i68 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



' " I don't know ; people nobody ever heard of — no- 

 body particular — Indians and Persians, and all that 

 sort." 



' " I know," said Bevis ; " of course ! I know. Of 

 course, I shall be Julius Cgesar !" 



' " And I shall be Mark Antony." 



' " And we will fight Pompey." 



' " But who shall be Pompey ?" said Mark. 



' " Pooh ! there's Bill, and Wat, and Ted ; anybody 

 will do for Pompey." '* 



The boys * bathed in air and sunbeam, and gathered 

 years of health like flowers from the field.' Enterprise 

 and independence, high spirits, love of the open air, are to 

 be felt, if not learnt, in every chapter of the book. As a 

 boy's book — I speak under correction from boys — it has 

 no fault, except, perhaps, that the exactness and abund- 

 ance of detail is disproportionate in a work that has, alas ! 

 to end. It is too dramatic for an epic, and its movement 

 is confused, not to speak of its being shamefully inter- 

 rupted by the description of an anemone-leaf. 



It is full of evidence of Jefferies not only as a boy, but 

 as a man. It marks an advance from the genial, easy 

 treatment of the Lucketts in ' Round about a Great 

 Estate ' towards the minuteness of * Amaryllis.' The 

 landscape is finer than in any of his earlier books — for 

 example, the sunrise in chapter xlviii., where he says : 

 * I do not know how any can slumber with this over them. 

 . . . Such moments are beyond the chronograph and any 

 measure of wheels ; the passing of one cog may be equal to 

 a century, for the mind has no time. . . . What an 

 incredible marvel it is that there are human creatures that 

 slumber threescore and ten years, and look down at the 

 clods, and then say : " We are old ; we have lived seventy 

 years." Seventy years ! The passing of one cog is 

 longer ; seven hundred times seventy years would not 

 equal the click of the tiniest cog while the mind was living 

 its own life. Sleep and clods, with the glory of the earth, 



* Bevis : The Story of a Boy. 



