w which is
best.

101. It is much to say for the self-taught Englishman;--yet do not
congratulate yourselves on his simplicity. I told you, a little while
since, that the English nobles had left the history of birds to be
written, and their spots to be drawn, by a printer's lad;--but I did not
tell you their farther loss in the fact that this printer's lad could
have written their own histories, and drawn their own spots, if they had
let him. But they had no history to be written; and were too closely
maculate to be portrayed;--white ground in most places altogether
obscured. Had there been Mores and Henrys to draw, Bewick could have
drawn them; and would have found his function. As it was, the nobles of
his day left him to draw the frogs, and pigs, and sparrows--of his day,
which seemed to him, in his solitude, the best types of its Nobility. No
sight or thought of beautiful things was ever granted him;--no heroic
creature, goddess-born--how much less any native Deity--ever shone upon
him. To his utterly English mind, the straw of the sty, and its
tenantry, were abiding truth;--the cloud of Olympus, and its tenantry, a
child's dream. He could draw a pig, but not an Aphrodite.

102. The three pieces of woodcut from his Fables (the two lower ones
enlarged) in the opposite plate, show his utmost strength and utmost
rudeness. I must endeavor to make you thoroughly understand both:--the
magnificent artistic power, the flawless virtue, veracity,
tenderness,--the infinite humor of the man; and yet the difference
between England and Florence, in the use they make of such gifts in
their children.

For the moment, however, I confine myself to the examination of
technical points; and we must follow our former conclusions a little
further.

[Illustration: I.

Things Celestial and Terrestrial, as apparent to the English Mind.]

103. Because our lines in wood must be thick, it becomes an extreme
virtue in wood engraving to economize lines,--not merely, as in all
other art, to save time and power, but because, our lines being
necessarily blunt, we must make up our minds to do with fewer, by many,
than are in the object. But is this necessarily a disadvantage?

_Absolutely_, an immense disadvantage,--a woodcut never can be so
beautiful or good a thing as a painting, or line engraving. But in its
own separate and useful way, an excellent thing, because, practiced
rightly, it exercises in the artist, and summons in you, the hab