376 Revietv of the Memoir of Thomas Bewick. 



scapes of historical Northumbrian localities, now fast perishing 

 under the advance of coal and iron ; and there is scarcely a 

 vignette which does not contain a likeness of some character 

 familiar fifty years since on Tyneside, perchance an old village 

 hero of "the '45/' a popular mendicant, a ballad-singer, a "daft 

 Jamie," or notorious poacher. One of his humorous pieces is 

 the devil whipping the driver of a coal-cart under the gallows- 

 Bewick, having detected his coalman in the act of cheating him, 

 revenged himself by drawing a striking likeness of him, and then, 

 calling him in, showed him the picture, with this pithy admoni- 

 tion : — " Now then, if thou goes on as thou has been doing wi' 

 me, the devil will get thee and tak thee to the gallows." Many 

 such stories are told by Mr. Atkinson in his sketch of Bewick, 

 published more than thirty years since. Indeed, we may con- 

 sider him to have been, among engravers, what Hogarth was 

 among painters, and Burns among poets. His fancy was 

 unpruned by academic instruction ; but who can tell a story like 

 him in so few lines ? He embodies the quaintness of Quarles 

 with the depth of Holbein's meanings. He has all Burns's 

 tenderness of disposition, quick perception of the ridiculous, and 

 power in portraying it, and, above all, his admiration for and 

 understanding of nature. In all his designs (and they may be 

 counted by hundreds) there is real poetry. Witness, in the 

 volume before us, the poacher's drunken wife in her hovel, with 

 her ragged urchins on the floor, the salmon spear, and the ballad- 

 sheet of the last dying speech and confession on the wall ; the 

 hobgoblin, formed from a gnarled and fantastically twisted trunk, 

 which appals even the dog ; the clown between his two wayward 

 pigs ; an ass frantically obstinate by the upsetting of the bee- 

 hives he has disturbed, and vainly rubbing off" his tormentors 

 against their own hive ; a gentleman's son and a ragged urchin 

 fishing together, the former without a nibble, while the switch 

 and crooked pin have just landed a fine trout ; a wooden-legged 

 pensioner stuck in a broken stile ; a Tyne salmon-fisher repairing 

 his draw-net. These and scores of others are quite enough to 

 give their author a place as one of nature's artists, for he had 

 that truth in familiar things which is also real poetry. 



Though there is much more superficial splendour in more 



