2 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 



It is positive rest only to look into that garden of his. It is 

 vastly better than to 



See great Diocletian walk 

 In the Salonian garden s noble shade, 



for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them the noises 

 of Rome, while here the world has no entrance. No rumour 

 of the revolt of the American Colonies seems to have reached 

 him. l The natural term of an hog s life has more interest 

 for him than that of an empire. Burgoyne may surrender 

 and welcome ; of what consequence is that compared with 

 the fact that we can explain the odd tumbling of rooks in the 

 air by their turning over to scratch themselves with one 

 claw J ? All the couriers in Europe spurring rowel-deep 

 make no stir in Mr. White s little Chartreuse ; but the arrival 

 of the house-martin a day earlier or later than last year is a 

 piece of news worth sending express to all his correspon 

 dents. 



Another secret charm of this book is its inadvertent 

 humour, so much the more delicious because unsuspected 

 by the author. How pleasant is his innocent vanity in 

 adding to the list of the British, and still more of the Sel- 

 bornian, fauna! I believe he would gladly have consented 

 to be eaten by a tiger or a crocodile, if by that means the 

 occasional presence within the parish limits of either of 

 these anthropophagous brutes could have been established. 

 He brags of no fine society, but is plainly a little elated by 

 * having considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl. 

 Most of us have known our share of owls, but few can boast 

 of intimacy with a feathered one. The great events of Mr. 

 White s life, too, have that disproportionate importance 

 which is always humorous. To think of his hands having 

 actually been thought worthy (as neither Willoughby s nor 

 Ray s were) to hold a stilted plover, the Charddnus himan- 

 topus t with no back toe, and therefore liable, in speculation, 

 to perpetual vacillations ! I wonder, by the way, if meta 

 physicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the ac 

 quaintance in Sussex of * an old family tortoise, which had 

 then been domesticated for thirty years. It is clear that he 

 fell in love with it at first sight. We have no means of 

 tracing the growth of his passion, but in 1780 we find him 

 eloping with its object in a post-chaise. The rattle and 

 hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when I 



