FROM the work of Thomas Bewick previous to 1785, and more especially from the two volumes of "Fables," it is evident that he is most successful in depicting those phases of animal life with which he was familiar, or in making such selection as his genius prompted of the characteristics, whimsical or pathetic, of the humanity about him. "That is best which lieth nearest, Shape from that thy work of art," never received more striking confirmation than at Bewick's hands. "Hercules and Jupiter," "Time and Fortune,”-figures in which the allegorists of the day would have delighted,—become under his pencil mere lumbering and futile unrealities, ill at ease in their nakedness, and not to be credited under any system of theology. But set him down to draw you a group of startled hares, a hungry beggar watched by an equally hungry dog, a boy stung by a nettle, or a brace of snarling hounds— "impares formas atque animos"-tugging at the unequal yoke, and he will straightway construct you a little picture-spirited, vivid, irreproachable in its literal fidelity-to which you will turn again and again as to the authentic record of something within your own experience, which you seem to have forgotten, but of which you are glad to be reminded once more. To such an artist, so truthful, so dependent upon nature, so unimaginative (in a certain sense of the word), the realising of other men's ideas would be a difficult and uncongenial task. But suppose him to find a field outside these conditions, in which he is free to exercise his abilities in a fashion most pleasant to himself, it will follow, almost as a matter of course, that he will produce his best work. This, in effect, appears to have been the case with Bewick. He found his fitting field in the “Quadrupeds" and Birds," and rose at once to his highest level. The "Quadrupeds" were begun soon after the publication of the "Select Fables." But while working at them, and before they were published, Bewick produced the large block known as the " Chillingham Bull," one of those famous wild cattle of the old Caledonian breed, now nearly extinct, which Landseer has painted, and Scott has celebrated in the ballad of "Cadyow Castle 66 Through the huge oaks of Evandale, Whose limbs a thousand years have worn, Mightiest of all the beasts of chase, That roam in woody Caledon, Crashing the forest in his race, The Mountain Bull comes thundering on." The engraving was a commission undertaken in the beginning of 1789 for Marmaduke Tunstall of Wycliffe, a local naturalist and collector; and in the "Memoir" Bewick has described some of the obstacles he met with in getting near his restless model. “I could make no drawing (he says) of the bull, while he, along with the rest of the herd, was wheeling about, and then front |