he felt the seeds of his talent stirring all
a-life, where he should have to display the beauties of the finny tribe,
and treat of the wonders of the great deep. When I was last in
Northumberland, they showed me _thirty_ fishes he had cut by way of trial,
with the spirit and execution whereof himself was well satisfied, and his
judicious friends enraptured; together with more than a hundred
tail-pieces, conceived and cut, 'ay, every inch,' with all his usual
imaginative appropriation and power. His art here got entirely into a new
element; for, as he was forced to show the fishes _out_ of water, he was
deprived of his favourite excellence, _motion_; yet such motion as a fish
new-landed _has_, he has given with elasticity and life: brilliance to the
scaly, and lubricity to the smooth; so as to remind the naturalist of
excellent old Chaucer's touches of nature, where

"They swommin full of smale fishes lighte,
With finnis rede, and scalis silver brighte."

A single impression of his John Doree sold lately in London for ten
guineas. And when they do come out, though every admirer will lament he
was, long ere completion, called to his blessed account, their sorrow will
be softened at beholding with what effect and spirit his animated graver
has been caught up by his son."

In the summer of 1828, Bewick visited London about his works. "He was,"
says Mr. Dovaston, "very honourably received by many learned societies and
individuals, of whom, and of whose collections, he wrote in raptures. On
his return, the London and provincial papers had many paragraphs
respecting this visit, his reception, and his life; to amend the errors of
which statements, I must have been writing one at the very hour of his
death; for I had not time to stop its insertion in one of the Shrewsbury
papers, when I received a short, but most affectionate and affecting
letter from his son, informing me, 'as his father's most valued friend,'
that he expired, in full possession of his fine and powerful mental
faculties, in quiet and cheerful resignation, on the 8th of November, 1828,
in the 76th year of his age. On the morning of his death he had the
satisfaction of seeing the first proof-impression of a series of large
wood-engravings he had undertaken, in a superior style, for the walls of
farm-houses, inns, and cottages, with a view to abate cruelty, mitigate
pain, and imbue the mind and heart with tenderness and humanity; and this
he called his last