76 Richard Jefferies. 



acumen, observed of one of them that it was "a multum in parvo 

 encyclopaedia of country sights and country matters." Exactly so : 

 it was a contribution towards one or other of those four or five 

 encyclopaedias on Shooting, on The Country Squire, on The Agricultural 

 Labourer, on what you will of a similar character, that were always 

 shaping themselves in his mind, but never to be completed as he had 

 planned them. They have a fault inseparable from their origin, 

 being often a series of more or less isolated paragraphs, lacking the 

 master-touches that would bind them into a whole. The canvas is 

 overcrowded with detail. Kingsley has given us exquisite open-air 

 pictures now and again, as in My Winter Garden, and elsewhere, 

 but they form only a part of his many-sided work. He, however, 

 could say in a sentence or two what Jefferies took a page over. 

 Look, for instance, at that wonderful idyll of Zeal-for-Truth 

 Thoresby. How every touch of the fen-land landscape tells ! There 

 is not a word too little or a word too much. The whole scene 

 stands out clearly before us. Jefferies would have given us every 

 leaf on the abele, every reed-rond in the fen, and though we should 

 have learned much that was new the impression left on our minds 

 would have been somewhat blurred and indistinct. 



One thing is very noticeable in all these books. Let their nominal 

 scene be where it may, it is of Coate and its surroundings that they 

 tell. Those who know the locality as it was twenty or thirty years 

 ago could probably identify every field, every mound, almost every 

 tree, in these pages. If a sheep-dog stares from a gap in the hedge, 

 if an over-ripe apple falls thud on the orchard greensward, if a 

 church-key grates as it turns cumbrously in the ancient lock, we 

 feel at once that it is an actual dog or apple or key of those old 

 days that he is speaking of. All are drawn directly from his own 

 experience. Look at those note-books of his, from which Mr. Besant 

 quotes a few pages. They are actual transcripts of Nature, jotted 

 down on the spot in a kind of verbal shorthand. Add but a word 

 here and a word there, and they would be ready at once to take their 

 place in one of his papers. From one point of view his writings, as 

 literature, suff'er from this habit of his, though looked at from another 

 point it is among their greatest charms. The Laureate, in a letter 



