OUR WOOD ENGRAVERS. 501 



his faculties to the last, could never have achieved them. He had 

 not the most remote claim to any beyond the head-pieces. And what 

 claim had he to these ? Of course the reader will conclude, that, 

 at least he furnished Harvey with the pencil sketches of them. No 

 such thing : it was not in his power to do so. What he did was this. 

 Supposing he had to manufacture a head-piece to a fable entitled 

 " The Cock, The Eagle, and The Pig :" he would first cut out a cock, 

 an eagle, and a pig, from any engravings in his possession ; he would 

 then puzzle his shallow brains in shifting them about on a bit of 

 printed landscape, until he had got them into passable positions : his 

 next feat was to paste them down ; and if the group wanted an addi- 

 tional rock, or a tree in foreground, or a river, cloud, castle, or 

 wood in the distance, he would rob another print of the desired ob- 

 ject, and plaster it upon his contemptible patch-work composition. 

 To this may be attributed the stiffness and formality of the designs, 

 their occasional outrages on comparative size, their frigidity their 

 want of flow their contemptible meagreness of composition a fault 

 of which Harvey never is guilty. He would have done them im- 

 measurably better, had Northcote not exerted his pastepot and scis- 

 sars at all in the business. The ornamental letters and tail-pieces, 

 with which Northcote had nothing to do, are full of life, fancy, feel- 

 ing, taste, and all that can render a pictorial composition valuable ; 

 while most of the head-pieces are comparatively cold, formal, dull, 

 and inanimate. The first series was got up precisely in the same 

 manner ; and knowing this to be the fact, it pains us considerably, to 

 find Allan Cunningham, in his last volume of British Painters, just 

 published, after having properly exposed the literary demerits of the 

 Fables, making the following observation <e The accompanying de- 

 signs are much more creditable to Northcote. Some of them are ele- 

 gant alike in conception and execution." Northcote had nothing at 

 all to do with them beyond the scissars and paste exploit of putting 

 something similar to the head-pieces together. All that is " elegant 

 alike in conception and execution" is to be found in the ornamental 

 letters and tail-pieces, and these are entirely the work of William 

 Harvey. Northcote was incapable of conceiving or executing them ; 

 as an artist, he was a downright quack ; all his compositions were 

 patchwork on the broadest scale ; and Harvey has done well in the 

 tail-piece to the present volume, to place conspicuously beneath the 

 old gentleman's bust, that instrument to which he was so largely 

 indebted namely, a huge pair of scissars. 



No man was ever more egregiously over-rated. He was supposed 

 to excel as an animal painter; but this prevalent idea was ludicrously 

 unfounded. At one time, as he admitted to a friend of ours, having 

 a picture on hand, in which it was necessary to introduce a tiger, he 

 went to the School of Painting for the purpose of stealing one from a 

 picture by Rubens. But the students were all copying the desired 

 animal, and their copies were all so superior, as he saw, to any at- 

 tempt that he could make, that, not wishing to expose himself, he 

 withdrew. " This was on a Wednesday," said he, " and Thursday 

 being a holiday, when none of the pupils would be there, I went down 



