Born, at Selborne, Hants, 18 July, 1720. Early education at a school at Basingstoke. Matric. Oriel Coll., Oxford, 17 Dec. 1739; B.A., 1743; Fellow Oriel Coll., 1744–93; M.A., 1746; Proctor, 1752–53. Ordained Deacon, 1747; Priest, 1749. Curate at Swarraton, 1747–51; at Selborne, 1751–52; at Durley, 1753–55. Returned to Selborne, 1755. Vicar of Moreton-Pinkney, Northamptonshire (sinecure), 1757–93. Curate at Faringdon, 1762–84; at Selborne, 1784. Died, at Selborne, 26 June, 1793. Works: “The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne” (anon.), 1789. Posthumous: “A Naturalist’s Calendar,” 1795; “Extracts from the unpublished MSS. of Mr. White,” in the second series of E. Jesse’s “Gleanings in Natural History,” 1834. Collected Works: in 2 vols., ed. by J. Aikin, 1802.

Personal

  Your work, upon the whole, will immortalize your place of abode as well as yourself.

  And lastly to close all I do desire that I may be buried in the churchyard belonging to the parish Church of Selborne aforesaid in as plain and private a way as possible without any pall bearers or parade and that six honest day labouring men respect being had to such as have bred up large families may bear me to my grave to whom I appoint the sum of ten shillings each for their trouble.

  He was widely known as a philosopher, in the highest sense of the word, but he was so known only to the world without. His own village could not understand him, and little did its inhabitants suppose that their insignificant little Selborne should become a world-known name by means of him, whose peaceful life was spent in retirement, and whose only eulogy, from a surviving fellow-parishioner, was, “That he was a still, quiet body, and there wasn’t a bit of harm in him, there wasn’t indeed.”

  There are few, perhaps, who have so extensively and so pleasantly occupied the mind of contemporaries and of posterity, and yet have left such scanty materials for a biography of corresponding interest, as the estimable and accomplished author of the “Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.”

  Most men must have marvelled at White’s always remaining a bachelor in spite of being endowed with exceptionally domestic tastes. And perhaps some have surmised that a disappointment in love had caused his single life. We learn from Mr. Bell that this was the case. White had in early life been attached to no less a person than Mrs. Chapone…. Her maiden name was Hester Mulso. She preferred a barrister to our naturalist; and although she was left a widow ten months after marriage, and continued to correspond with White on the most friendly terms, they never married. It is amusing to see White’s anger at any calumny on her fair fame after fourteen years of widowhood…. A sensitive nature like White’s, capable of strong attachment and yet somewhat diffident as becomes a recluse and scholar, seldom gets the better of such a love-sorrow.

  Our country has changed; old institutions have passed away; the railway and electric telegraph have transformed society. Yet in Selborne, whatever change there may be, is almost imperceptible. We are told that White preached a favourite sermon of his no less than fifty times, and that his text bore on the duty of love to man. Were he with us again he would be gratified to find that the passage of time had left unchanged the natural objects he so dearly loved; that the general aspect of his beloved village, as affected by the hand of man, was as he knew it; and that any changes in social and domestic life were such as are based on the duty of loving others and trying to improve the condition of mankind.

  At the top of the Plestor, in cheerful proximity to the living, lies the ancient church-yard about the quaint Norman church where Gilbert White addressed his ordinary parishioners, in distinction from those winged and singing ones, the four-footed ones, and those even who modestly crawled, who all filled up his calm life. The church is a good deal renovated, of necessity; but, with Norman traditions, it is not quite at its ease in the presence of nineteenth-century pews and a nineteenth-century organ. Human beings, however, are pretty much the same, and the little boys are marched out just before the sermon with the same subdued yet hilarious clatter as in the days when those were living and young who now lie in the church-yard under the moss-grown headstones from which the centuries have softly wiped out the dates. Even the five bell-ropes hanging under the belfry of the church are pulled as they were centuries ago; for as soon as the vicar has pronounced the benediction, five Selborne men grasp the ropes and pull with a will, and the chimes ring into the peaceful landscape. Beside the weather-beaten church-tower stands the venerable tenant of the cemetery, a yew-tree so old that it is respectfully mentioned in the Domesday Book. Tradition gives it twelve hundred years; and amazingly young and vigorous it looks, and its mighty branches make a grateful shade on a summer’s day; and, sitting on the bench about its gnarled trunk, somehow one feels that to lie under a lichen-grown stone, with the summer sun beating the waving grass on the gentle slope towards the Lythe, within the sound of a bird singing joyously in the old chestnut-tree and the passing patter of a child’s little feet, might not be the saddest of fates. On the north side of the church lies Gilbert White under a moss-grown head-stone, the long grass swaying lightly, just as he would have wished, with no futile word to praise him. Some one has suggested a nice new monument for the old naturalist—think of it! So far, thank Heaven! his grave has mercifully been spared that fatal honor.

  On the 26th an express messenger was sent to Salisbury for Dr. John White. He posted to Selborne at once, but can hardly have found his uncle alive; since on the latter day the White family lost its amiable head; Selborne a highly respected neighbour; and the world a singularly observant and original naturalist. What is the happy life? It is a true, if trite, saying that few men attain their ideal of a career in life; or, having attained it, realise that it is the ideal career. But the man who lay dead at Selborne, fascinated from boyhood by the study of Nature, had longed for life and leisure in his wild, woodland, native country—not from any merely indolent wish to shirk the responsibilities of life, to cope with which he was by character and attainments amply equipped—of him it may be truly said that he had realised his ideal, and as much as any man had lived a happy life.

The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, 1789

  The | Natural History | and | Antiquities | of | Selborne, | in the | County of Southampton: | with | Engravings, and an Appendix. London: | printed by T. Bensley; | for B. White and Son, at Horace’s Head, Fleet Street. | M, DCC, LXXXIX.

  If this author should be thought by any to have been too minute in his researches, be it remembered that his studies have been in the great book of nature. It must be confessed, that the economy of the several kinds of crickets, and the distinction between the stock-dove and the ring-dove, are humble pursuits, and will be esteemed trivial by many; perhaps by some to be objects of ridicule. However, before we condemn any pursuits which contribute so much to health by calling us abroad, let us consider how the studious have employed themselves in their closets. In a former century, the minds of the learned were engaged in determining whether the name of the Roman poet should be spelt Vergilius or Virgilius; and the number of letters in the name of Shakespear still remains a matter of much solicitude and criticism. Nor can we but think that the conjectures about the migration of Hirundines are fully as interesting as the Chattertonian controversy.

  One of the most delightful books in the English language!

  No lover of the country or of country-things can pass him by without cordial recognition and genial praise. There is not so much of incident or of adventure in his little book as would suffice to pepper the romances of one issue of a weekly paper in our day. The literary mechanicians would find in him no artful contrivance of parts and no rhetorical jangle of language. It is only good Parson White, who, wandering about the fields and the brook-sides of Selborne, scrutinizes with rare clearness and patience a thousand miracles of God’s providence, in trees, in flowers, in stones, in birds,—and jots down the story of his scrutiny with such simplicity, such reverent trust in His power and goodness, such loving fondness for almost every created thing, that the reading of it charms like Walton’s story of the fishes. We Americans, indeed, do not altogether recognize his chaffinches and his titlarks; his daws and his fern-owl are strange to us; and his robin-redbreast, though undoubtedly the same which in our nursery-days flitted around the dead “Children in the Wood.”… Notwithstanding, however, the dissimilarity of species, the studies of this old naturalist are directed with a nice particularity, and are colored with an unaffected homeliness, which are very charming; and I never hear the first whisk of a swallow’s wing in summer but I feel an inclination to take down the booklet of the good old Parson, drop into my library-chair, and follow up at my leisure all the gyrations and flutterings and incubations of all the hirundines of Selborne. Every country-liver should own the book, and be taught from it—nicety of observation.

  One of the most delightful books in my father’s library was White’s “Natural History of Selborne.” For me it has rather gained in charm with years. I used to read it without knowing the secret of the pleasure I found in it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some of the simple expedients of this natural magic. Open the book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially garrulous Fellow of Oriel and find refreshment instead of fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping abreast of him as he ambles along on his hobby-horse, now pointing to a pretty view, now stopping to watch the motions of a bird or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honourable Daines Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of taste and natural refinement he reminds one of Walton; in tenderness toward what he would have called the brute creation, of Cowper. I do not know whether his descriptions of scenery are good or not, but they have made me familiar with his neighborhood. Since I first read him, I have walked over some of his favorite haunts, but I still see them through his eyes rather than by any recollection of actual and personal vision. The book has also the delightfulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems never to have had any harder work to do than to study the habits of his feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch the ripening of his peaches on the wall. No doubt he looked after the souls of his parishioners with official and even friendly interest, but, I cannot help suspecting, with a less personal solicitude.

  The work of the Selborne naturalist belongs to the class of books that one must discover for himself: their quality is not patent; he that runs may not read them. Like certain fruits they leave a lingering flavor in the mouth that is much better than the first taste promised. In some congenial mood or lucky moment you find them out…. There was no other book of any merit like it for nearly a hundred years. It contains a great deal of good natural history and acute observations upon various rural subjects, put up in a cheap and portable form. The contemporary works of Pennant are voluminous and costly,—heavy sailing-craft that come to port only in the great libraries, while this is a nimble light-draught vessel that has found a harbor on nearly every man’s book-shelf. Hence we say that while it is not one of the great books, it is one of the very real books, one of the very live books, and has met and supplied a tangible want in the English reading world. It does not appeal to a large class of readers, and yet no library is complete without it. It is valuable as a storehouse of facts, it is valuable as a treatise on the art of observing things, and it is valuable for its sweetness and charm of style.

  White’s book has taken possession of the English mind as securely as the “Complete Angler,” or even as “Robinson Crusoe.” At the distance of a century one may well ask why this is so, and what has given the book its enduring quality…. He was White of Selborne, not White of Oxford. If natural history has lost anything by his want of adventure, it has after all gained more; for the unique value of his book is mainly due to the persistence with which he followed his own instinct, and to the complete ease and isolation in which his acute mind worked at home…. Though his records are confined to his own district, White’s conception of the work of the naturalist was as broad and rational as that of Aristotle. He took mankind into his view, and nothing escaped him that was worth recording of the economy, the superstitions, the language, of the people who lived around him.

  To the majority of those who do not know him personally, a perusal of the volume, it is not improbable, would prove somewhat of a disappointment. For despite the praise it has received and justly merits, it is a book unlikely to please the average reader,—the less so if he is not an ardent ornithologist or zoölogist. Embracing mineralogy, zoölogy, meteorology, ornithology, etomology, and botany, with constant reference to ætiology, it may be termed a cyclopædia of English natural history, presented in epistolary form…. Strictly speaking, Gilbert White was not a poet or an idyllist, but rather an observer and investigator, with a strong trend toward science in its less arid and technical forms. And yet he possesses an unquestionable charm of his own, apart from that of a mere scientific recorder,—if the reader be but sympathetic and responsive to the spell…. Yet although he may not be termed an idyllist, his book deserves to be classed among country idyls, if only for its reflex character in having fostered a closer acquaintanceship with outward Nature,—a work that has paved the way to Jesse, Kingsley, Thoreau, Jefferies, Burroughs, and Gibson, and the choir that has hailed the sun upon the upland lawn. It has taught when and how to observe, and made us more responsive to a life that enters into intimate relationship with our own. It is as such that White deserves lasting recognition, apart from his valuable labours as a naturalist during his own generation…. Re-reading “Selborne,” one comes to appreciate it the more, and to perceive in the letters of the learned Hampshire parson those qualities that one must ever cherish in fond regard. Its fresh and simple style, its modest, unassuming grace cling to and permeate its leaves like the fragrance of the ferny lanes and shade of the beechwoods it leads to. To remember it is to enter a region of rest and quietude, with nothing more important than to watch the churn-owl’s flight and hearken to the cricket’s cry. And if read in the right mood, it will, after all, seem eminently deserving of being classed among rustic idyllia, and returned to the library shelves to be enshrined with Theocritus and “The Georgics.”

  His seeing eye and gentle heart are imaged in his fresh and happy style.

  That White’s “Selborne” is the only work on natural history which has attained the rank of an English classic is admitted by general acclamation, as well as by competent critics, and numerous have been the attempts to discover the secret of its ever-growing reputation. Scarcely two of them agree, and no explanation whatever offered of the charm which invests it can be accepted as in itself satisfactory. If we grant what is partially true, and that it was the first book of its kind to appear in this country, and therefore had no rivals to encounter before its reputation was established, we find that alone insufficient to account for the way in which it is still welcomed by thousands of readers, to many of whom—and this especially applies to its American admirers—scarcely a plant or an animal mentioned in it is familiar, or even known but by name. White was a prince among observers, nearly always observing the right thing in the right way, and placing before us in a few words the living being he observed. Of the hundreds of statements recorded by White, the number which are undoubtedly mistaken may be counted almost on the fingers of one hand…. In addition White was “a scholar and a gentleman,” and a philosopher of no mean depth. But it seems as though the combination of all these qualities would not necessarily give him the unquestioned superiority over all other writers in the same field. The secret of the charm must be sought elsewhere; but it has been sought in vain. Some have ascribed it to his way of identifying himself in feeling with the animal kingdom, though to this sympathy there were notable exceptions. Some, like Lowell, set down the “natural magic” of White to the fact that, “open the book where you will, it takes you out of doors,” but the same is to be said of other writers who yet remain comparatively undistinguished. White’s style, a certain stiffness characteristic of the period being admitted, is eminently unaffected, even when he is “didactic,” as he more than once apologises for becoming, and the same simplicity is observable in his letters to members of his family, which could never have been penned with the view of publication, and have never been retouched. Then, too, there is the complete absence of self-importance or self-consciousness. The observation or the remark stands on its own merit, and gains nothing because he happens to be the maker of it, except it be in the tinge of humour that often delicately pervades it. The beauties of the work, apart from the way in which they directly appeal to naturalists, as they did to Darwin, grow upon the reader who is not a naturalist, as Lowell testifies, and the more they are studied the more they seem to detect analysis.

  I have pondered a hundred times on the wonderful fact that the world should take such a heart-felt interest in the work of a retiring and modest eighteenth-century clergyman!… Apart from Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle, and other places of historical interest in the British Islands, there is probably no place, save Stratford-on-Avon, to which the pilgrims of the Anglo-Saxon race render more respectful tribute than to the lowly headstone which marks the grave of Gilbert White of Selborne. The occupant of that simple grass-grown grave would probably have been the most astonished of all people in the world could he have realized that his celebrity as an Englishman would have come near to equalling that of Shakespeare; and yet there exists at the present date as much affection, among naturalists at least, for the sayings and doings of Gilbert White as is felt for the records of Shakespeare and his time.

General

  A | Naturalist’s Calendar, | with | Observations in various branches | of | Natural History; | extracted from the papers | of the late | Rev. Gilbert White, M. A. | of Selborne, Hampshire, | Senior Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. | Never before published. | London: | printed for B. and J. White, Horace’s Head, | Fleet Street. | 1795.

  His Diaries were kept with unremitting diligence; and in his annual migrations to Oriel College, and other places, his man Thomas, who seems to have been well qualified for the office, recorded the weather journal. The state of the thermometer, barometer, and the variations of the wind are noted as well as the quantity of rain which fell. We have daily accounts of the weather, whether hot or cold, sunny or cloudy: we have, also information of the first tree in leaf, and even of the appearance of the first fungi, and of the plants first in blossom. We are told when mosses vegetate, and when insects first appear and disappear. There are also remarks with regard to fish and other animals; with miscellaneous observations and memoranda on various subjects. For instance, we are told that on the 21st of June, house-martins, which had laid their eggs in an old nest, had hatched them, and that when this is the case they get the start of those that build new ones by ten days or a fortnight. He speaks with some degree of triumph to having ricked his meadow hay in delicate order, and that Thomas had seen a polecat run across his garden. He records the circumstance of boys playing at taw on the Plestor; and that he had set Gunnery, one of his bantam hens, on nine of her own eggs. He complains that dogs come in to his garden at night and eat his goose-berries, and gives a useful hint to farmers and others, when he says that rooks and crows destroy an immense number of chaffers, and that were it not for these birds the chaffers would destroy everything…. Insignificant as these little details may appear, they were not thought to be so by a man whose mind was evidently stored with considerable learning, who possessed a cultivated and elegant taste for what is beautiful in nature, and who has left behind him one of the most delightful works in the English language,—a work which will be read as long as that language lasts, and which is equally remarkable for its extreme accuracy, its pleasing style, and the agreeable and varied information it contains.

  He had a wide range of knowledge, he was the master of a good Latin style, and he knew the literature of his country well, having an extensive acquaintance with it, and a keen perception of its spirit. It is very pleasant when the old naturalist stops to point a reflection with a line from the Latin or the British poets.

  Who that lives in this busy, noisy age has not envied the lot of Gilbert White, watching with keen, quiet eyes the little world of Selborne for more than fifty uneventful years? To a mind so tranquil and a spirit so serene the comings and goings of the old domesticated turtle in the garden were more important than the debates in Parliament. The pulse of the world beat slowly in the secluded hamlet, and the roar of change and revolution, beyond the Channel were only faintly echoed across the peaceful hills. The methodical observer had as much leisure as Nature herself, and could wait patiently on the moods of the seasons for those confidences which he always invited, but which he never forced; and there grew up a somewhat platonic but very loyal friendship between him and the beautiful rural world about him. How many days of happy observation were his, and with what a sense of leisure his discoveries were set down in English as devoid of artifice or strain or the fever of haste as the calm movements of the seasons registered there! There was room for enjoyment in a life so quietly ordered; time for meditation and for getting acquainted with one’s self.

  White may be regarded as the founder of a new branch of English literature, and few of those who have followed him have had so much to tell, or have succeeded in conveying so much in so short a space. In the narration of the features of events so as to give a clear idea of the details, as well as of the whole, White, in the natural world, shows skill comparable to that of Cowper in the description of his domestic circle and its incidents. The letters of White are less numerous and briefer than those of Cowper, and of somewhat less literary power, but they have the same kind of merit, and while making clear what the writer saw, unconsciously furnish a portrait of his own mind.

  Gilbert White strikes us at first only by his homeliness and simplicity, by his lucid and unpretentious narrative, by the sincerity and piety of his unwearied study of nature. But in truth the scholar never forgets his books. The simplicity is the effect of the highest art; his narrative impresses us because it is arranged with the skill of a trained thinker, who never allows his induction to be slovenly or inexact, who knows exactly how to buttress a theory with an unassuming anecdote, and who can bring a scientific reminiscence, or a recondite classification, into the midst of the homely story of some everyday incident.

  Not an aspect or a mood of Nature passed him unnoted, and each, marked by a feature of importance, was stamped with minute particularity upon his retentive memory. There was an incessant gathering of incessant facts which had not before been reported for the benefit of science at large. The gentle curate had no means of measuring the value of his investigations. He was following the bent of his inclinations in single-heartedness and purity of aim. Love set him on to the work, and the honesty of his mind kept him true to the performance of it.