Notices of New Books. §147 



books and every space became filled with various kinds of devices and 

 scenes 1 had met with, and these were accompanied by wretched 

 rhymes explanatory of them. As soon as I had filled all the blank spaces 

 in my books, I had recourse, at all spare times, to the gravestones and 

 the floor of the church porch with a bit of chalk, to give vent to this 

 propensity of mind, of figuring whatever I had seen. At that time I 

 had never heard of drawing, nor did I know of any other paintings 

 besides the King's Arms in the church, and the signs in Ovingham of 

 the ' Black Bull.' the ' White Horse,' the ' Salmon ' and the ' Hounds 

 and Hare.' 1 always thought I could make a far better hunting 

 scene than the lalter; the others were beyond my hand." The 

 schoolmaster caught the little lad at his unprofitable labour and called 

 him a conjuror. Like the youth he had never heard of drawing, and 

 seemed to regard the occupation as something uncanny : his father 

 also found a great deal of fault with him for thus misspending his time. 

 Thomas persevered nevertheless, and filled the flagstones of the floor, 

 and especially the hearthstone, with his designs in chalk ; but a friend, 

 whose name is not recorded, saw that this propensity was not so entirely 

 evil as the village pedagogue and the boy's father considered it, and 

 instead of trying to exorcise the demon within him, by thrashing and 

 scolding, actually gave him paper on which to execute his designs. 

 " Pen and ink and the juice of the bramble-berry make a great change. 

 These," says the writer, " were succeeded by a camel's hair pencil and 

 shells of colours, and thus supplied I became completely set up, 

 * * * The beasts and the birds which enlivened the beautiful scenery 

 of the woods and wilds surrounding my native hamlet furnished me 

 with an endless supply of subjects. I now, in the estimation of my 

 rustic neighbours, became an eminent painter, and the walls of their 

 houses were ornamented with an abundance of my rude productions 

 at a very cheap rate. These chiefly consisted of particular hunting 

 scenes, in which the portraits of the hunters, the horses, and of every 

 dog in the park, were, in their opinion as well as my own, faithfully 

 delineated." 



Even in the church the drawing propensity found its way. " Having 

 got off" the service " he held down his head and repeated it with the 

 rest of the congregation, all the while employing himself in drawing 

 figures upon the soft painted book board with a pin. Flogging seems to 

 have been the normal condition of the boy, but was wholly useless ; it 

 neither taught him Latin, cured a vagrant taste for hunting and fishing, 

 woods and wilds, nor eradicated the propensity for drawing ; so solitary 

 confinement was tried, a system that was very irksome, as the poor boy 



