GILBERT WHITE AGAIN 171 



its sound style — sentences actually filled with the 

 living breath of a man. We are everywhere face to 

 face with something genuine and real ; objects, ideas, 

 stand out on the page ; the articulation is easy and 

 distinct. White had no literary ambitions. His 

 style is that of a scholar, but of a scholar devoted to 

 natural knowledge. There was evidently something 

 winsome and charming about the man personally, 

 and these qualities reappear in his pages. 



He was probably a parson who made as many 

 calls afield as in the village, if not more. An old 

 nurse in his family said of him, fifty years after his 

 death, " He was a still, quiet body, and that there 

 was not a bit of harm in him." 



White was a type of the true observer, the man 

 with the detective eye. He did not seek to read his 

 own thoughts and theories into Nature, but sub- 

 mitted his mind to her with absolute frankness and 

 ingenuousness. He had infinite curiosity, and de- 

 lighted in nothing so much as a new fact about the 

 birds and the wild life around him. To see the 

 thing as it was in itself and in its relations, that was 

 his ambition. He could resist the tendency of his 

 own mind to believe without sufficient evidence. 

 Apparently he wanted to fall in with the notion cur- 

 rent during the last century, that swallows hiber- 

 nated in the mud in the bottoms of streams and 

 ponds, but he could not gather convincing proof. It 

 was not enough that a few belated specimens were 

 seen in the fall lingering about such localities, or 

 again hovering over them early in spring ; or that 



