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Rh, heartiness, there is also an unbending virtue—a little like preaching sometimes, with its gallows in the background—but sturdy and homely; not rising into any eloquent homily, but with indignation for the boys drowning a cat or the man beating his overdriven horse.

As an artist he knows, like Holbein, the method of great art. His economy of labor, his simplicity, justness, and sureness of stroke show the master’s hand. There was no waste in his work, no ineffective effort after impossible results, no meaningless lines. For these excellences of method and of character he has been often praised, especially because he developed his talents under very unfavorable conditions; but perhaps no words would have been sweeter to him than those which Charlotte Brontë wrote, sincerely out of her own experience without doubt, for he himself said he was led to his task by “the hope of administering to the pleasure and amusement of youth.” Charlotte Brontë, speaking through the lips of Jane Eyre of the pleasure she took as a child in looking through Bewick’s books, writes thus:

“I returned to my book—Bewick’s History of British Birds, the letterpress whereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank: they were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of ‘the solitary rocks and promontories’ by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape— Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls, Boils round the naked, melancholy isles Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.’