note above (Sec. 200), with extreme pain
that I have hitherto limited my notice of our own great engraver and
moralist, to the points in which the disadvantages of English
art-teaching made him inferior to his trained Florentine rival. But,
that these disadvantages were powerless to arrest or ignobly depress
him;--that however failing in grace and scholarship, he should never
fail in truth or vitality; and that the precision of his unerring
hand[BF]--his inevitable eye--and his rightly judging heart--should
place him in the first rank of the great artists not of England only,
but of all the world and of all time:--that _this_ was possible to him,
was simply because he lived a _country_ life. Bewick himself,
Botticelli himself, Apelles himself, and twenty times Apelles, condemned
to slavery in the hell-fire of the iron furnace, could have
done--NOTHING. Absolute paralysis of all high human faculty _must_
result from labor near fire. The poor engraver of the piston-rod had
faculties--not like Bewick's, for if he had had those, he never would
have endured the degradation; but assuredly, (I know this by his work,)
faculties high enough to have made him one of the most accomplished
figure painters of his age. And they are scorched out of him, as the sap
from the grass in the oven: while on his Northumberland hill-sides,
Bewick grew into as stately life as their strongest pine.

227. And therefore, in words of his, telling consummate and unchanging
truth concerning the life, honor, and happiness of England, and bearing
directly on the points of difference between class and class which I
have not dwelt on without need, I will bring these lectures to a close.

"I have always, through life, been of opinion that there is no business
of any kind that can be compared to that of a man who farms his own
land. It appears to me that every earthly pleasure, with health, is
within his reach. But numbers of these men (the old statesmen) were
grossly ignorant, and in exact proportion to that ignorance they were
sure to be offensively proud. This led them to attempt appearing above
their station, which hastened them on to their ruin; but, indeed, this
disposition and this kind of conduct invariably leads to such results.
There were many of these lairds on Tyneside; as well as many who held
their lands on the tenure of 'suit and service,' and were nearly on the
same level as the lairds. Some of the latter lost their lands (not
fairly, I thi