x PREFACE. 



A great master is under a disadvantage. You go to look at 

 an old and celebrated picture with exalted feelings, and when 

 you get there you say, "How disappointing! I have seen all this 

 before ; the style, the attitude, and the method of composition 

 are all familiar in a hundred engravings and modern pictures, 

 and, really, the old masters, instead of being such a guide, look a 

 long way behind the age. We can do things better now." The 

 secret is, the old master's work has been multiplied exceedingly, 

 and used as the ground- work on which to build innumerable 

 variations. Without his work these could never have come 

 into existence. From the stores accumulated by Gilbert White 

 a very great deal of the contents of modern books have been 

 drawn. Not only the facts but the general system has been 

 followed out in a hundred ways, so that his book suffers exactly 

 like the old picture, until you understand it. The more you 

 understand them the more you appreciate old masters, whether 

 artists or authors, until you would be ready, if you had the 

 means, to give the extraordinary prices for them that seem so 

 incomprehensible to outsiders. It is curious that White should 

 have had an artist's eye for landscape. He frequently, as he 

 rides along the South Downs, checks his horse to admire those 

 very scenes which Turner has made classic. He thinks them 

 glorious, as indeed they are ; yet one would scarcely expect, in 

 the world's judgment, a man who was not an authority on art to 

 find out for himself the views which the public now purchase so 

 eagerly. The sympathy he felt with nature enabled him to see 

 much farther than the hedges by which he walked, and brought 

 his mind into parallel lines with the great painter. At Mount 

 Caburn he was attacked by swarms of wild bees a little incident; 

 but fifty years afterwards, or more, another naturalist, who had 

 paid particular attention to these insects, happened to visit the 

 same spot, and there he found colonies of the same bees, and 

 recognised the same species. 



Anyone who desires to see some of the things that this man 

 saw, if he have the least inclination for drawing, cannot do 

 better than fix himself in some pleasant spot, and work there in 

 absolute quietness for as many days as possible. For it is in 



