Wiltshire Books, P amp filets, and Articles. 319 



Eeviews of the book have appeared in Wiltshire Notes and Queries, 

 March, 1894; The Devizes Gazette, March 15th and 22nd, 1894; The 

 Antiqiiary, June, 1894 ; The Illustrated Archaologist, June, 1894 ; 

 The Salisbury Journal, March Slst, 1894 ; and the Bristol Times and 

 Mirror, 



Richard JefPeries, a Study, by H. S. Salt. Lond. : 1894. This book, 

 in its large paper 8vo edition rejoices in excellent type, and hand-made 

 paper with wide margins; it has a photographic portrait of R. JefBeries 

 as a frontispiece, and as illustrations foi;r wash drawings of Coate and the 

 neighbourhood, reproduced by some process analogous to photogravure with 

 singularly soft and pleasing results. In five chapters the author deals with 

 his subject as man, naturalist, poet-naturalist, thinker, and writer, and the 

 book concludes with a bibliographical appendix of his works. 



Mr. Salt holds a very high opinion of JefEeries' power and value as a 

 writer. " He is one of the small number, the very small number, of great 

 prose writers of his generation " — but he grounds that opinion not on the 

 excellence of those studies of wild and rural life by which he is so widely 

 known, but on his later mystical writings, and more especially on his 

 "autobiography" — The Story of My Heart. "Whereas JefEeries' real 

 and ultimate fame as a writer is based on his later and more imaginative 

 essays, his present commercial-literary reputation is based on an antecedent 

 transitional and distinctly subordinate phase of workmanship. He survives 

 in booksellers' catalogues as the author of the Gamekeeper at Home, that 

 he may be known to future ages as the author of The Story of My Heart.^^ 

 " JefEeries in the finest efEorts of his genius is necessarily for the few," 

 the few superior beings who can enter into his mystic " ectasies," and 

 sympathise with him in those moments of " exaltation " which he shared 

 ■we are told with the " adepts " of the East. To rise to this height of 

 appreciation it is apparently necessary to be in religion a Pantheist, and 

 in politics a Communist — a state of mind to which perhaps the average 

 Wiltshireman can hardly hope to attain. He will, nevertheless, find Mr, 

 Salt's essay very readable. 



The small paper edition, price 2s. 6d., forms one of the " Dilettante 

 Library " issued by Messrs. Swan, Sonnenschein, & Co. 



The book has been widely noticed in the Times, December 28th, 1893 ; 

 Saturday Review, March 3rd, 1894; Daily Chronicle, January 25th, 

 1894 ; and twenty-one other London and provincial and twelve American 

 papers. 



" Richard Jefferies, the Man and his Work," is the title of a lecture 

 delivered at the Salisbury Museum, on February 8th, 1894, by Mr. J. L. 



