80 Richard Jefferies. 



Amaryllis at the Fair may here be taken somewhat out of its 

 proper order. It was the last book published during his life. We 

 may say of it, as of After London, that, fragment as it is, it still has 

 no small charm for us, and that we would williugl}^ have had the 

 rest of the story told. It deals entirely with the Coate neighbour- 

 hood, and most of the characters in it are sketches of his own 

 relatives, Iden, for instance, is evidently his father. Miss Thomas 

 mentions that the latter told her that two of the best passages in 

 the book, the potato -planting and the choosing the leg of mutton, 

 were drawn from life in all their details. 



There now remain only the four ^ volumes of collected essays and 

 papers, one of which was not published until after his death. These 

 four books, with Red Deer, make up the second great series dealing 

 with country life, but they contain little that distinctly belongs to 

 Wiltshire. The Life of the Fields is chiefly remarkable for 

 three articles, of which the first to be mentioned is " The Field- Play," 

 one of the saddest things ever written, beginning with sunshine and 

 brightness, and passing away into unredeemed tragedy and darkness 

 at the close. Crabbe might have told the story well, but Jefferies 

 has done more than this — has almost attained perfection. Next 

 comes the oft-quoted Pageant of Slimmer, which is in his finest 

 poetical manner. Lastly Village Miners, a capital paper on curious 

 dialect words, mostly Wiltshire, which makes us wish he had given 

 us more of the same sort. He knew our folk-speech thoroughly, 

 but apparently did not recognise its real historical and philological 

 value — to say nothing of its picturesqueness and rough vigour — 

 until too late in his career to give us the full benefit of his knowledge. 

 Of the remaining volumes, The Open Air deals almost entirely 

 with Sussex and the neighbourhood of Loudon. The resemblance 

 between parts of the fine paper on Wild blowers and Kingsley's 

 Winter Garden is worth noting, Its mere title would show that the 

 volume on Nature near London lies somewhat outside our range ; 

 but in his last essays, collected after his death under the title Field 

 AND Hedgerow, there are a few distinctly Wiltshire touches, as in 



' The Toilers of the Fields is not here included, as it mainly belongs to 

 his earliest period. 



