Review of the Memoir 0/ Thomas Bewick. 3G9 



Thomas Bewick was one of the many self-made men of 

 Northumberland — a county whose sons, no longer absorbed in 

 border-warfare, have devoted their massive, rugged intellects to 

 the battle with nature and the unfolding of her secrets. New- 

 castle can boast of having earned in two successive years the 

 gold medal of the Royal Society*. But our business here is 

 not with her Stephensons and Armstrongs, nor yet with her 

 artists, as Martin and Lough, but with Bewick and his works. 

 He was emphatically the father of Northumbrian naturalists — 

 a goodly family, as the names of Prideaux-Selby, Albany and 

 John Hancock, Hewitson and Alder, still living, may testify. 



The Tyneside and Berwickshire Naturalist Clubs (the latter 

 really a Northumbrian society) will, we may well expect, rear 

 many worthy successors in the field ; and the volumes of their 

 Transactions have already supplied no inconsiderable contribu- 

 tions to our zoological literature. We have frequently known 

 these clubs to muster upwards of fifty members on excursions 

 among the western moors, when many a racy anecdote of old 

 Bewick has been told by those whose boyish interest had been 

 roused while watching the veteran's chisel and listening to his 

 old-world lore. 



We could have wished that more of his characteristic traits, 

 and some recollections of him by others, had been imported 

 into the present volume. One excellence, at least, this memoir 

 has — the man is permitted to speak for himself; nor has the 

 filial reverence of the editor permitted her once to check the 

 pleasant garrulity of the kindly old man, even when he has di- 

 gressed into long chapters on his Utopia in Church and State, 

 with which he was wont to beguile his fancy while his hand was 

 busily at work on his blocks. 



The earlier chapters of the autobiography (for such it is, in 

 the form of letters to his daughter) are the most interesting, as 

 tracing the early development of his love of nature and of 

 drawing. Bewick was fond of expressing his dislike of a mere 

 " three-pair-of-stairs-garret naturalist," and he certainly had 

 learned his lessons in the field, not in the closet. The son of a 

 plain Northumbrian farmer, he was sent first to the village 

 * Awarded to Messrs. H. Lee Pattinson and Albany Hancock. 



