MEMOIR OP THOMAS BEWICK. 
65 
along the east ; and even the admonishing sun- 
beams to keek through the shutters, laughing out 
the candles. Be up as early as I could, I always, 
were the morning fine, found him walking briskly 
in his garden for exercise. His ornithic ear was 
quick and discriminative; he one morning told 
me he had then first caught the robin’s autumnal 
melody, and said we should have a premature fall 
of the leaf; we had so, after the excessively hot 
summer of 1825. I had heard this robin as I lay 
in bed, feeble and infrequent ; and as we walked 
in the garden, a passerine warbler, Sylvia hortensis 
(whom, from his profusion of hurried and gurgled 
notes in May, I call the Ruckler J, just gave a touch 
of his late song, which the fine ear of Bewick 
instantly caught, though in loud and laughing con- 
versation. At meals he ate very heartily, and, after 
a plentiful supply, often said he could have eaten 
more. In early, and indeed late in, life he had 
been a hardish drinker ; but was at this time ad- 
vised by his medical friends to be more abstemious, 
which he abode by as resolutely as he could, though 
not without now and then what he called a niarlock. 
It has been said that Linnaeus did more in a given 
time than ever did any one man. If the surprising 
number of blocks of every description, for his own 
and others' works, cut by Bewick, be considered, 
though perhaps he may not rival our beloved natu- 
ralist, he may he counted among the indefatigably 
industrious. And amid all this he found ample 
time for reading and conviviality. I have seen him 
E 
