IN LITERATURE n 



always remain something of a mystery to us ; and it is 

 only to be explained in any plausible way by those 

 inborn tastes to which he addresses himself instinctively. 

 No one would have been more astonished than the 

 retiring Sussex parson, had it been predicted to him 

 that in jotting down his everyday notes, or in penning 

 his letters to Pennant and Barrington, he was raising 

 himself an imperishable monument, and bringing his 

 parish into undying notoriety. There are scores and 

 hundreds of villages in England to the full as attrac- 

 tive as Selborne, which enjoy no greater reputation than 

 can be given them by a county gazetteer. But as for 

 Selborne, how many of us there are who seem to know 

 the place, as if they had passed their days under the 

 Hanger ! White happened to possess a natural literary 

 gift, which has done all the more for his fame and his 

 parish that he exercised it in absolute unconsciousness, 

 and never dreamed of cultivating it. He had a pas- 

 sionate attachment for nature, which made him inde- 

 fatigable in his observation of her ; and a variety of 

 unconsidered touches in his desultory correspondence 

 and his diaries have worked a thousand details indelibly 

 into our memories. How many of us there are who 

 owe such lights on natural history as we possess almost 

 entirely to the interest that was excited by that un- 

 pretending and antiquated volume ! Since then we 

 have had such fanciful theories exploded as the general 

 hibernation of swallows in the depths of the Sussex 

 ponds or the rifts of the chalk cliffs ; but it was White 

 who taught us to distinguish the black swifts screaming 



