GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 345 



"all the improved appliances of a science which has 

 " widened and deepened tenfold since White's time." 

 The style of Philip Gosse was scarcely affected by any 

 other external influences than those which had come 

 across his path in his early youth in Newfoundland. The 

 manner of writing of the most striking authors of his own 

 generation, such as Carlyle and Macaulay, did not leave 

 any trace upon him, since he was mature before he met 

 with their works. The only masters under whom he 

 studied prose were romance-writers of a class now wholly 

 neglected and almost forgotten. Fenimore Cooper, whose 

 novels were appearing in quick succession between 1820 

 and 1840, introduced into these stories of Indian life 

 elaborate studies of landscape and seascape which had a 

 real merit of their own. The Canadian Naturalist shows 

 evident signs of an enthusiastic study of these descriptive 

 parts of Cooper. John Banim, the Irish novelist, whose 

 O'Hara Tales captivated him so long, left a mark on the 

 minute and graphic style of Philip Gosse, and there can be 

 little doubt that the latter owed something of the gorgeous- 

 ness and redundancy of his more purple passages to the 

 inordinate admiration he had felt for the apocalyptic 

 romances of the Rev. George Croly, whose once-famous 

 Salathiel he almost knew by heart. After the year 1838 

 he ceased to read new prose books for enjoyment of their 

 manner, and his style underwent but little further modi- 

 fication. 



The most characteristic of my father's books, as types 

 of which A Naturalist's Sojourn in Jamaica and the 

 Devonshire Coast may be taken, consisted of an amalgam 

 of picturesque description, exact zoological statement, 

 topographical gossip, and easy reflection, combined after a 

 fashion wholly his own, and unlike anything attempted 

 before his day. White's Selbome, alone, may be supposed 



