THE TECHNICS OF WOOD ENGRAVING. 301 



might have been the making of a Holbein, or nearly a Holbein, 

 in him. I do not know ; but I can turn from his work to that 

 of a man who was not trained at all, and who was, without 

 training, Holbein's equal. 



Equal, in the sense that this brown stone, in my left hand, 

 is the equal, though not the likeness, of that in my right. 

 They are both of the same true and pure crystal ; but the one 

 is brown with iron, and never touched by forming hand ; the 

 other has never been in rough companionship, and has been 

 exquisitely polished. So with these two men. The one was 

 the companion of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. His father 

 was so good an artist that you cannot always tell their draw- 

 ings asunder. But the other was a farmer's son ; and learned 

 his trade in the back shops of Newcastle. 



Yet the first book I asked you to get was his biography ; 

 and in this frame are set together a drawing by Hans Hol- 

 bein, and one by Thomas Bewick. I know which is most 

 scholarly ; but I do not know which is best. 



101. It is much to say for the self-taught Englishman ; yet 

 do not congratulate yourselves on his simplicity. I told you, 

 a little while since, that the English nobles had left the his- 

 tory of birds to be written, and their spots to be drawn, by a 

 printer's lad ; but I did not tell you their farther loss in the 

 fact that this printer's lad could have written their own his- 

 tories, and drawn their own spots, if they had let him. But 

 they had no history to be written ; and were too closely macu- 

 late to be portrayed ; white ground in most places altogether 

 obscured. Had there been Mores and Henrys to draw, Be- 

 wick could have drawn them ; and would have found his func- 

 tion. As it was, the nobles of his day left him to draw the 

 frogs, and pigs, and sparrows of his day, which seemed to 

 him, in his solitude, the best types of its Nobility. No sight 

 or thought of beautiful things was ever granted him ; no 

 heroic creature, goddess-born how much less any native * 

 Deity ever shone upon him. To his utterly English mind, 

 the straw of the stye, and its tenantry, were abiding truth ; 

 the cloud of Olympus, and its tenantry, a child's dream. He 

 could draw a pig, but not an Aphrodite. 



