xxviii Introduction 



1720. He died in 1793, so that his seventy-three years fairly 

 covered the greater part of the eighteenth century and of the reigns of 

 the three Georges. Selborne is even now a remote country village, far 

 from the railway ; it was then yet more inaccessible and sequestered 

 than at -present. It lay midway between two great coach roads, the 

 Portsmouth and the Winchester ; and it was approached only by those 

 deep, steep, and water-worn lanes of which White speaks so feelingly, 

 but to render which passable his grandfather the vicar had left a 

 considerable sum of money. Roughly speaking, indeed, Gilbert White 

 spent most of his life at Selborne ; and it is partly that long ancestral 

 connection with a single spot which imparts so much value to his 

 continued series of local observations. But he did not lack polite 

 learning, nor intercourse with the best of his kind elsewhere. He 

 went to school at Basingstoke, with Thomas Warton, a well-known 

 clergyman, famous as the father of two more distinguished sons, 

 Joseph, Master of Winchester College, and Thomas, Professor of 

 Poetry at Oxford. Thence the lad proceeded in due course to the 

 University, where he matriculated at Oriel in 1739, being then nine- 

 teen. Four years later, in 1743, he took his degree of Bachelor of 

 Arts, and in March 1/44 he was elected to a Fellowship. He seems 

 to have resided for at least three years afterwards at the University. 

 His first curacy was at Swarraton, near Old Aires ford. In 17^2, 

 however, he was Junior Proctor at Oxford, and there are indications 

 that the Swarraton curacy was little more than a title. Not very long 

 afterwards he retired to Selborne, where he was finally settled in 

 1755, though he did not inherit the family property till his uncle's 

 death in 1763. He could never thenceforward be induced permanently 

 to quit this his chosen place of residence. He refused more than one 

 offer of a college living, preferring his modest curacy at Faringdon, 

 and the quiet ease of a lettered naturalist to parochial distractions. 

 But it would seem from a curious passage in the "Antiquities of 

 Selborne " that before settling in Hampshire he must have passed some 

 time practically as a gentleman farmer in the Isle of Ely. 



Such are the chief dates in the Hampshire parson s simple annals. 

 White has left for us an account of his life, however, far more graphic 

 and valuable than any mere formal biography an account which more 



