CHAPTER III. 



Of Gilbert White's early years there is indeed little 

 on record. For people who are interested in such 

 trifles it may be recorded that he was " bred up 

 by hand," as he mentions in a letter to his niece 

 Mary, written in 1784. Some part of his boyhood 

 was spent at Farnham, a fact which he recorded in 

 his "Naturalist's Journal" when staying, in the last 

 year of his life, with his brother Benjamin, who had 

 retired to Mareland, in the parish of Bentley, near 

 that town : " The sweet peal of bells at Farnham 

 . . . occasioning agreeable associations in the mind, 

 and remembrances of the days of my youth, when 

 1 once resided in the town." 



If at school at Farnham, it was probably at a 

 dame's school, but he may possibly have been at the 

 grammar school there, which was founded in 1611. 

 He was certainly sent afterwards, though at what 

 date is uncertain, to Basingstoke Grammar School, "^ 

 the headmaster of which, the Vicar, was the Rev. 

 Thomas Warton, father of two sons — Joseph, who 



* The building, now a ruin, was used as a school up to 1855. 

 29 



