Introduction xxxiii 



stand " 'The Natural History of Selborne" one ought to visit Selborne 

 itself. There, facing the chief street of the village, you see a quiet and 

 unobtrusive old house, which is the one where White made his 

 immortal observations and penned in -peace his immortal letters. As 

 you look at the front towards the street, indeed, you wonder that such 

 a site could afford the bachelor -parson sufficient opportunities for 

 watching the intimate life of birds and beasts as his correspondence 

 shows him to have watched it. But if you obtain the courteous per- 

 mission of the present proprietor to enter the house and inspect the 

 garden, you will no longer feel surprised. The front windows, it is 

 true, give upon a very compact street of eighteenth century domestic 

 architecture ; the back opens out upon a spacious lawn and garden, 

 sloping up towards the Hanger, and wooded with fine old trees, some 

 of them doubtless of Gilbert White's own planting. Here the easy- 

 minded Fellow of Oriel and curate of Faringdon could sit in his 

 rustic chair all day long, and observe the birds and beasts as they 

 dropped in to visit him. The Letters are the vivid picture of a life 

 so passed the life of a quiet, well-to-do, comparatively unoccupied 

 gentleman of cultivated manners and scientific tastes, studying nature 

 at his ease in his own domain, untroubled by trains, by telegrams, by 

 duns, by domestic worries ; amply satisfied to give up ten years of his 

 life to settling some question of ornithological detail, and well pleased 

 if in the end his conclusions are fortunate enough to meet the approval 

 of the learned Mr. Pennant or the ingenious Mr. Earrington. 



Those times have passed away. Science has become a matter of 

 special education. The field of the amateur has been sadly curtailed. 

 No man now can hope to attain to new facts or generalisations without 

 the copious aid of libraries, instruments, collections, co-operation, long 

 specialist training. But the calm picture of this more peaceful and 

 easy-going past is all the more pleasant to us on that account. I 

 confess I can never read a page or two of White without recalling to 

 my mind those exquisite lines of Austin Dobsons which sum up for us 

 the ideal eighteenth-century gentleman : 



He liked the well-wheel's creaking tongue 

 He liked the thrush that stopped and sung 



