WHITE OF SELBORNE. 
45 
fact noted by White of a boy who ate bees. To be sure he was 
an idiot boy. He would have made a fine subject for Words- 
w'orth. He was not more remarkable than a local leper, whose 
case leads White to form conjectures as to the cause of the 
decline of leprosy. He attributes the disease to the winter 
eating of salt meat, the scarcity of vegetables, and the salt fish 
of Lent. We are apt, perhaps, to think of White as a man only 
interested in birds, but he was really a kind of rural Pepys, and 
all Nature had the same undying interest for him as human 
nature had for the immortal Samuel. Living in a lonely place, 
where nobody cared to talk to him about natural history, he 
wrote his pleasing and unaffected observations in letters to 
friends. The autumn manoeuvres of rooks were food for his 
mind — 
Upon a gate he leans and sees 
The pastures and the quiet trees — 
not reflecting on the sum of all things, like Mr. Matthew Arnold’s 
philosopher, but on the rooks saying their vespers — “the ravens 
call upon Him.’’ 
Selborne possessed antiquities which also amused White. 
Wolmer Pond was fabled to contain treasures, and in the dry 
summer of 1741, hundreds of Roman coins were found in its 
bed. White bought several of Marcus Aurelius and Faustina. 
The Empress with the unlucky reputation (which we trust Mr. 
Swinburne exaggerates) “had a very agreeable set of features,” 
according to White. How the coins came there, like the 
mystery of the swallow’s winter, puzzled him entirely. Lord 
Selborne speaks of Roman vessels, capable of containing 30,000 
coins, found by himself, or in his own time. No fewer than 
29,773 coins were actually recovered near Wolmer Pond in 1873. 
The Romans interested White much less than his predecessors, 
the Priors. He was fortunate in living in one of those old 
English parishes where prehistoric peoples and Romans and 
the mediaeval Church have all left abiding marks of their occu- 
pation. An intelligent man needs- no more than the run of such 
a parish to keep him happy and busy. Many of them are 
epitomes of the history and, if we may use the term, the pre- 
history, of the island. Palaeolithic and neolithic flints, bronze 
arts of all dates, Roman tiles, mosaics and pottery, foundations 
of villas, lie on or near the surface ; old names, tombs, and coats 
of arms on the walls of church, manor, and farmhouse speak of 
the years since the Norman Conquest. All is old, grey, and 
bowered in beautiful woods and slopes of hills, themselves vocal 
with many birds, and haunted by the few harmless beasts, 
hedge-hogs and badgers, perhaps otters if there be a stream, 
which mankind has spared. Naturalist and historian and 
antiquarian may all be happy here, and bequeath a book as 
innocent and curious as White’s to the world, when they leave 
it for the rural grave beneath the yew and the “ G.W.” on the 
simple tombstone. 
