30 GILBERT WHITE OF SELBORNE 



matriculated at Oriel College in the same year as 

 Gilbert White, and Thomas. They became men 

 of some literary eminence, and were respectively 

 headmaster of Winchester College ; and Professor 

 of Poetry at Oxford and Poet Laureate. Neither of 

 them, however, can have been for any length of 

 time school-fellows of the Selborne naturalist, since 

 Joseph Warton went to Winchester in 1736, and 

 Thomas was born in 1728, and therefore eight years 

 the junior of Gilbert White. 



One incident of his school days at Basingstoke 

 is mentioned in *'The Antiquities of Selborne," 

 Letter XXVI. 



"When a schoolboy, more than fifty years ago, he [the 

 author] was eye-witness, perhaps a party concerned, in 

 the undermining a portion of that fine old ruin at the 

 north end of Basingstoke town, well known by the name 

 of Holy Ghost Chapel. Very providentially the vast frag- 

 ment which these thoughtless little engineers endeavoured 

 to sap did not give way so soon as might have been ex- 

 pected; but it fell the night following, and with such 

 violence that it shook the very ground, and, awakening 

 the inhabitants of the neighbouring cottages, made them 

 start up in their beds as if they had felt an earthquake. 

 The motive for this dangerous attempt does not appear: 

 perhaps the more danger the more honour, thought the 

 boys; and the notion of doing some mischief gave a zest 

 to the enterprize. As Dryden says upon another occasion, 

 " * It look'd so like a sin it pleas'd the more.*" 



In his first letter to Pennant (which, from the 

 insertion of preliminary matter when his book 



