190 GILBERT WHITE AND OTHERS 



Grant Allen's edition contained the marginal notes 

 made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his own copy of the 

 book. " These Marginalia are sixteen in number, and 

 by how much the world is better for their publica- 

 tion it is not easy to say, since anything more inane 

 and commonplace than most of them cannot well be 

 imagined." Newton sarcastically suggested the issue of 

 a supplement to the New English Dictionary to contain 

 what Mr. Allen called Coleridge's " certain yet hitherto 

 unknown etymology " of the word gossamer, as " God's 

 Dame's Hair," which illustrates the old notion well 

 expressed by the saying of an expert, that " the less 

 authority there is for any derivation the more glorious 

 is the guess ! " (W. W. Skeat in litt. ad hoc). 



Another edition of Selborne which appeared at about 

 the same time was that of Dr. Richard Bowdler Sharpe, 

 with ten pages of introduction by the Dean of Rochester, 

 " a part of the performance which may be dismissed with 

 the remark that more than half of it would serve as a 

 prelude to almost any kind of book." One of the worst 

 features of that edition is that it contains imaginary 

 portraits of Gilbert White, of whom one of the best 

 known personal facts is that he would never sit for his 

 portrait. This roused Newton's just anger, and he de- 

 scribed the figures as " offensive impertinences," and 



as such they will properly be resented by all lovers of his 

 memory. Moreover they all express one and the same 

 falsification, proving the draughtsman's ignorance of his 

 victim's personal appearance. In every one Gilbert 

 White is represented as " wearing his own hair," to use 

 the old phrase. Yet we have undoubted proof that he 

 always wore a wig, as did nearly all the respectable 

 gentlemen of his day. In 1752 we find him paying forty- 

 five shillings for a " feather top'd grizzle wig " from 

 London; and in 1783 his niece wrote to him from 



