128 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



with such a poHceman god as tho book in\'okes. In the 

 whole there is no trace of the loftier ideas which had been 

 expressed, however uncertainly, in the luckless novels. 

 Yet these are little matters, only to be mentioned in 

 order that his later progress may be made clear ; for 

 here is good cheer, the smell of the morning, and the 

 freedom of a sweet land. 



' Wild Life in a Southern County,' also consisting of 

 papers from the Pall Mall Gazette, was published as a 

 book in 1879. Here also he returns to Coate, Burderop, 

 and the Reservoir, but ranges farther afield to Marl- 

 borough Forest, Draycot, Broad Hinton, Bishopston, 

 Aldbourne, covering much of the same ground as in his 

 early North Wilts Herald articles, and using, too, part of 

 his contributions to the Graphic ; while in the sixteenth 

 chapter he begins to include his observations from the 

 neighbourhood of Surbiton. Its twenty chapters con- 

 form roughly to the rough scheme of beginning at the 

 Downs, on Liddington Castle, and descending with a 

 stream to the lower land, to Coate Farm and the fields 

 and woods around. But the arrangement is even less 

 rigid than in ' The Gamekeeper'; the digressions are more 

 haphazard, the writing more careless. The writing of 

 newspaper articles of a certain length helps to develop 

 a habit of filling a proposed number of pages rather than 

 of achieving a firm and logical form demanded by the 

 substance. The length of an article demanded by an 

 editor has no necessary connection with the subject of 

 it. In prose such lengths are as destructive to order and 

 beauty as the fourteen lines of a sonnet commonly are to 

 sense. Jefferies' difficulty, writing with no precedent to 

 warn or guide, was unusually great, and his rich, un- 

 trained intelligence was an ordained victim. Almost to 

 the end of his life he is to be seen painfully struggling 

 with, or carelessly giving way to, the necessity of writing 

 essays of a standard length, introducing brief irrelevancies, 

 and seriously injuring what he really has to say. But 

 ' Wild Life,' though not without dulness and repetition, 



