THE CENTENARY ANNIVERSARY OF GILBERT WHITE. 203 



quarto edition of his work, that he was educated at Basingstoke 

 under the Vicar of that place, the Rev. Thomas Warton, the 

 father of the Master of Winchester, and the Professor of Poetry 

 at Oxford. In December, 1739, he went to Oriel College, Oxford, 

 where in June, 1743, he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts, and 

 in March, 1741, was elected a Fellow of his College, becoming 

 Master of Arts in 1746. He received deacon's orders on April 

 27th, 1747, from the Bishop of Oxford, the eminent Thomas 

 Seeker, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, and was ordained 

 priest by the Bishop of Hereford on March 11th, 1749, in the 

 chapel in Spring Gardens, London. In October, 1751, he was 

 appointed to the curacy of Selborne, which he temporarily 

 resigned in April, 1752, to enter on his duties at Oxford as 

 Junior Proctor of the University. 



The statement which has passed current to the effect that he 

 gave up shooting on his being ordained is erroneous. Not only 

 is this proved by the frequent entries in his accounts of the 

 purchase of the usual necessaries for the sport, and by the fact 

 that he kept several sporting dogs both at Oxford and Selborne, 

 but we also find occasional allusions in his letters which show 

 that he continued to follow the sport, although not to an advanced 

 age ; and it is extremely probable that he occasionally made it 

 subservient to the pursuit of the Ornithology of the district.* 



He quitted Oxford in the spring of 1753, and on the 9th 

 September in that year became Curate of Durley, near Bishops' 

 Waltham, where he officiated until the 9th March, 1755, when 

 he returned to live at Selborne. Shortly after his father's death, 

 in 1758, he became Curate of the neighbouring parish of Far- 

 ingdon, where he officiated regularly until 1784, when (as he 

 remarked in a letter to his sister, Mrs. Barker) Mr. Taylor, the 

 new Vicar of Selborne, having taken possession of his living, 

 he "reassumed the curacy after an interruption of twenty-six 

 years." 



From this time he renounced all intention of accepting any 

 clerical preferment which would take him from his ancestral home 

 at Selborne, and, as a matter of fact, he refused several livings 

 which from time to time were offered him in other counties. 



* Memoir prefixed to Bell's edition of the ' Natural History of Selborne,' 

 1877, vol. i., pp. xxxiii — xxxiv. 



r2 



