X Introduction 



met with little success. One villager spoke of him in words 

 which might be applied to many others besides White, " He 

 was thought very little of till he was dead and gone, and 

 then he was thought a great deal of." There was another 

 old woman, who was eleven years of age when White died. 

 She must have seen him on many occasions, but did not seem 

 to preserve any very distinct recollection of the old gentle- 

 man. " He was a quiet old gentleman," she reported, "with 

 very old-fashioned sayings ; he was very kind in giving 

 presents to the poor, and used to keep a locust which 

 crawled about his garden." She was asked whether this 

 animal might not possibly have been a tortoise, and replied, 

 "Ah, that's what I mean." Occasionally he alludes to him- 

 self and his people in his letters, but such references are 

 but scanty. Of the parish, writing to Mr. Pennant, he says, 

 " We abound with poor, many of whom are sober and in- 

 dustrious. The inhabitants enjoy a good share of health 

 and longevity, and the parish swarms with children." 

 Again, writing to his niece Anne, he says, " After I had 

 experienced the advantage of two agreeable young house- 

 keepers, I was much at a loss when they left me ; and have no- 

 body to make whipped syllabubs and gracethe upper end of my 

 table. We have here this winter a weekly concert, consisting 

 of first and second fiddle, two repianos, a bassoon, a hautboy, 

 a violincello, and a German flute ; to the great annoyance 

 of the neighbouring pigs, which complain that their slumbers 

 are interrupted and their teeth set on edge." In this little 

 picture we see the fairer side of the isolation of the villages 

 of those days. Self-contained as they were, it is obvious that 

 their inhabitants had a more cheerful time amongst them- 

 selves than is the lot of most villagers of to-day. The old 

 village church band of instrumentalists was doubtless a very 

 amateur body, and its replacement by the organ of to-day has 

 no doubt contributed to placing church music on a higher 

 plane, but the revolution has not — one seems to be led to 

 think — been a wholly unmixed advantage. In 1778, when he 

 was beginning to feel that age was creeping over him. White 

 writes to his sister, " My great parlour turns out a fine warm 

 winter room, and affords a pleasant equal warmth. In 



