgson, or that he obtained from Hodgson his knowledge of wood engraving, the assertion is incorrect. It is, however, almost certain that Bewick, when in London in 1776, was employed by Hodgson, as will be shown in its proper place.

[Footnote VII-27: Dr. Dibdin adds: “Mr. Douce informs me that Sir John Hawkins told him of the artist’s obtaining the prize for it from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts.”]

Having now given some account of wood engraving in its languishing state--occasionally showing symptoms of returning vigour, and then almost immediately sinking into its former state of depression--we at length arrive at an epoch from which its revival and progressive improvement may be safely dated. The person whose productions recalled public attention to the neglected art of wood engraving was

This distinguished wood engraver, whose works will be admired as long as truth and nature shall continue to charm, was born on the 10th or 11th of August, 1753, at Cherry-burn, in the county of Northumberland, but on the south side of the Tyne, about twelve miles westward of Newcastle.

His father rented a small land-sale colliery at Mickley-bank, in the neighbourhood of his dwelling, and it is said that when a boy the future wood engraver sometimes worked in the pit. At a proper age he was sent as a day-scholar to a school kept by the Rev. Christopher Gregson at Ovingham, on the opposite side of the Tyne. The Parsonage House, in which Mr. Gregson lived, is pleasantly situated on the edge of a sloping bank immediately above the river; and many reminiscences of the place are to be found in Bewick’s cuts; the gate at the entrance is introduced, with trifling variations, in three or four different subjects; and a person acquainted with the neighbourhood will easily recognise in his tail-pieces several other little local sketches of a similar kind. In the time of the Rev. James Birkett, Mr. Gregson’s successor, Ovingham school had the character of being one of the best private schools in the county; and several gentlemen, whose talents reflect credit on their teacher, received their education there. In the following cut, representing a view of Ovingham from the south-westward, the Parsonage House, with its garden sloping down to the Tyne, is perceived immediately to the right of the clump of large trees. The bank on which those trees grow is known as the _crow-tree bank_. The following lines, descriptive of a view from the Parsonage House, are from “The School Boy,” a poem, by Thomas Maude, A.M., who received his early education at Ovingham under Mr. Birkett.

“But can I sing thy simpler pleasures flown, Loved OVINGHAM! and leave the _chief_ unknown,-- Thy _annual Fair_, of every joy the mart, That drained my pocket, ay, and took my childish heart? Blest morn! how lightly from my bed I sprung, When in the blushing east thy beams were young; While every blithe co-tenant of the room Rose at a call, with cheeks of liveliest bloom. Then from each well-packed drawer our vests we drew, Each gay-frilled shirt, and jacket smartly new. Brief toilet ours! yet, on a morn like this, Five extra minutes were not deemed amiss. Fling back the casement!--Sun, propitious shine! How sweet your beams gild the clear-flowing Tyne, That winds beneath our master’s garden-brae, With broad bright mazes o’er its pebbly way. See Prudhoe! lovely in the morning beam:-- } Mark, mark, the ferry-boat, with twinkling gleam, } Wafting fair-going folks across the stream. } Look out! a bed of sweetness breathes below, Where many a rocket points its spire of snow; And from the _Crow-tree Bank_ the cawing sound Of sable troops incessant poured around! Well may each little bosom throb with joy! On such a morn, who would not be a boy?”

Bewick’s school acquirements probably did not extend beyond English reading, writing, and arithmetic; for, though he knew a little Latin, he does not appear to have ever received any instructions in that language. In a letter dated 18th April, 1803, addressed to Mr. Christopher Gregson,[VII-28] London, a son of his old master, introducing an artist of the name of Murphy, who had painted his portrait, Bewick humorously alludes to his _beauty_ when a boy, and to the state of his coat-sleeve, in consequence of his using it instead of a pocket-handkerchief. Bewick, it is to be observed, was very hard-featured, and much marked with the small-pox. After mentioning Mr. Murphy as “a man of worth, and a first-rate artist in the miniature line,” he thus proceeds: “I do not imagine, at your time of life, my dear friend, that you will be solicitous about forming new acquaintances; but it may not, perhaps, be putting you much out of the way to show any little civilities to Mr. Murphy during his stay in London. He has, on his own account, taken my portrait, and I dare say will be desirous to show you it the first opportunity: when you see it, you will no doubt conclude that T. B. is turning _bonnyer_ and _bonnyer_[VII-29] in his old days; but indeed you cannot _help knowing this_, and also that there were _great indications_ of its turning out so _long since_. But if you have forgot our earliest youth, perhaps your brother P.[VII-30] may help you to remember what a _great beauty_ I was at that time, when the grey coat-sleeve was _glazed_ from the cuff towards the elbows.” The words printed in Italics are those that are underlined by Bewick himself.

[Footnote VII-28: Mr. Christopher Gregson, who was an apothecary, lived in Blackfriars. He died about the year 1813. As long as he lived, Bewick maintained a friendly correspondence with him.]

[Footnote VII-29: _Prettier_ and _prettier_.]

[Footnote VII-30: Philip.]

Bewick, having shown a taste for drawing, was placed by his father as an apprentice with Mr. Ralph Beilby, an engraver, living in Newcastle, to whom on the 1st of October 1767 he was bound for a term of seven years. Mr. Beilby was not a wood engraver; and his business in the copper-plate line was of a kind which did not allow of much scope for the display of artistic talent. He engraved copper-plates for books, when any by chance were offered to him; and he also executed brass-plates for doors, with the names of the owners handsomely filled up, after the manner of the old “_niellos_,” with black sealing-wax. He engraved crests and initials on steel and silver watch-seals; also on tea-spoons, sugar-tongs, and other articles of plate; and the engraving of numerals and ornaments, with the name of the maker, on clock-faces,--which were not then enamelled,--seems to have formed one of the chief branches of his very general business.[VII-31]

[Footnote VII-31: “While with BEILBY he was employed in engraving clock-faces, which, I have heard him say, made his hands as hard as a blacksmith’s, and almost disgusted him with engraving.”--Sketch of the Life and Works of the late Thomas Bewick, by George C. Atkinson. Printed in the Transactions of the Natural History Society, Newcastle, 1830.]

Bewick’s attention appears to have been first directed to wood engraving in consequence of his master having been employed by the late Dr. Charles Hutton, then a schoolmaster in Newcastle, to engrave on wood the diagrams for his Treatise on Mensuration. The printing of this work was commenced in 1768, and was completed in 1770. The engraving of the diagrams was committed to Bewick, who is said to have invented a graver with a fine groove at the point, which enabled him to cut the outlines by a single operation.

The above is a fac-simile of one of the earliest productions of Bewick in the art of wood engraving. The church is intended for that of St. Nicholas, Newcastle.

Subsequently, and while he was still an apprentice, Bewick undoubtedly endeavoured to improve himself in wood engraving; but his progress does not appear to have been great, and his master had certainly very little work of this kind for him to do. He appears to have engraved a few bill-heads on wood; and it is not unlikely that the cuts in a little book entitled “Youth’s Instructive and Entertaining Story Teller,” first published by T. Saint, Newcastle, 1774, were executed by him before the expiration of his apprenticeship.

Bewick, at one period during his apprenticeship, paid ninepence a week for his lodgings in Newcastle, and usually received a brown loaf every week from Cherry-burn. “During his servitude,” says Mr. Atkinson, “he paid weekly visits to Cherry-burn, except when the river was so much swollen as to prevent his passage of it at Eltringham, when he vociferated his inquiries across the stream, and then returned to Newcastle.” This account of his being accustomed to _shout_ his enquiries across the Tyne first appeared in a Memoir prefixed to the Select Fables, published by E. Charnley, 1820. Mr. William Bedlington, an old friend of Bewick, once asked him if it were true? “Babbles and nonsense!” was the reply. “It never happened but once, and that was when the river had suddenly swelled before I could reach the top of the _allers_,[VII-32] and yet folks are made to believe that I was in the habit of doing it.”

[Footnote VII-32: Alders--the name of a small plantation above Ovingham, which Bewick had to pass through on his way to Eltringham ferry-boat.]

On the expiration of his apprenticeship he returned to his father’s house at Cherry-burn, but still continued to work for Mr. Beilby. About this time he seems to have formed the resolution of applying himself exclusively in future to wood engraving, and with this view to have executed several cuts as specimens of his ability. In 1775 he received a premium of seven guineas from the Society of Arts for a cut of the Huntsman and the Old Hound, which he probably engraved when living at Cherry-burn after leaving Mr. Beilby.[VII-33] The following is a fac-simile of this cut, which was first printed in an edition of Gay’s Fables, published by T. Saint, Newcastle, 1779. Mr. Henry Bohn, the publisher of the present edition, happening to be in possession of the original cut, it is annexed on the opposite page.

[Footnote VII-33: The Reverend William Turner, of Newcastle, in a letter printed in the Monthly Magazine for June 1801, says that Bewick obtained this premium “_during his apprenticeship_.” This must be a mistake; as his apprenticeship expired in October 1774, and he obtained the premium in 1775. It is possible, however, that the engraving may have been executed during that period.]

In 1776, when on a visit to some of his relations in Cumberland,[VII-34] he availed himself of the opportunity of visiting the Lakes; and in after-life he used frequently to speak in terms of admiration of the beauty of the scenery, and of the neat appearance of the white-washed, slate-covered cottages on the banks of some of the lakes. His tour was made on foot, with a stick in his hand and a wallet at his back; and it has been supposed that in a tail-piece, to be found at page 177 of the first volume of his British Birds, first edition, 1797, he has introduced a sketch of himself in his travelling costume, drinking out of what he himself would have called the _flipe_ of his hat. The figure has been copied in our ornamental letter T at page 471.

[Footnote VII-34: Bewick’s mother, Jane Wilson, was a daughter of Thomas Wilson of Ainstable in Cumberland, about five miles north-north-west of Kirk-Oswald.]

In the same year, 1776, he went to London, where he arrived on the 1st of October. He certainly did not remain more than a twelvemonth in London,[VII-35] for in 1777 he returned to Newcastle, and entered into partnership with his former master, Mr. Ralph Beilby. Bewick--who does not appear to have been wishful to undeceive those who fancied that he was the person who rediscovered the “long-lost art of engraving on wood”[VII-36]--would never inform any of the good-natured friends, who fished for intelligence with the view of writing his life, of the works on which he was employed when in London. The faith of a believer in the story of Bewick’s re-discovering “the long-lost art” would have received too great a shock had he been told by Bewick himself that on his arrival in London he found professors of the “long-lost art” regularly exercising their calling, and that with one of them he found employment.

[Footnote VII-35: Bewick, in London, in 1828, observed to one of his former pupils, that it was then fifty-one years since he left London, on his first visit, to return to Newcastle.]

[Footnote VII-36: Mr. Atkinson talks about wood engraving having taken a nap for a century or two “after the time of Durer and Holbein,” and of Bewick being the restorer of the “long-lost art;” and yet, with singular inconsistency, in another part of his Sketch, he refers to Papillon, whose work, containing a minute account of the art as then practised, was published about two years before Bewick began to engrave on wood.--The Reverend William Turner, who ought to have known better, also speaks of the “long-lost art,” in his Memoir of Thomas Bewick.]

There is every reason to believe that Bewick, when in London, was chiefly employed by T. Hodgson, most likely the person who engraved the four cuts in Sir John Hawkins’s History of Music. It is at any rate certain that several cuts engraved by Bewick appeared in a little work entitled “A curious Hieroglyphick Bible,” printed by and for T. Hodgson, in George’s Court, St. John’s Lane, Clerkenwell.[VII-37] Proofs of three of the principal cuts are now lying before me. The subjects are: Adam and Eve, with the Deity seen in the clouds, forming the frontispiece; the Resurrection; and a cut representing a gentleman seated in an arm-chair, with four boys beside him: the border of this cut is of the same kind as that of the large cut of the Chillingham Bull engraved by Bewick in 1789. These proofs appear to have been presented by Bewick to an eminent painter, now dead, with whom either then, or at a subsequent period, he had become acquainted. Not one of Bewick’s biographers mentions those cuts, nor seems to have been aware of their existence. The two memoirs of Bewick, written by his “friends” G. C. Atkinson and John F. M. Dovaston,[VII-38] sufficiently demonstrate that neither of them had enjoyed his confidence in matters relative to his progress in the art of wood engraving.

[Footnote VII-37: I have not been able to discover the date of the first edition of this work. The third edition is dated 1785.]

[Footnote VII-38: “Some Account of the Life, Genius, and Personal Habits of the late Thomas Bewick, the celebrated Artist and Engraver on Wood. By his Friend John F. M. Dovaston, Esq. A.M.,” was published in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, 1829-1830. Mr. Dovaston seems to have caught a knowledge of Bewick’s personal habits at a glance; and a considerable number of his observations on other matters appear to have been the result of a peculiar quickness of apprehension. What he says about the church of Ovingham not being “parted into proud pews,” when Bewick was a boy, is incorrect. It had, in fact, been pewed from an early period; for, on the 2nd of September, 1763, Dr. Sharp, Archdeacon of Northumberland, on visiting the church, notices the pews as being “very bad and irregular;” and on a board over the vestry-door is the following inscription: “This Church was new pewed, A. D. 1766.” No boards from this church containing specimens of Bewick’s early drawing were ever in the possession of the Duke of Northumberland. Mr. Dovaston is frequently imaginative, but seldom correct. His personal sketch of Bewick is a ridiculous caricature.]

Mr. Atkinson, in his Sketch of the Life and Works of Bewick, says that when in London he worked with a person of the name of Cole. Of this person, as a wood engraver, I have not been able to discover any trace. Bewick did not like London; and he always advised his former pupils and north-country friends to leave the “province covered with houses” as soon as they could, and return to the country to there enjoy the beauties of Nature, fresh air, and content. In the letter to his old schoolfellow, Mr. Christopher Gregson, previously quoted, he thus expresses his opinion of London life. “Ever since you paid your last visit to the north, I have often been thinking upon you, and wishing that you would _lap up_, and leave the metropolis, to enjoy the fruits of your hard-earned industry on the banks of the Tyne, where you are so much respected, both on your own account and on that of those who are gone. Indeed, I wonder how you can think of turmoiling yourself to the end of the chapter, and let the opportunity slip of contemplating at your ease the beauties of Nature, so bountifully spread out to enlighten, to captivate, and to cheer the heart of man. For my part, I am still of the same mind that I was in when in London, and that is, _I would rather be herding sheep on Mickley bank top than remain in London, although for doing so I was to be made the premier of England_.” Bewick was truly a _country_ man; he felt that it was better “to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep;” for, though no person was capable of closer application to his art when within doors, he loved to spend his hours of relaxation in the open air, studying the character of beasts and birds in their natural state; and diligently noting those little incidents and traits of country life which give so great an interest to many of his tail-pieces. When a young man, he was fond of angling; and, like Roger Ascham, he “dearly loved a main of cocks.” When annoyed by street-walkers in London, he used to assume the air of a stupid countryman, and, in reply to their importunity, would ask, with an expression of stolid gravity, if they knew “Tommy Hummel o’ Prudhoe, Willy Eltringham o’ Hall-Yards, or Auld Laird Newton o’ Mickley?”[VII-39] He thus, without losing his temper, or showing any feeling of annoyance, soon got quit of those who wished to engage his attention, though sometimes not until he had received a hearty malediction for his stupidity.

[Footnote VII-39: Humble, Eltringham, and Newton were the names of three of his country acquaintances; Prudhoe, Hall-Yards, and Mickley are places near Ovingham.]

In 1777, on his return to Newcastle, he entered into partnership with Mr. Beilby; and his younger brother, John Bewick, who was then about seventeen years old, became their apprentice. From this time Bewick, though he continued to assist his partner in the other branches of their business,[VII-40] applied himself chiefly to engraving on wood. The cuts in an edition of Gay’s Fables, 1779,[VII-41] and in an edition of Select Fables, 1784, both printed by T. Saint, Newcastle, were engraved by Bewick, who was probably assisted by his brother. Several of those cuts are well engraved, though by no means to be compared to his later works, executed when he had acquired greater knowledge of the art, and more confidence in his own powers. He evidently improved as his talents were exercised; for the cuts in the Select Fables, 1784, are generally much superior to those in Gay’s Fables, 1779; the animals are better drawn and engraved; the sketches of landscape in the back-grounds are more natural; and the engraving of the foliage of the trees and bushes is, not unfrequently, scarce inferior to that of his later productions. Such an attention to nature in this respect is not to be found in any wood-cuts of an earlier date. The following impressions from two of the original cuts in the Select Fables are fair specimens; one is interesting, as being Bewick’s first idea of a favourite vignette in his British Land Birds; the other as his first treatment of the lion and the four bulls, afterwards repeated in his Quadrupeds. In the best cuts of the time of Durer and Holbein the foliage is generally neglected; the artists of that period merely give general forms of trees, without ever attending to that which contributes so much to their beauty. The merit of introducing this great improvement in wood engraving, and of depicting quadrupeds and birds in their natural forms, and with their characteristic expression, is undoubtedly due to Bewick. Though he was not the discoverer of the art of wood engraving, he certainly was the first who applied it with success to the delineation of animals, and to the natural representation of landscape and woodland scenery. He found for himself a path which no previous wood engraver had trodden, and in which none of his successors have gone beyond him. For several of the cuts in the Select Fables, Bewick was paid only nine shillings each.

[Footnote VII-40: Bewick could engrave on copper, but did not excel in this branch of engraving. The following are the principal copper-plates which are known to be of his engraving. Plates in Consett’s Tour through Sweden, Swedish Lapland, Finland, and Denmark, 4to. Stockton, 1789; The Whitley large Ox, 1789; and the remarkable Kyloe Ox, bred in the Mull, Argyleshire, 1790--A set of silver buttons, containing sporting devices, engraved by Bewick for the late H. U. Reay, Esq. of Killingworth, which passed into the possession of Mr. Reay’s son-in-law, Matthew Bell, Esq. of Wolsingham.]

[Footnote VII-41: Mr. Atkinson says that “about the same time he executed the cuts [sixty-two in number] for a small child’s book, entitled ‘A pretty Book of Pictures for little Masters and Misses, or Tommy Trip’s History of Beasts and Birds.’”--An edition of the Select Fables, with very bad wood-cuts, was printed by Mr. Saint in 1776. The person by whom they were engraved is unknown. Bewick always denied that any of them were of his engraving.]

In 1789 he drew and engraved his large cut of the Chillingham Bull,[VII-42] which many persons suppose to be his master-piece; but though it is certainly well engraved, and the character of the animal is well expressed, yet as a wood engraving it will not bear a comparison with several of the cuts in his History of British Birds. The grass and the foliage of the trees are most beautifully expressed; but there is a want of variety in the more distant trees, and the bark of that in the fore-ground to the left is too rough. This exaggeration of the roughness of the bark of trees is also to be perceived in many of his other cuts. The style in which the bull is engraved is admirably adapted to express the texture of the short white hair of the animal; the dewlap, however, is not well represented, it appears to be stiff instead of flaccid and pendulous; and the lines intended for the hairs on its margin are too _wiry_. On a stone in the fore-ground he has introduced a _bit_ of cross-hatching, but not with good effect, for it causes the stone to look very much like an old scrubbing-brush. Bewick was not partial to cross-hatching, and it is seldom to be found in cuts of his engraving. He seems to have introduced it in this cut rather to show to those who knew anything of the matter that he could engrave such lines, than from an opinion that they were necessary, or in the slightest degree improved the cut. This is almost the only instance in which Bewick has introduced black lines crossing each other, and thus forming what is usually called “cross-hatchings.” From the commencement of his career as a wood engraver, he adopted a much more simple method of obtaining colour. He very justly considered, that, as impressions of wood-cuts are printed from lines engraved in _relief_, the unengraved surface of the block already represented the darkest colour that could be produced; and consequently, instead of labouring to produce colour in the same manner as the old wood engravers, he commenced upon colour or black, and proceeded from _dark to light_ by means of lines cut in intaglio, and appearing white when in the impression, until his subject was completed. This great simplification of the old process was the result of his having to engrave his own drawings; for in drawing his subject on the wood he avoided all combinations of lines which to the designer are easy, but to the engraver difficult. In almost every one of his cuts the effect is produced by the simplest means. The colour which the old wood engravers obtained by means of cross-hatchings, Bewick obtained with much greater facility by means of single lines, and masses of black slightly intersected or broken with white.

[Footnote VII-42: This cut was executed for Marmaduke Tunstall, Esq. of Wycliffe, near Greta Bridge, in Yorkshire.]

When only a few impressions of the Chillingham Bull had been taken, and before he had added his name, the block split. The pressmen, it is said, got tipsy over their work, and left the block lying on the window-sill exposed to the rays of the sun, which caused it to warp and split.[VII-43] About six impressions were taken on thin vellum before the accident occurred. Mr. Atkinson says that one of those impressions, which had formerly belonged to Mr. Beilby, Bewick’s partner, was sold in London for twenty pounds; A. Stothard, R.A., had one, as had also Mr. C. Nesbit.

[Footnote VII-43: The block remained in several pieces until 1817, when they were firmly united by means of cramps, and a number of impressions printed off. These impressions are without the border, which distinguishes the earlier ones. The border, which was engraved on separate pieces, enclosed the principal cut in the manner of a frame.]

Towards the latter end of 1785 Bewick began to engrave the cuts for his General History of Quadrupeds, which was first printed in 1790.[VII-44] The descriptions were written by his partner, Mr. Beilby, and the cuts were all drawn and engraved by himself. The comparative excellence of those cuts, which, for the correct delineation of the animals and the natural character of the _incidents_, and the back-grounds, are greatly superior to anything of the kind that had previously appeared, insured a rapid sale for the work; a second edition was published in 1791, and a third in 1792.[VII-45]

[Footnote VII-44: A Prospectus containing specimens of the cuts was printed in 1787.]

[Footnote VII-45: The first edition consisted of fifteen hundred copies in demy octavo at 8_s._, and one hundred royal at 12_s._ The price of the demy copies of the _eighth_ edition, published in 1825, was £1 1_s._ A proof of the estimation in which the work continued to be held.]

The great merit of those cuts consists not so much in their execution as in the spirited and natural manner in which they are drawn. Some of the animals, indeed, which he had not had an opportunity of seeing, and for which he had to depend on the previous engravings of others, are not correctly drawn. Among the most incorrect are the Bison, the Zebu, the Buffalo, the Many-horned Sheep, the Gnu, and the Giraffe or Cameleopard.[VII-46] Even in some of our domestic quadrupeds he was not successful; the Horses are not well represented; and the very indifferent execution of the Common Bull and Cow, at page 19, edition 1790, is only redeemed by the interest of the back-grounds. In that of the Common Bull, the action of the bull seen chasing a man is most excellent; and in that of the Cow, the woman, with a _skeel_ on her head, and her petticoats tucked up behind, returning from milking, is evidently a sketch from nature. The Goats and the Dogs are the best of those cuts both in design and execution; and perhaps the very best of all the cuts in the first edition is that of the Cur Fox at page 270. The tail of the animal, which is too long, and is also incorrectly marked with black near the white tip, was subsequently altered.

[Footnote VII-46: The cut of the Giraffe in the edition of 1824 is not the original one engraved by Bewick. In the later cut, which was chiefly engraved by W. W. Temple, one of Bewick’s pupils, the marks on the body of the animal appear like so many white-coloured lines crossing each other, and enclosing large irregular spots.]

In the first edition the characteristic tail-pieces are comparatively few; and several of those which are merely ornamental, displaying neither imagination nor feeling, are copies of cuts which are frequent in books printed at Leipsic between 1770 and 1780, and which were probably engraved by Ungher, a German wood engraver of that period. Examples of such tasteless trifles are to be found at pages 9, 12, 18, 65, 110, 140, 201, 223, and 401. Ornaments of the same character occur in Heineken’s “Idée Générale d’une Collection complette d’Estampes,” Leipsic and Vienna, 1771. Bewick was unquestionably better acquainted with the history and progress of wood engraving than those who talk about the “long-lost art” were aware of. The first of the two following cuts is a fac-simile of a tail-piece which occurs in an edition of “Der Weiss Kunig,”[VII-47] printed at Vienna, 1775, and which Bewick has copied at page 144 of the first edition of the Quadrupeds, 1790. The second, from one of the cuts illustrative of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1569, designed by Virgil Solis,[VII-48] is copied in a tail-piece in the first volume of Bewick’s Birds, page 330, edition 1797.

[Footnote VII-47: Some account of this work is previously given at page287.]

[Footnote VII-48: This work is noticed at page 407.]

The following may be mentioned as the best of the tail-pieces in the first edition of the Quadrupeds, and as those which most decidedly display Bewick’s talent in depicting, without exaggeration, natural and humorous incidents. In this respect he has been excelled by no other artist either of past or present times. The Elephant, fore-shortened, at page 162; the Dog and Cat, 195; the Old Man crossing a ford, mounted on an old horse, which carries, in addition, two heavy sacks, 244; the Bear-ward, with his wife and companion, leading Bruin, and accompanied by his dancing-dogs,--a gallows seen in the distance, 256; a Fox, with Magpies flying after him, indicating his course to his pursuers, 265; Two unfeeling fellows enjoying the pleasure of hanging a dog,--a gibbet, seen in the distance, to denote that those who could thus quietly enjoy the dying struggles of a dog would not be unlikely to murder a man, 274; a Man eating his dinner with his dog sitting beside him, expecting his share, 285; Old Blind Man led by a dog, crossing a bridge of a single plank, and with the rail broken, in a storm of wind and rain, 320; a Mad Dog pursued by three men,--a feeble old woman directly in the dog’s way, 324; a Man with a bundle at his back, crossing a stream on stilts, 337; a winter piece,--a Man travelling in the snow, 339; a grim-visaged Old Man, accompanied by a cur-dog, driving an old sow, 371; Two Boys and an Ass on a common, 375; a Man leaping, by means of a pole, a stream, across which he has previously thrown his stick and bag, 391; a Man carrying a bundle of faggots on the ice, 395; a Wolf falling into a trap, 430; and Two Blind Fiddlers and a Boy, the last in the book, at 456. In this cut Bewick has represented the two blind fiddlers earnestly scraping away, although there is no one to listen to their strains; the bare-legged _tatty_-headed boy who leads them, and the half-starved melancholy-looking dog at their heels, are in admirable keeping with the principal characters.

On the next page is a copy of the cut of the Two Boys and the Ass, previously mentioned as occurring at page 375. This cut, beyond any other of the tail-pieces in the first edition of the Quadrupeds, perhaps affords the best specimen of Bewick’s peculiar talent of depicting such subjects; he faithfully represents Nature, and at the same time conveys a moral, which gives additional interest to the sketch. Though the ass remains immoveable, in spite of the application of a branch of furze to his hind quarters, the young graceless who is mounted evidently enjoys his seat. The pleasure of the twain consists as much in having _caught_ an ass as in the prospect of a ride. To such characters the stubborn ass frequently affords more _amusement_ than a willing goer; they like to flog and thump a thing well, though it be but a gate-post. The gallows in the distance--a favourite _in terrorem_ object with Bewick--suggests their ultimate destiny; and the cut, in the first edition, derives additional _point_ from its situation among the animals found in _New South Wales_,--the first shipment of convicts to Botany Bay having taken place about two years previous to the publication of the work. This cut, as well as many others in the book, affords an instance of lowering,--the light appearance of the distance is entirely effected by that process.

The subsequent editions of the Quadrupeds were enlarged by the addition of new matter and the insertion of several new cuts. Of these, with the exception of the Kyloe Ox,[VII-49] the tail-pieces are by far the best. The following are the principal cuts of animals that have been added since the first publication of the work; the pages annexed refer to the edition of 1824, the last that was published in Bewick’s life-time: the Arabian Horse, page 4,--the stallion, seen in the back-ground, has suffered a dismemberment since its first appearance;[VII-50] the Old English Road Horse, 9; the Improved Cart Horse, 14; the Kyloe Ox, 36; the Musk Bull, 49; the Black-faced, or Heath Ram, 56; Heath Ram of the Improved Breed, 57; The Cheviot Ram, 58; Tees-water Ram of the Old Breed, 60; Tees-water Ram, Improved Breed, 61; the American Elk, 125; Sow of the Improved Breed, 164; Sow of the Chinese Breed, 166; Head of a Hippopotamus, (engraved by W. W. Temple,) 185; Indian Bear, 293; Polar, or Great White Bear, substituted for another cut of the same animal, 295; the Spotted Hyena, substituted for another cut of the same animal, 301; the Ban-dog, 338; the Irish Greyhound, 340; the Harrier, 347; Spotted Bavy, substituted for another cut of the same animal, 379; the Grey Squirrel, 387; the Long-tailed Squirrel, 396; the Jerboa, substituted for another cut of the same animal, 397; the Musquash, or Musk Beaver, 416; the Mouse, substituted for another cut of the same animal, 424; the Short-eared Bat, 513; the Long-eared Bat, 515; the Ternate Bat, 518; the Wombach, 523; and the Ornithorhynchus Paradoxicus, 525. The cut of the animal called the Thick-nosed Tapiir, at page 139 of the first edition, is transposed to page 381 of the last edition, and there described under the name of the Capibara: it is probably intended for the Coypu rat, a specimen of which is at present in the Gardens of the Zoological Society, Regent’s Park. Bewick was a regular visitor of all the wild-beast shows that came to Newcastle, and availed himself of every opportunity to obtain drawings from living animals.

[Footnote VII-49: The Kyloe Ox, which occurs at page 36 of the edition of 1824, the last that was published in Bewick’s life-time, is one of the very best cuts of a quadruped that he ever engraved. The drawing is excellent, and the characteristic form and general appearance of the animal are represented in a manner that has never been excelled.]

[Footnote VII-50: The Lancashire _Bull_, of the first edition, by a similar process has been converted into the Lancashire _Ox_.]

The tail-pieces introduced in subsequent editions of the Quadrupeds generally display more humour and not less talent in representing natural objects than those contained in the first. In the annexed cut of a sour-visaged old fellow going with corn to the mill, we have an exemplification of cruelty not unworthy of Hogarth.[VII-51] The over-laden, half-starved old horse,--broken-kneed, greasy-heeled, and evidently troubled with the string-halt, as is indicated by the action of the _off_ hind-leg,--hesitates to descend the brae, at the foot of which there is a stream, and the old brute on his back urges him forward by _working_ him, as jockeys say, with the halter, and beating him with his stick. In the distance, Bewick, as is usual with him when he gives a sketch of cruelty or knavery, has introduced a gallows. The miserable appearance of the poor animal is not a little increased by the nakedness of his hind quarters; his stump of a tail is so short that it will not even serve as a _catch_ for the crupper or _tail-band_.

[Footnote VII-51: The originals of this and the three following cuts occur respectively at pages 13, 15, 69, and 526 of the edition of 1824. The other principal tail-pieces in this edition are: Greyhound-coursing, (originally engraved on a silver cup for a person at Northallerton,) drawn by Bewick on the block, but engraved by W. W. Temple, page x, at the end of the Index; the Old Coachman and the Young Squire, 12; Tinker’s Children in a pair of panniers on the back of an Ass, 21; a Cow drinking, 28; Winter scene, 34; Two Men digging, (engraved by H. White, who also engraved the cut of the Musk Bull at page 49,) 37; Dog worrying a Sheep, 62; Old Soldier travelling in the rain, 117; Smelling, tail-piece to the Genet, a _strong bit_, 269; Drunken Man making his Dam, 378; and Seals on a large piece of floating ice, 510.]

In the cut of the child, unconscious of its danger, pulling at the long tail of a young unbroken colt, the story is most admirably told. The nurse, who is seen engaged with her sweetheart by the side of the hedge, has left the child to wander at will, and thus expose itself to destruction; while the mother, who has accidentally perceived the danger of her darling, is seen hastening over the stile, regardless of the steps, in an agony of fear. The backward glance of the horse’s eye, and the heel raised ready to strike, most forcibly suggest the danger to which the unthinking infant is exposed.

Though the subject of the following cut be simple, yet the _sentiment_ which it displays is the genuine offspring of true genius. Near to a ruined cottage, while all around is covered with snow, a lean and hungry ewe is seen nibbling at an old broom, while her young and weakly lamb is sucking her milkless teats. Such a picture of animal want--conceived with so much feeling, and so well expressed,--has perhaps never been represented by any artist except Bewick.

The original of the following cut forms the tail-piece to the last page of the edition of 1824. An old man, wearing a parson’s cast-off beaver and wig, is seen carrying his young wife and child across a stream. The complacent look of the cock-nosed wife shows that she enjoys the treat, while the old drudge patiently bears his burden, and with his right hand keeps a firm _grip_ of the nether end of his better part. This cut is an excellent satire on those old men who marry young wives and become dotingly uxorious in the decline of life; submitting to every indignity to please their youthful spouses and reconcile them to their state. It is a _new reading_ of January and May,--he an old travelling beggar, and she a young slut with her heels peeping, or rather staring, through her stockings.

Mr. Solomon Hodgson, the printer of the first four editions of the Quadrupeds, had an interest in the work; he died in 1800; and in consequence of a misunderstanding between his widow and Bewick, the latter had the subsequent editions printed at the office of Mr. Edward Walker. Mrs. Hodgson having asserted, in a letter printed in the Monthly Magazine for July 1805, that Bewick was neither the author nor the projector of the History of Quadrupeds, but “was employed merely as the engraver or wood-cutter,” he, in justification of his own claims, gave the following account of the origin of the work.[VII-52] “From my first reading, when a boy at school, a sixpenny History of Birds and Beasts, and a then wretched composition called the History of Three Hundred Animals, to the time I became acquainted with works on Natural History written for the perusal of men, I never was without the design of attempting something of this kind myself; but my principal object was (and still is) directed to the mental pleasure and improvement of youth; to engage their attention, to direct their steps aright, and to lead them on till they become enamoured of this innocent and delightful pursuit. Some time after my partnership with Mr. Beilby commenced, I communicated my wishes to him, who, after many conversations, came into my plan of publishing a History of Quadrupeds, and I then immediately began to draw the animals, to design the vignettes, and to cut them on wood, and this, to avoid interruption, frequently till very late in the night; my partner at the same time undertaking to compile and draw up the descriptions and history at his leisure hours and evenings at home. With the accounts of the foreign animals I did not much interfere; the sources whence I had drawn the little knowledge I possessed were open to my coadjutor, and he used them; but to those of the animals of our own country, as my partner before this time had paid little attention to natural history, I lent a helping hand. This help was given in daily conversations, and in occasional notes and memoranda, which were used in their proper places. As the cuts were engraved, we employed the late Mr. Thomas Angus, of this town, printer, to take off a certain number of impressions of each, many of which are still in my possession. At Mr. Angus’s death the charge for this business was not made in his books, and at the request of his widow and ourselves, the late Mr. Solomon Hodgson fixed the price; and yet the widow and executrix of Mr. Hodgson asserts in your Magazine, that I was ‘merely employed as the engraver or wood-cutter,’ (I suppose) by her husband! Had this been the case, is it probable that Mr. Hodgson would have had the cuts printed in any other office than his own? The fact is the reverse of Mrs. Hodgson’s statement; and although I have never, either ‘insidiously’ or otherwise, used any means to cause the reviewers, or others, to hold me up as the ‘first and sole mover of the concern,’ I am now dragged forth by her to declare that _I am the man_.

[Footnote VII-52: This account is extracted from a letter written by Bewick, and printed in the Monthly Magazine for November 1805.]

“But to return to my story:--while we were in the progress of our work, prudence suggested that it might be necessary to inquire how our labours were to be ushered to the world, and, as we were unacquainted with the printing and publishing of books, what mode was the most likely to insure success. Upon this subject Mr. Hodgson was consulted, and made fully acquainted with our plan. He entered into the undertaking with uncommon ardour, and urged us strenuously not to retain our first humble notions of ‘making it like a school-book,’ but pressed us to let it ‘assume a more respectable form.’ From this warmth of our friend we had no hesitation in offering him a share in the work, and a copartnership deed was entered into between us, for that purpose, on the 10th of April 1790. What Mr. Hodgson did in correcting the press, beyond what falls to the duty of every printer, I know not; but I am certain that he was extremely desirous that it should have justice done it. In this _weaving of words_ I did not interfere, as I believed it to be in hands much fitter than my own, only I took the liberty of blotting out whatever I knew not to be truth.”

The favourable manner in which the History of Quadrupeds was received determined Bewick to commence without delay his History of British Birds. He began to draw and engrave the cuts in 1791, and in 1797 the first volume of the work, containing the Land Birds, was published.[VII-53] The letter-press, as in the Quadrupeds, was written by his partner, Mr. Beilby, who certainly deserves great praise for the manner in which he has performed his task. The descriptions generally have the great merit of being simple, intelligible, and correct. There are no trifling details about system, no confused arguments about classification, which more frequently bewilder than inform the reader who is uninitiated in the piebald jargon of what is called “Systematic nomenclature.” He describes the quadruped or bird in a manner which enables even the most unlearned to recognize it when he sees it; and, like one who is rather wishful to inform his readers than to display his own acquaintance with the scientific vocabulary, he carefully avoids the use of all terms which are not generally understood. Mr. Beilby, though in a different manner and in a less degree, is fairly entitled to share with Bewick in the honour of having rendered popular in this country the study of the most interesting and useful branches of Zoology--Quadrupeds and Birds--by giving the descriptions in simple and intelligible language, and presenting to the eye the very form and character of the living animals. As a copper-plate engraver, Mr. Beilby has certainly no just pretensions to fame; but as a compiler, and as an able coadjutor of Bewick in simplifying the study of Natural History, and rendering its most interesting portions easy of attainment to the young, and to those unacquainted with the “science,” he deserves higher praise than he has hitherto generally received. Roger Thornton’s Monument, and the Plan of Newcastle, in the Reverend John Brand’s History of that town, were engraved by Mr. Beilby. Mr. Brand’s book-plate was also engraved by him. It is to be found in most of the books that formerly belonged to that celebrated antiquary, who is well known to all collectors from the extent of his purchases at stalls, and the number of curious old books which he thus occasionally obtained.--The Reverend William Turner, of Newcastle, in a letter printed in the Monthly Magazine for June 1801, vindicates the character of Mr. Beilby from what he considers the detractions of Dr. Gleig, in an article on Wood-cuts in the Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Mr. Beilby was a native of the city of Durham, and was brought up as a silversmith and seal-engraver under his father. He died at Newcastle on the 4th of January 1817, in the seventy-fourth year of his age.

[Footnote VII-53: Of this edition, 1,874 copies were printed,--one thousand demy octavo, at 10_s._ 6_d._; eight hundred and fifty thin and thick royal, at 13_s._, and 15_s._; and twenty-four imperial at £1 1_s._ The first edition of the second volume, 1804, consisted of the same number of copies as the first, but the prices were respectively 12_s._, 15_s._, 18_s._ and £1 4_s._]

The partnership between Beilby and Bewick having been dissolved in 1797, shortly after the publication of the first volume of the Birds, the descriptions in the second, which did not appear till 1804, were written by Bewick himself, but revised by the Reverend Henry Cotes, vicar of Bedlington. The publication of this volume formed the key-stone of Bewick’s fame as a designer and engraver on wood; for though the cuts are not superior to those of the first, they are not excelled, nor indeed equalled, by any that he afterwards executed. The subsequent additions, whether as cuts of birds or tail-pieces, are not so excellent as numerous--in this respect the reverse of the additions to the Quadrupeds. Though all the birds were designed, and nearly all of them engraved by Bewick himself, there are yet living witnesses who can testify that both in the drawing and the engraving of the tail-pieces he received very considerable assistance from his pupils, more especially from Robert Johnson as a draftsman, and Luke Clennell as a wood engraver.[VII-54] Before saying anything further on this subject, it seems necessary to give the following passage from Mr. Atkinson’s Sketch of the Life and Works of Bewick. “With regard to the circumstance that the _British Birds_, with very few exceptions, were finished by his own hand, I have it in my power to pledge myself. I had been a good deal surprised one day by hearing a gentleman assert that very few of them were his own work, all the easy parts being executed by his pupils. I saw him the same day, and, talking of his art, inquired if he permitted the assistance of his apprentices in many cases? He said, ‘No; it had seldom happened, and then they had injured the cuts very much.’ I inquired if he could remember any of them in which he had received assistance? He said, ‘Aye: I can soon tell you them;’ and, after a few minutes’ consideration, he made out, with his daughter’s assistance, _the Whimbrel_, _Tufted Duck_, and _Lesser Tern_:[VII-55] he tried to recollect more, and turning to his daughter, said, ‘Jane, honey, dost thou remember any more?’ She considered a little, and said, ‘No: she did not; but that certainly there were not half a dozen in all:’ those we both pressed him to do over again. ‘He intended it,’ he said; but, alas! this intention was prevented. In some cases, I am informed, he made his pupils block out for him; that is, furnished them with an outline, and let them cut away the edges of the block to that line; but as, in this case, the assistance rendered is much the same as that afforded by a turner’s apprentice when he rounds off the heavy mass of wood in readiness for a more experienced hand, but not a line of whose performance remains in the beautiful toy it becomes, it does not materially shake the authenticity of the work in question.”

[Footnote VII-54: Pinkerton having stated in his Scottish Gallery, on the authority of Messrs. Morison, printers, of Perth, that Bewick, “observing the uncommon genius of his late apprentice, Robert Johnson, employed him to trace the figures on the wood in the History of Quadrupeds,” Bewick, in his letter, printed in the Monthly Magazine for November 1805, previously quoted, thus denies the assertion: “It is only necessary for me to declare, and this will be attested by my partner Mr. Beilby, who compiled the History of Quadrupeds, and was a proprietor of the work, that neither Robert Johnson, nor any person but myself, made the drawings, or traced or cut them on the wood.”--Robert Johnson was employed by Messrs. Morison to copy for the Scottish Gallery several portraits at Taymouth Castle, the seat of the Earl of Breadalbane. Bewick in this letter carefully avoids pleading to that with which he was not charged; he does not deny that several of the drawings of the tail-pieces in the History of British Birds were made by Robert Johnson. A pupil of Bewick’s, now living, saw many of Johnson’s drawings for these cuts, and sat beside Clennell when he was engraving them.]

[Footnote VII-55: These three cuts were engraved by one of Bewick’s pupils, named Henry Hole. Neither Bewick’s memory nor his daughter’s had been accurate on this occasion; but not one of the other cuts which they failed to recollect can be compared with those engraved by Bewick himself. In addition to those three, the following, not engraved by Bewick himself, had appeared at the time the above conversation took place--some time between 1825 and 1826:--the Brent Goose, the Lesser Imber, and the Cormorant, engraved by L. Clennell; the Velvet Duck, the Red-breasted Merganser, and the Crested Cormorant, by H. Hole; the Rough-legged Falcon, the Pigmy Sand-piper, the Red Sand-piper, and the Eared Grebe, by W. W. Temple.]

Though it is evident that Bewick meant here simply to assert that all the _figures_ of the _birds_, except the few which he mentions, were entirely engraved by himself, yet his biographer always speaks as if _every one_ of the cuts in the work--both birds and tail-pieces--were exclusively engraved by Bewick himself; and in consequence of this erroneous opinion he refers to seven cuts[VII-56] as affording favourable instances of Bewick’s manner of representing water, although _not one_ of them was engraved by him, but by Luke Clennell, from drawings by himself or by Robert Johnson. Mr. Atkinson, in his admiration of Bewick, and in his desire to exaggerate his fame, entirely overlooks the merits of those by whom he was assisted. Charlton Nesbit and Luke Clennell rendered him more assistance, though not in the cuts of birds, than such as that “afforded by a turner’s apprentice when he rounds off the heavy mass of wood;” and Robert Johnson, who designed many of the best of the tail-pieces, drew the human figure more correctly than Bewick himself, and in landscape-drawing was at least his equal. These observations are not intended in the least to detract from Bewick’s just and deservedly great reputation, but to correct the erroneous opinions which have been promulgated on this subject by persons who knew nothing of the very considerable assistance which he received from his pupils in the drawing and engraving of the tail-pieces in his history of British Birds.

[Footnote VII-56: “He never could, he said, please himself in his representations of water in a state of motion, and a horse galloping: his taste must have been fastidious indeed, if that beautiful moonlight scene at sea, page 120, vol. ii. [edition 1816]; the river scene at page 126; the sea breaking among the rocks at page 168, or 177, or 200, or 216; or the rippling of the water as it leaves the feet of the old fisherman, at page 95, did not satisfy him.” In scarcely one of the cuts engraved by Bewick himself is water in a state of motion well represented. He knew his own deficiency in this respect; though Mr. Atkinson, not being able to distinguish the cuts engraved by Bewick himself from those engraved by his pupils, cannot perceive it.]

Though three of the best specimens of Bewick’s talents as a designer and engraver on wood--the Bittern, the Wood-cock, and the Common Duck[VII-57]--are to be found in the second volume, containing the water-birds, yet the land-birds in the first volume, from his being more familiar with their habits, and in consequence of their allowing more scope for the display of Bewick’s excellence in the representation of foliage, are, on the whole, superior both in design and execution to the others; their characteristic attitude and expression are represented with the greatest truth, while, from the propriety of the back-grounds, and the beauty of the trees and foliage, almost every cut forms a perfect little picture. Bewick’s talent in pourtraying the form and character of birds is seen to great advantage in the hawks and the owls; but his excellence, both as a designer and engraver on wood, is yet more strikingly displayed in several of the other cuts contained in the same volume, and among these the following are perhaps the best. The numbers refer to the pages of the first edition of the Land Birds, 1797. The Field-fare, page 98; the Yellow Bunting, a most exquisite cut, and considered by Bewick as the best that he ever engraved, 143; the Goldfinch, 165; the Skylark, 178; the Woodlark, 183; the Lesser and the Winter Fauvette, 212, 213; the Willow Wren, 222; the Wren, 227; the White-rump, 229; the Cole Titmouse, 241; the Night-Jar, 262; the Domestic Cock, 276; the Turkey, 286; the Pintado, 293; the Red Grouse, 301; the Partridge, 305; the Quail, 308; and the Corncrake, 311.--Among the Birds in the second volume, first edition, 1804, the following may be instanced as the most excellent. The Water Crake, page 10; the Water Rail, 13; the Bittern, 47; the Woodcock, 60; the Common Snipe, 68; the Judcock, or Jack Snipe, 73; the Dunlin, 117; the Dun Diver, 257; the Grey Lag Goose, 292; and the Common Duck, 333.

[Footnote VII-57: The cut here given is engraved by Bewick at a somewhat earlier date, for a once popular work entitled the History of Three Hundred Animals, since incorporated in Mrs. Loudon’s “Entertaining Naturalist.”]

Nothing of the same kind that wood engraving has produced since the time of Bewick can for a moment bear a comparison with these cuts. They are not to be equalled till a designer and engraver shall arise possessed of Bewick’s knowledge of nature, and endowed with his happy talent of expressing it. Bewick has in this respect effected more by himself than has been produced by one of our best wood engravers when working from drawings made by a professional designer, but who knows nothing of birds, of their habits, or the places which they frequent; and has not the slightest feeling for natural incident or picturesque beauty.--No mere fac-simile engraver of a drawing ready made to his hand, should venture to speak slightingly of Bewick’s talents until he has both _drawn and engraved_ a cut which may justly challenge a comparison with the Kyloe Ox, the Yellow-hammer, the Partridge, the Wood-cock, or the Tame Duck.

Bewick’s style of engraving, as displayed in the Birds, is exclusively his own. He adopts no conventional mode of representing texture or producing an effect, but skilfully avails himself of the most simple and effective means which his art affords of faithfully and efficiently representing his subject. He never wastes his time in laborious trifling to display his skill in execution;--he works with a higher aim, to represent nature; and, consequently, he never bestows his pains except to express a meaning. The manner in which he has represented the feathers in many of his birds, is as admirable as it is perfectly original. His feeling for his subject, and his knowledge of his art, suggest the best means of effecting his end, and the manner in which he has employed them entitle him to rank as a wood engraver--without reference to his merits as a designer--among the very best that have practised the art.

Our copy of his cut of the Partridge, though not equal to the original, will perhaps to a certain extent serve to exemplify his practice. Every line that is to be perceived in this bird is the best that could have been devised to express the engraver’s perfect idea of his subject. The soft downy plumage of the breast is represented by delicate black lines crossed horizontally by white ones, and in order that they may appear comparatively light in the impression, the block has in this part been lowered. The texture of the skin of the legs, and the marks of the toes, are expressed with the greatest accuracy; and the varied tints of the plumage of the rump, back, wings, and head, are indicated with no less fidelity.--Such a cut as this Bewick would execute in less time than a modern French wood engraver would require to cut the delicate cross-hatchings necessary, according to French taste, to denote the grey colour of a soldier’s great coat.

The cut of the Wood-cock, of which that on the next page is a copy, is another instance of the able manner in which Bewick has availed himself of the capabilities of his art. He has here produced the most perfect likeness of the bird that ever was engraved, and at the same time given to his subject an effect, by the skilful management of light and shade, which it is impossible to obtain by means of copper-plate engraving. Bewick thoroughly understood the advantages of his art in this respect, and no wood engraver or designer, either ancient or modern, has employed them with greater success, without sacrificing nature to mere effect.

Among the very best of Bewick’s cuts, as a specimen of wood engraving, is, as we have already said, the Common Duck. The round, full form of the bird, is represented with the greatest fidelity; the plumage in all its downy, smooth, and glossy variety,--on the sides, the rump, the back, the wings, and the head,--is singularly true to nature; while the legs and toes, and even the webs between the toes, are engraved in a manner which proves the great attention that Bewick, when necessary, paid to the minutest points of detail. The effect of the whole is excellent, and the back-ground, both in character and execution, is worthy of this master-piece of Bewick as a designer and engraver on wood.

The tail-pieces in the first editions of the Birds are, taken all together, the best that are to be found in any of Bewick’s works; but, though it is not unlikely that he suggested the subjects, there is reason to believe that many of them were drawn by Robert Johnson, and there cannot be a doubt that the greater number of those contained in the second volume were engraved by Luke Clennell. Before saying anything more about them, it seems necessary to give a list of those which were either not drawn or not engraved by Bewick himself; it has been furnished by one of his early pupils who saw most of Johnson’s drawings, and worked in the same room with Clennell when he was engraving those which are here ascribed to him. The pages show where those cuts are to be found in the edition of 1797 and in that of 1821.

Editions