OF SELBORNE. 255 



If you think my letter worthy the notice of your 

 respectable society, you are at liberty to lay it before 

 them ; and they will consider it, I hope, as it was in- 

 tended, as an humble attempt to promote a more minute 

 inquiry into natural history ; into the life and conversa- 

 tion of animals. Perhaps hereafter I may be induced 

 to take the house swallow under consideration ; and 

 from that proceed to the rest of the British Hirundines. 



Though I have now travelled the Sussex downs up- 

 wards of thirty years, yet I still investigate that chain 

 of majestic mountains with fresh admiration year by 

 year ; and think I see new beauties every time I tra- 

 verse it. This range, which runs from Chichester east- 

 ward as far as East-Bourn, is about sixty miles in 

 length, and is called the South Downs, properly speak- 

 ing, only round Lewes. As you pass along you com- 

 mand a noble view of the wild, or weald, on one hand, 

 and the broad downs and sea on the other. Mr. Ray 

 used to visit a family l just at the foot of these hills, 

 and was so ravished with the prospect from Plumpton 

 Plain, near Lewes, that he mentions j;hose scapes in his 

 " Wisdom of God in the Works of the Creation" with 

 the utmost satisfaction, and thinks them equal to any 

 thing he had seen in the finest parts of Europe. 



For my own part, I think there is somewhat pecu- 

 liarly sweet and amusing in the shapely figured aspect 

 of chalk hills, in preference to those of stone, which are 

 rugged, broken, abrupt, and shapeless. 



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 mountains without thinking I per- 

 ceive somewhat analogous to growth in their gentle 

 swellings and smooth fungus-like protuberances, their 

 fluted sides, and regular hollows and slopes, that carry 

 at once the air of vegetative dilatation and expansion. 

 Or was there ever a time when these immense 



1 Mr. Courthope, of Danny. 



