sisted in till it made us often quarrel, which was distressing to me, for my regard for him was too deeply rooted ever to think of suffering him to tread in the paths which led to ruin, without endeavouring to prevent it. To the latest day of his life, he repented of having turned a deaf ear to my advice; and as bitterly and sincerely did he acknowledge the slighted obligations he owed me. He rued; and that is as painful a word as any in the English language." Something in this, no doubt, must be allowed for the Spartan austerity of the disciple of Lewis Cornaro, and it is not probable that poor John Bewick's errors went farther than a certain smartness in costume, and occasional convivial excesses.

At the time of his death he was engaged upon the block of Cherryburn, afterwards used as a frontispiece to the "Memoir." He did not live to complete it; and it was eventually finished by Thomas Bewick. The original sketch, probably made much earlier, together with his punch-ladle and glass, some water-colour drawings, and other relics, is carefully preserved at the old home by

his grandnieces, who still speak affectionately of their "Uncle John's" talents and amiability. At the recent Bewick sale another memento of him came under the hammer. This was a walkingstick, containing a hautboy, with which (as per

LEONORA AND ADOLPHUS. (FROM THE "LOOKING-GLASS FOR THE MIND," 1792.)

catalogue) he is said to have "amused himself in his summer-evening strolls about Hornsey and the banks of the Thames." In the last months of his life, it should be added, he alternated engraving with teaching, being employed as drawingmaster at the "Hornsey Academy," then kept by a Mr. Nathaniel Norton. Two or three unfinished

sketches made by him at this time-one of which shows his pony and his lodgings are included in the Bewick bequest to the British Museum. Another, dated 1795, the year of his death, has a touch of pathos. It represents his "intended house" on the water bank at Eltringham.

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

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THOMAS BEWICK.

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 houndsimpares 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 To such an artist, so truthreminded once more. ful, 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 unBut suppose him to find a field congenial task. 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, This, in that he will produce his best work. effect, appears to have been the case with Bewick. He found his fitting field in the "Quadrupeds" and

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Birds," and rose at once to his highest level.