'The Natural History of Se I borne 229 



mountains * with fresh admiration year by year ; and I think 

 I see new beauties every time I traverse it. This range, 

 which runs from Chichester eastward as far as East Bourn 

 [Eastbourne], is about sixty miles in length, and is called the 

 South Downs, properly speaking, only round Lewes. As you 

 pass along, you command a noble view of the wild, 2 or weald, 

 on one hand, and the broad downs and sea on the other. 

 Mr. Ray used to visit a family * just at the foot of these hills, 

 and was so ravished with the prospect from Plumpton Plain, 

 near Lewes, that he mentions those scapes 3 in his " Wisdom 

 of God in the Works of the Creation " with the utmost satis- 

 faction, and thinks them equal to anything he had seen in the 

 finest parts of Europe. 



For my own part, I think there is somewhat peculiarly 

 sweet and amusing in the shapely figured aspect of chalk-hills 

 in preference to those of stone, which are rugged, broken, 

 abrupt, and shapeless. 4 



Perhaps I may be singular in my opinion, and not so happy 

 as to convey to you the same idea ; but I never contemplate 

 these mountains without thinking I perceive somewhat ana- 

 logous to growth in their gentle swellings and smooth fungus- 

 like protuberances, their fluted sides, and regular hollows and 



* Mr. Courthope of Danny. 



1 There is no passage in White more redolent of the eighteenth-century 

 manner of regarding natural scenery than this. Few of us would now 

 apply such overwrought words to the Bernese Oberland. ED. 2 The 

 " wild " is of course superfine English for the weald. The word weald is a 

 good old term for a wooded district, and is allied to the German Wald. 

 The whole of the weald of Surrey and Sussex was once covered by a dense 

 oak forest ; even now it is very thickly wooded. Both in this instance, 

 and at Monkton Weald in Dorsetshire, the people preserve the true pro- 

 nunciation, though White here ignorantly writes "wild " and the ordnance 

 surveyors write " Monkton Wyld." As a rule, in such cases, the popular 

 form is the correct one, while "educated" people, striving to be more 

 correct, distort or lose sight of the true etymology. ED. 3 Views. 

 This is a rare example of the separate use of the word, familiar to us all in 

 composition in "landscape" and " seascape." ED. 4 Here again we 

 get the eighteenth-century notion that rugged and rocky scenery is "shape- 

 less," and, therefore, ugly. What that age specially admired was smiling 

 cultivation ; wild mountainous districts it regarded as repellent and ter- 

 rifying. ED. 



