222 The Natural History of Selborne 



Though I have now travelled the Sussex Downs upwards of thirty 

 years, yet I still investigate that chain of majestic mountains 1 with 

 fresh admiration year by year ; and I think I see new beauties every 

 time I traverse it. This range, which runs from Chichester east- 

 ward as far as East Bourn [Eastbourne], is about sixty miles in 

 length, and is called the South Downs, properly speaking, only 

 round Lewes. As you pass along, you command a noble view of 

 the wild, 2 or weald, on one hand, and the broad downs and sea on 

 the other. Mr. Ray used to visit a family * just at the foot of these 

 hills, and was so ravished with the prospect from Plumpton Plain, 

 near Lewes, that he mentions those scapes 3 in his " Wisdom of God 

 in the Works of the Creation " with the utmost satisfaction, and 

 thinks them equal to anything he had seen in the finest parts of 

 Europe. 



For my own part, I think there is somewhat peculiarly sweet 

 and amusing in the shapely figured aspect of chalk-hills in pre- 

 ference to those of stone, which are rugged, broken, abrupt, and 

 shapeless. 4 



Perhaps I may be singular in my opinion, and not so happy as to 

 convey to you the same idea ; but I never contemplate these moun- 

 tains without thinking I perceive somewhat analogous to growth in 

 their gentle swellings and smooth fungus-like protuberances, their 



* Mr. Courthope of Danny. 



1 There is no passage in White more redolent of the eighteenth-century 

 manner of regarding natural scenery than this. Few of us would now apply such 

 overwrought words to the Bernese Oberland. ED. 2 The " wild " is of course 

 superfine English for the weald. The word weald is a good old term for a wooded 

 district, and is allied to the German Wald. The whole of the weald of Surrey 

 and Sussex was once covered by a dense oak forest ; even now it is very thickly 

 wooded. Both in this instance, and at Monkton Weald in Dorsetshire, the 

 people preserve the true pronunciation, though White here ignorantly writes 

 "wild " and the ordnance surveyors write " Monkton Wyld." As a rule, in such 

 cases, the popular form is the correct one, while " educated " people, striving to 

 be more correct, distort or lose sight of the true etymology. ED. 3 Views. 

 This is a rare example of the separate use of the word, familiar to us all in com- 

 position in "landscape" and "seascape." ED. 4 Here again we get the 

 eighteenth-century notion that rugged and rocky scenery is "shapeless," and, 

 therefore, ugly. What that age specially admired was smiling cultivation ; wild 

 mountainous districts it regarded as repellent and terrifying. ED. 



