INTRODUCTION 



SOME time about the year 1755, as far as one can judge, 

 there went to settle down at Selborne in Hampshire a 

 certain quiet and unobtrusive parson, the Reverend Gilbert 

 White, Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, who has made his out-of- 

 the-way village into a place of pilgrimage for all lovers of nature 

 on both sides of the Atlantic. He was not, as is commonly though 

 erroneously stated, the vicar of the parish ; he retained his 

 Fellowship at Oriel, and seems to have resided in Selborne for the 

 most part merely in his character as a private gentleman, though 

 he also incidentally acted as curate there and elsezv here. But that 

 was not Gilbert White's first appearance in the Hampshire parish. 

 He merely settled down to spend his days obscurely but calmly in his 

 native village. So modest was he, indeed, and so careless of fame 

 that no portrait now exists of him, and only a few particulars 

 can with difficulty be gleaned from very brief notices about the 

 man whose Letters have probably been reprinted in a greater 

 number of editions than those of any other English worthy. 



The Whites had a hereditary connection of two generations 

 with Selborne. Gilbert White the elder, grandfather of the 

 naturalist, was a Fellow of Magdalen, presented by his college 

 in 1 68 1 to their vicarage of Selborne, then, it would appear, of 

 very small value. The tombstone of this elder Gilbert, still 

 remaining in the parish church, is partly answerable for the 

 persistent blunder ivhich describes the naturalist as "the idyllic 

 vicar of Selborne" ; and the error is intensified by the memorial 

 slab to the grandson himself, on which occur the words, "formerly 

 Vicar of this Parish? applied to the elder not to the younger 

 Gilbert. The vicar died in 1727, when his famous grandson 



