344 THL LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



be treated as literature. Yet another section consists of 

 books in which the religious teacher is pre-eminent, in 

 which the design is not to please, but to convict, admonish, 

 or persuade. When these three divisions of his vast 

 library of publications are dismissed as valuable each after 

 its kind, but distinctly unliterary, there remains a residuum 

 of about eight or nine volumes, which are books in the 

 literary sense, which are not liable to extinction from the 

 nature of their subject, and which constitute his claim to 

 an enduring memory as a writer. Of these The Canadian 

 Naturalist of 1840 is the earliest, A Year at the Shore of 

 1865 the latest. Charles Kingsley's criticism of these 

 volumes, expressed thirty-five years ago, may still be 

 quoted. Surveying the literature of natural history, 

 Kingsley wrote, in Glaucus : — 



" First and foremost, certainly, come Mr. Gosse's 

 "books. There is a playful and genial spirit in them, 

 " a brilliant power of word-painting, combined with deep 

 "and earnest religious feeling, which makes them as 

 " morally valuable as they are intellectually interesting. 

 " Since White's History of Selborne few or no writers on 

 " natural history, save Mr. Gosse and poor Mr. Edward 

 " Forbes, have had the power of bringing out the human 

 " side of science, and giving to seemingly dry disquisi- 

 " tions and animals of the lowest type, by little touches 

 " of pathos and humour, that living and personal interest, 

 "to bestow which is generally the special function of 

 " the poet. Not that Waterton and Jesse are not excellent 

 "in this respect, and authors who should be in every 

 " boy's library : but they are rather anecdotists than 

 "systematic or scientific inquirers; while Mr. Gosse, in 

 " his Naturalist on the Shores of Devon, his Tour in 

 "Jamaica, and his Canadian Naturalist, has done for 

 " those three places what White did for Selborne, with 



