LAST ESSAYS 297 



fair chance : do not make its possession dependent upon 

 morality, virtue, genius, personal stature, nobility of 

 mind, self-sacrifice, or such rubbish.' His were not the 

 times in which a poet could write : ' I have been young, 

 and now am old ; yet I have not seen the righteous for- 

 saken, nor his seed begging bread.' 



But there is a large and not always latent power of 

 conservatism in Jefferies as in the land itself ; it emerges 

 now and then, as if a mastodon heaved up the earth and 

 thrust its shoulders out in the midst of the street. His 

 spirit, his owti special part of himself, that which belongs 

 to the years since 1848, is capable of the bravest flights ; 

 but there were many years before 1848, and they, too, are 

 in him, and he is of them. Hence a labourer's sentiment 

 or a farmer's prejudice easily threatens his tower of 

 ivory, ' pinnacled dim in the intense inane '; hence he 

 can never quite get away from Coate Farm, its half- 

 dozen little fields, and his good father making the bad 

 best of it. He delights in Linnfeus' * Tour in Lapland ' 

 ' because it gives a smack in the face to modern pseudo- 

 scientific medical cant about hygiene, showing how the 

 Laplanders break every " law," human and " Divine," 

 ventilation, bath, and diet — all the trash — and therefore 

 enjoy the most excellent health, and live to a great old 

 age.'* 



So also the unscientific and unhistorical man in him 

 scorns ' infallible instinct ' and ' evolution ' as explana- 

 tions of birds' nests. ' An examination of birds' nests, 

 if conducted free of prejudice, will convince any in- 

 dependent person neither that the one nor the other 

 explains these common hedge difficulties 'f — e.g., the fact 

 that nests are too small for the fledglings, which ' bubble 

 over ' the edge. The county wants new land laws, but 

 votes Conservative ; it ' has learned to read, and does not 

 buy books. 'J Jefferies used to think that the country- 



* ' Nature in Books,' Field and Hedgerow, 



t 'Bird's Nests,' ibid. 



% ' Walks in the Wheatfields/ ibid. 



