BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. 
xxi 
before and are not likely to be surpassed. The rough sketches were 
always designed by the author himself, and were drawn on stone 
by Mr. Hart, who also made a finished painting of the whole of the 
plates of the ‘ Birds of Great Britain * (excepting the few done by 
Mr. Wolf) before they were put on stone. Mr. Hart commenced 
working for Mr. Gould in the summer of 1851, making the patterns 
for the 4 Humming-Birds ’ and colouring the metallic portions of 
the plates. He commenced to draw the plates on stone from the 
twenty-second part of the 4 Birds of Great Britain,’ and continued 
to do so till all the works were completed. 
It was about the year 1862 that I myself first became acquainted 
with Mr. Gould, when I was a boy careering about the neighbourhood 
of Cookham in search of birds. He was a frequent visitor to the 
pleasant little Berkshire village, which was not then the crowded 
resort of boating men that it is now. None of the notices of Gould’s 
life which I have seen have referred to his prowess as a fisherman; 
but in my young days his name was in every one’s mouth whenever 
an unusually big fish was known to be feeding in our neighbourhood. 
When the local fishermen had tried in vain to catch it, they used to 
say: “Well! we shall have to leave it till Mr. Gould comes down.” 
And in after years, when he was an invalid, many is the story he 
has told me of the capture of some of his best trout in the Thames. 
One particularly fine fish which he caught off Formosa was painted for 
him by Mr. Hart, and the picture used to hang over the sideboard in his 
dining-room. His usual habit, on receiving information as to the time 
when the fish used to rise and feed, was to come down for several 
evenings in succession and verify for himself the time of feeding, and 
when assured of the fact he brought his tackle and seldom failed to 
land the trout. The particular fish whose portrait I have often seen 
in the dining-room at Charlotte Street was known to frequent the 
