320 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



concentrate himself upon this work. London thrilled 

 and delighted and repeUed him, and probably stimulated 

 him. He certainly found a market there for his work, 

 which was readily printed in newspapers and magazines, 

 and afterwards published with applause in the form of 

 books. With little arrangement, but with the charm of 

 exuberance and freshness, he poured out his stores of 

 country knowledge. There had been unlettered men 

 who knew much that he knew ; there had been greater 

 naturalists and more experienced sportsmen, more 

 magical painters — at least, in verse — of country things ; 

 but no one English writer before had had such a wide 

 knowledge of labourers, farmers, gamekeepers, poachers,of 

 the fields, and woods, and waters, and the sky above them, 

 by day and night ; of their inhabitants that run and fly 

 and creep, that are still and fragrant and many-coloured. 

 No writer had been able to express this knowledge with 

 such a pleasing element of personality in the style that 

 mere ignorance was no bar to its enjoyment. When he 

 wrote these books — * The Amateur Poacher ' and its 

 companions^ — he had no rival, nor have they since been 

 equalled in purity, abundance, and rusticity. The writer 

 was clearly as much of the soil as the things which he 

 described. In his books the things themselves were 

 alive, were given a new life by an artist's words, a life 

 more intense than they had had for any but the few 

 before they were thus brought on to the printed page. 

 Here was the life of man and animal, the crude and lavish 

 beauty of English country-life in the nineteenth century, 

 with glimpses of the older life remembered by the men 

 and women who still ploughed or kept sheep in Wiltshire 

 and Surrey. In writing these four books, Jefferies was 

 mainly drawing upon his memory and his Wiltshire notes, 

 depicting things as he had seen and known them in his 

 childhood and youth. The expression is mature, indeed, 

 but the matter simple, the spirit, as a rule, one of whole- 

 some old-fashioned enjoyment, the reflection contented 

 and commonplace. 



