Notices of New Books. 



8145 



Notices of New Books. 



'A Memoir of Thomas Bewick, written by himself; embellished 

 by numerous Wood Engravings, designed and engraved by the 

 Author for a work on British Fishes, and never before published. 1 

 Newcastle-on-Tyne : printed by Robert Ward, Dean Street, for 

 Jane Bewick, Gateshead. London: Longman & Co. 1862. 



What sweet visions arise in the eyes of the naturalist at the name 

 of Bewick ! " His works indeed are of the smallest dimensions, but 

 this makes it only the more surprising that so much interest could be 

 comprised within such little spaces. The woodcuts that illustrate his 

 books of Natural History may be studied with advantage by the most 

 ambitious votary of the highest classes of Art, filled as they are by the 

 truest feeling for Nature, and though often representing the most 

 ordinary subjects, yet never, in a single instance, degenerating into 

 common-place. The charming vignettes that ornament these books 

 abound in incidents from real life, diversified by genuine humour, as 

 well as by the truest pathos, of which the single figure of a shipwrecked 

 sailor saying his prayers on a rock, with the waves rising round him, 

 is an instance. There is often in these little things a deep meaning 

 that places his art on a level with styles which the world is apt to con- 

 sider as greatly above it, in proof of which I would mention the party 

 of boys playing at soldiers among graves, and mounted on a row of 

 upright tombstones for horses; while for quaint humour, extracted 

 from a very simple source, may be noticed a procession of geese which 

 have just waddled through a stream, while their line of march is con- 

 tinued by a row of stepping-stones. The student of landscape can 

 never consult the works of Bewick without improvement. The back- 

 grounds to the figures of his quadrupeds and his birds and his vig- 

 nettes have a charm of Nature quite his own. He gives us in these 

 every season of the year, and his trees, whether in the clothing of 

 summer or in the nakedness of winter, are the trees of an artist bred 

 in the country. It is equally true in his little home scenes, his farm 

 yards and cottages, as in the wild coast scenery, with the flocks of sea 

 birds wheeling round the rocks. In one of these subjects stands a 

 ruined church, towards which the sea has encroached, the rising tide 

 threatening to submerge a tombstone raised 4 to perpetuate the 

 memory,' &c. Bewick resembles Hogarth in this, that his illustrations 

 of the stories of others are not to be compared with his own inventions. 

 His feeling for the beauties of Nature as they were impressed on him 

 directly, and not at second-hand, is akin to the feeling of Burns, and 

 VOL. XX. 2 T 



