Introduction xxxiii 



quisite lines of Austin Dobson's which sum up for us the ideat, 

 eighteenth-century gentleman : 



He liked the well-wheel 's creaking tongtie 

 He liked the thrush that stopped and sung 

 He liked the drone of flies among 



His netted peaches ; 

 He liked to watch the sunlight fall 

 Athwart his ivied orchard wall ; 

 Or pause to catch the cuckoo's call 



Beyond the beeches. 



Such of a surety was Gilbert White's ideal ; and we may 

 almost add of him, in Mr. Dobson's apt phrase, " His name 

 was Leisure" Time was not then money ; it was opportunity 

 for enjoyment, for self-development, for culture. And as such 

 White used it, with a consciousness of dignity and a sense of 

 worthiness in life which have almost faded out of our hurried 

 modern existence. 



'Tis as a literary monument, therefore, I hold, that we ought 

 above all things to regard these rambling and amiable Letters. 

 They enshrine for us in miniature the daily life of an amateur 

 naturalist in the days when the positions of parson, sportsman, 

 country gentleman, and man of science were not yet incongruous. 

 And in this spirit and from this point of view I have thought it 

 best to edit White's charming volume. I have not attempted the 

 impossible task of bringing our author's biology "up to date" as 

 a matter of technical modern information. To do so would be 

 to overload the ivork with useless notes, which could only distract 

 the attention of the reader from what is central and essential to 

 the time and place of the original writer. When White wrote, 

 the very convenient Linncean system of nomenclature, for example, 

 which marks genus uniformly by one substantive and species 

 by one epithet, had not yet fully superseded the clumsier old 

 descriptive method ; so that White frequently refers to birds or 

 mammals by the cumbrous and uncertain many-worded names 



c 



