YOUTH AND EARLY WRITINGS 53 



youth is a slight indication of his uncertainty and con- 

 fusion ; for a time it was back-handed, and again it was 

 a compromise between writing and printing. 



There were more of these tales than are exposed in 

 ' Early Fiction,' and Jefferies had hopes that his Uncle 

 Harrild would pass them on to the editor of London 

 Society, a journal that helped to relieve the rusticity of 

 Coate. But he was not only writing tales, reporting, and 

 correcting proofs. For some time past he had been 

 reading modern science, as chance brought Darwin or 

 Lyell along ; but it was without any guidance from critics 

 or friends, and we know that he came upon White's 

 ' Selborne,' e.g., only towards the end of his life. He was 

 reading history, too, and had turned archaeologist and 

 numismatist, looking out for signs of early occupation on 

 the face of the earth, for coins, epitaphs, armorial bearings, 

 pedigrees, legends, architecture in the churches, manor- 

 houses, and farms. His own neighbourhood, as he wrote 

 in July, 1867, was a mine for an antiquary. He threw 

 over his school belief that ancient Britain was a waste. 

 The Roman and British coins, arrow-heads, tumuli, camps, 

 cannon-balls, made the country seem ' alive with the 

 dead,' and he was ' inclined to think that this part of 

 North Wilts, at least, was as thickly inhabited of yore as 

 it is now, the difference being only in the spot inhabited 

 having been exchanged for another more adapted to the 

 wants of the times.' He read especially the historians 

 and chroniclers of his own part of the country, and picked 

 up all kinds of knowledge that he could either store up 

 or set forth at once in the North Wilts Herald. Before 

 the middle of 1867 he had finished a series of twenty 

 chapters for that paper on the history of Malmesbury. 

 There he quoted from Asser, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 

 David Lindsay, ' Hudibras,' Byron, Goethe, Ossian, and 

 Longfellow's ' King Witlaf's Drinking Horn.' But he 

 gave his medley of quotations and paraphrases little 

 vitality by passages of an insecure and imitated stateliness 

 — as, for example : ' Certain names stand out in the mind 



