210 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



fatigue or of painful concession to the ' essay ' form, such 

 as ' Clematis Lane,' ' January in the Sussex Woods,' 

 ' By the Exe,' and others. Essays, accurately so called, 

 make the second class ; these are orderly discussions of a 

 given subject, the material supplied chiefly by his own 

 observation and reflection, as in ' Mind under Water,' 

 ' Birds Climbing the Air,' ' The Plainest City in Europe.' 

 In the third class come those papers with which the first 

 might have ranked had they been more happily wrought. 

 They are impassioned descriptions or meditations, like 

 ' The Pageant of Summer,' ' Meadow Thoughts,' ' Sun- 

 light in a London Square,' ' Venice in the East End,' and 

 to these must be added the stories and sketches like 

 ' St. Guido,' and ' Bits of Oak Bark.' 



In the first class, he is hampered by his notebooks and 

 the necessity of writing for the magazines. The reader 

 who wishes for country facts and ' no nonsense ' finds 

 them here. The fragments of pictures are often fine in 

 detail ; the observation of natural facts useful ; the 

 thoughts, as in * January in the Sussex Woods,' lively and 

 new ; all reveal something of the man, and can be enjoyed 

 for his sake. 



But the other two classes show more clearly and 

 favourably the Jefferies of 1883, 1884, and 1885 ; his 

 mind, his heart, and all his senses, his whole humanity, 

 is at work in them, and, above all, in the impassioned 

 descriptions and meditations. Some of the essays in 

 the second class show us what a naturalist Jefferies might 

 have become. He had been for years a great reader in 

 natural history : he mentions Linnaeus, Darwin, LyeU, 

 Maury, and others ; while among his books I have seen 

 Bevan's * Honey Bee '; Morris's ' Butterflies '; Shuckard's 

 ' British Bees '; Lubbock's ' Ants, Bees, and Wasps '; 

 J. Bell Pettigrew's ' Animal Locomotion ; or. Walking, 

 Swimming, and Flying, with a Dissertation on Aero- 

 nautics.' His eye, as has been seen, was restless, 

 curious, and exact ; and his power of recording what he 

 saw in precise and vivid English was growing every year. 



