The execution of the plumage in Bewick's birds is the most masterly
thing ever yet done in wood-cutting; it is worked just as Paul Veronese
would have worked in wood, had he taken to it. His vignettes, though too
coarse in execution, and vulgar in types of form, to be good copies,
show, nevertheless, intellectual power of the highest order; and there
are pieces of sentiment in them, either pathetic or satirical, which
have never since been equaled in illustrations of this simple kind; the
bitter intensity of the feeling being just like that which characterizes
some of the leading Pre-Raphaelites. Bewick is the Burns of painting.