CHAPTER III.

APPRENTICESHIP.

LOOKING down upon the Tyne from the pleasant parsonage garden at Ovingham, with the roundarched door and dial, and the bright flowerbeds in shadow, it is easy to understand how keenly the boy must have felt the change. Over the broken water at the ferry the swallows are wheeling and turning, while from the other side a rustic group hails the ferryman. Higher up, a man, with raised knees, rides his horse through the river at the ford; a pony and cart come after. Below the ferry an angler is wading mid-deep: on the opposite bank another is throwing a fly. At his back two tiny figures of school-children climb the steep hill to Master's Close. From the tall trees at Eltringham on the right comes the

cry of the cuckoo on the left the rooks are cawing in the great rookery at Prudhoe Castle, the ancient seat of the Umfravilles. There is no other sound but the rippling flow of the river to Newcastle and the sea.

But the Newcastle to which it flows to-day is a far different place from the Newcastle to which Bewick came in October 1767. One might then, as now, stand by the famous church of St. Nicholas, with its fairylike turrets and vanes and crocketted pinnacles, but the grand High Level Bridge which Robert Stephenson flung across the steep ravine between Newcastle and Gateshead was yet a thing undreamed of. The keep of the old Norman castle which gave the town its name, black with age and smoke, still fronts it at the northern end; but the spectator may seek in vain for the frowning and gloomy gates which stretched across the main streets from Westgate to Pilgrim Street, or the pleasant gardens and orchards which everywhere intersected the city, and shut in the stately mansions and antique houses with carved enrichments,

where dwelt its merchant princes. The red-brick shop of Bewick's new master stood near Amen Corner, and looked into St. Nicholas's Churchyard. It was distinguishable by two fantastic wooden spouts, and existed until very lately; but a towering building in the modern taste now occupies its site. Bewick boarded with Mr. Beilby, and, after the fashion of those days, attended him to divine service twice every Sunday (probably carrying the prayer-book), groomed his brother's horse, and made himself generally useful, not

1 Some of these expressions are borrowed from a pleasantlywritten little pamphlet by Mr. Robert Robinson, of Pilgrim Street, issued in 1876 with his reprint of Bewick's "Waiting for Death.”

2 The London apprentices, if we may trust Foote, had somewhat departed from the "beneficial and cleanly way" of life which still prevailed in the provinces:—

SIR WILLIAM. . . . What, old boy, times are chang'd since the date of thy indentures; when the sleek, crop-ear'd 'prentice us'd to dangle after his mistress, with the great gilt Bible under his arm, to St. Bride's, on a Sunday; bring home the text, repeat the divisions of the discourse, dine at twelve, and regale, upon a gaudy day, with buns and beer at Islington, or Mile-End.

R. WEALTHY. Wonderfully facetious!

SIR WILLIAM. Our modern lads are of a different metal. They have their gaming clubs in the garden, their little lodgings, the snug depositories of their rusty swords, and occasional bag-wigs; their horses for the turf; ay, and their commissions of bankruptcy too, before they are well out of their time.

THE MINOR, 1760, Act i.

omitting, doubtless, to abstain carefully from the over-abundant Tyne salmon which (as per indenture) the apprentice of the period was not obliged to eat more than twice a week.

For some time after entering the business he was employed in copying "Copeland's Ornaments" (Copeland's "New Book of Ornaments," 1746, or Lock and Copeland's do., 1752, both of which were in possession of his family), and "this," he says, "was the only kind of drawing upon which I ever had a lesson given to me from any one.' one." So far as the discipline of the hand is concerned, the statement is no doubt strictly accurate; but that other education of the sight, which Hogarth defined as the early habit "of retaining in his mind's eye, without coldly copying it on the spot, whatever he intended to imitate," had probably been active for many years previously. Beilby's work was of a most multifarious character. Pipe moulds, bottle moulds, brass clock-faces, coffin-plates, stamps, seals, billheads, ciphers and crests for the silversmiths— nothing seems to have come amiss; and the

coarser kinds of engraving which fell to the share of the young apprentice made his hands as hard and large as a blacksmith's. According to the "Memoir," the first "jobs" on which he was employed were etching sword-blades, and blocking out the wood about the lines on diagrams (to be finished subsequently by his master) for the "Ladies' Diary," a popular almanac which dated as far back as 1704, and which was edited for many years by Charles Hutton, then a Newcastle schoolmaster, and later the celebrated Dr. Hutton of Woolwich. It was for Hutton also that he did what in the catalogues figures as his earliest production, namely the diagrams to a "Treatise on Mensuration." This book, which long enjoyed a great reputation, made its debut in fifty sixpenny numbers (!), and was a portentous quarto volume. often referred to with exaggerated interest, contains a representation of the tower of St. Nicholas's Church, afterwards a frequent feature in Bewick's designs. Considerable ingenuity appears to have been shown by him in the execution

issued in 1770 as

One of the cuts,