INTKODUCTION IX. 



Young, a Devonshire gentleman, and rather less than two years 

 before the death of Gilbert White. At the time of his death his 

 eldest son John, born in 1759, was Vicar of South Stoneham, 

 near Southampton. His daughters, Jane, born in 1758, and 

 Hester, born in 1764, to the latter of whom Gilbert White's 

 well-known "Letter from Timothy the Tortoise" was addressed, 

 continued to reside in Winchester after their father's death. 

 The elder of these sisters, who had been married in 1797 to 

 the Eevd. Benjamin Jeffreys, a Fellow of Winchester College, 

 died in 1799 after giving birth to a dead child. In the latter 

 year Mrs. Chapone.had come to live at Winchester with her 

 niece Hester Mulso, after the sudden death of her brother 

 Thomas, a childless widower ; but in consequence of the death 

 of her married niece, and the removal of her cousin Mrs. Newton 

 Ogle to Northumberland, she retired with Hester Mulso in 1800 

 to Hadley, near Barnet, where she expired on Christmas Day 

 1801. William, John Mulso's sailor son, had been lost with all 

 hands in the Hei'mes sloop in 1797 ; so that after Mrs. Chapone's 

 death the only descendants of Thomas Mulso, of Twywell, besides 

 any children of John Mulso junior, were the latter and his sister 

 Hester. Whether this John Mulso, who died Vicar of South 

 Stoneham in 1815, left any descendants, or not, I have been 

 unable to ascertain ; but in an edition of Mrs. Chapone's works 

 published in 1807, which contains " An Account of her Life and 

 Character drawn up by her own Family " — that is, I am sure, 

 by her nephew and niece John and Hester Mulso — I find the 

 following passages : " There now survive but few who could 

 "boast of an alliance with Mrs. Chapone " ; and again, "The 

 " four children [of John Mulso] were the last remaining branch 

 " of the formerly numerous and prosperous family of which she 

 " [Mrs. Chapone] was a member, and she regarded them as 

 "props that might yet sustain a once flourishing edifice from 

 " falling into total decay. This idea has not been permitted to 

 " be realised ! " It seems therefore very possible that the Mulso 

 family is now extinct. 



Admirers of the Selborne naturalist will greatly regret the 

 destruction of his letters to Mulso, all the more since, with the 

 exception of a very few lines of biography written by his nephew, 

 John White, the publisher, there is no account of Gilbert White 

 by any of his contemporaries, of whom all those who knew him, 

 even in their earliest years, have now long been dead. To these 

 letters from his friend, then, we must turn to see what is almost 

 the only contemporary estimate of the naturalist's character and 

 career, as it were in a mirror : a mirror which is, perhaps, not 

 always of the clearest or purest lustre, but which may be trusted 

 to give out bright, and generally faithful reflections. In reading 

 them through I have sometimes wondered whether there ever 



