16 BRITISH BIRDS 



Thomson was also the author of TJie Castle of Indolence ; and the 

 national anthem of Rule, Britannia was probably his too. 



5. Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne. A series of 

 44 letters addressed to Thomas Pennant, Esq., and of 66 

 addressed to the Hon. Daines Barrington, gentlemen of means 

 and leisure, and of congenial tastes with the writer, who 

 was six or seven years older than his correspondents. The 

 writer, Gilbert White, was born at The Wakes, an ivied house 

 in the village of Selborne, in 1720. He graduated M.A. at Oriel 

 College, Oxford, in 1746 ; took Holy Orders the year after ; 

 became rector of his native parish of Selborne, where he lived 

 the greater part of his life, performing the light clerical duties 

 of his office, and finding ample time for the study of nature ; 

 and died, in the house in which he was born, in 1793. His 

 book on the natural history of Selborne is a classic which has 

 made the parish of Selborne more widely known than any other 

 parish in Great Britain. c Open the book where you will ', says 

 Russell Lowell, * it takes you out of doors. ... In simplicity of 

 taste and natural refinement it reminds one of Walton ; in 

 tenderness toward " the brute creation", of Cowper. . . . His 

 book has the delightfulness of absolute leisure. It is the 

 journal of Adam in Paradise ' (' My Garden Acquaintance,' in 

 My Study Windows). The parish of Selborne is in the extreme 

 eastern corner of Hampshire, about 12 square miles in area, 

 finely diversified by hill, dale, woodlands, heath, and water. It 

 borders on Sussex near where that county borders on Surrey. 

 The high part is in the south-west, and consists of ' a vast hill 

 of chalk, rising 300 ft. above the village, and divided into 

 a sheep down, a high wood, and a long hanging wood called 

 the Hanger '. [See Letter 1 to Mr. Pennant.] The village in 

 White's time contained about 700 inhabitants. 



34. more amusing. We should now say * more entertaining or 

 interesting '. 



43. with a single word. E. gr., ( A shoreless ocean tumbles 

 round the globe.' 



203. commoners of air. See Burns's Epistle to Davie, ' What 

 tho' like commoners of air,' &c. 



278. by no means dogmatic not more so than Gilbert White. 

 See p. 21. 



