210 ROUND THE GREAT WHITE HORSE . 



naturalist returning by an uncontrollable impulse to live 

 near the scenes of his boyhood. " I would rather be 

 herding sheep on Mickley Bank top," he wrote home, 

 " than be one of the richest citizens of London." But 

 Cobbett, the son of a labourer, abandoned the village 

 when a lad ; the Howicks, like the late Edward Bates, 

 were citizens of " fair Nottingham," and Gilbert 

 White, Charles Kingsley, and Waterton, were parsons 

 or squires. Jefferies himself, like Cobbett, longed to 

 shake off his early associations, and his mad enterprise 

 of a walk to Russia when a boy, and failing that, of 

 crossing the Atlantic, was only prevented by want of 

 means. To the last he would rather have been a 

 novelist than a naturalist, and declared that he knew 

 London quite as well as he did the country. No 

 doubt the sense of contrast so presented, painted the 

 beauties of the country in more vivid colours in the 

 mind of Jefferies, as in that of Cobbett. But it will be 

 found that the rustic naturalist does not, except in rare 

 instances, spring from the classes who spend their 

 serious life in the fields. For the common labourer, 

 his daily toil is too severe ; for the farmer, the prac- 

 tical problems are too exacting. How exacting that 

 strain is, mentally and physically, both for master and 

 man, the reader may gather from Jefferies' description 

 of the harvesting of the hundred-acre cornfield, in his 

 essay on the " Loaf of Bread." 



It is only the shepherds of the hills, while keeping 

 their flocks as of old, who are free to see visions and 

 dream dreams, or watch the stars and nature. For the 



