IN FULL CAREER. 187 



woods, and streams are ever with us, whether 

 we are savages or civilized beings, whatever 

 our manners, dress, fashions, laws or customs, 

 the man who speaks with truth of these speaks 

 for all time and for all mankind. 



Yet he is not, and will never be, widely 

 popular. There are many persons, presum- 

 ably persons of culture, who cannot read 

 Jeiferies. A country parson poor man! 

 observed to me in Swindon itself, that he 

 hoped the biography of Richard Jefferies 

 would not prove so dry as the works of 

 Richard Jefferies. These, he said, with the 

 cheerful dogmatism of his kind, were as dry 

 as a stick, and impossible to read. Now, this 

 good man was probably in some sort a scholar. 

 He lives in the Jefferies county. All round 

 him are the hills and downs described in these 

 works. To us those hills and downs are now 

 filled with life, beauty, and all kinds of delight- 

 ful things, entirely through those very books. 

 The good vicar finds them so dry that he 

 cannot read them. Others there are who 

 complain that Jefferies is always " catalogu- 

 ing." One understands what is meant. To 



