Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/43

 and there ended his days. One of his sisters, Elizabeth (1698-1753), was married to Charles White (d. 1763), apparently a cousin, who held the livings of Bradley and Swarraton (both in Hampshire), besides being, through his wife, owner of the house at Selborne, built on land bought by the elder Gilbert, and then distinguished as having belonged to one Wake. This house has been subsequently known as 'The Wakes,' and at the death of Charles White in 1763 it passed to Gilbert, the naturalist, who had already resided there for some time.

Gilbert had six brothers and four sisters; one of the former and two of the latter died in infancy. Those who grew up were Thomas (1724-1797), presumably godson of Thomas Holt (not the rector of Streatham, just mentioned, but receiver to the Duke of Bedford's estate at Thorney in the Isle of Ely), whose property he inherited and name he prefixed to his own, but he did not enter upon the enjoyment of the bequest until 1776, when he retired from the business he had carried on as a wholesale ironmonger in Thames Street, and took up his abode in South Lambeth. He was a man of considerable attainments, writing on various subjects in the 'Gentleman's Magazine,' and was elected F.R.S. in 1777.

The next brother was Benjamin (1725–1794), the successful publisher of Fleet Street, who left several sons: Benjamin and John, who carried on their father's business at 'The Horace's Head;' and Edmund, vicar of Newton Valence, near Selborne.

Then came John (1727-1781) of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who, taking orders, proceeded as chaplain to the forces at Gibraltar; and, doubtless through the influence of the governor of that fortress, Cornwallis, was subsequently (1772) presented by the governor's brother (archbishop of Canterbury) to the living of Blackburn in Lancashire. John White had a strong taste for natural history, as his correspondence with Linnaeus (whose letters to him were first printed by Sir William Jardine in Contributions to Ornithology, 1849, pp. 27-32, 37-40) and with his brother Gilbert (printed by Bell, as below) shows. This correspondence chiefly related to a zoology of Gibraltar (Fauna Calpensis it was named), which he wrote but never succeeded in publishing. The manuscript of the introduction exists, and is not remarkable for style or matter. Of the rest of the work, which has excited so much curiosity, nothing more is known than that it was completed. After his death his widow, Barbara Mary (1734-1802), daughter of George Freeman of London, resided at Selborne, keeping house for her brother-in-law, Gilbert, to the time of his death; and her son John, subsequently in medical practice at Salisbury, was for a time his pupil, and seems to have been one of his favourite nephews.

Gilbert's other brothers, Francis (b. 1728-9) and Henry (1733-1788), were of less note; but the latter was rector of Fyfield, near Andover, and the extracts from his diary (in Notes on the Parishes of Fyfield, &c. Revised and edited by Edward Doran Webb, Salisbury, 1898) show that in quiet humour and habit of observation he was worthy of his more celebrated brother.

Of the sisters, one, Ann (b. 1731), was married to Thomas Barker of Lyndon in Rutland, by whom she had a son Samuel, a frequent correspondent of his uncle Gilbert, with whose pursuits he had much sympathy; the other, Rebecca (b. 1726), became the wife of Henry Woods of Shopwyke and Chilgrove, near Chichester, at which place her brother often stayed on his way to and from Ringmer, near Lewes, where lived an aunt Rebecca (b. 1780), the wife of Henry Snooke, whom he visited nearly every year as long as she lived. Three other aunts must also be noticed: Mary (d. 1768), married to Baptist Isaac, rector of Whitwell and Ash well in Rutland, where Gilbert passed three months in 1742, before leaving Oxford; Dorothea (d. 1731), the wife of William Henry Cane, who succeeded her father in 1727 as vicar of Selborne; and Elizabeth (d. 1753), married to Charles White, rector of Bradley and Swarraton, as before mentioned.

Gilbert was presumably sent to a school at Farnham, whose ' sweet peal of bells,' heard at Selborne of a still evening, brought him in the last year of his life ' agreeable associations' and remembrances of his youthful days (Zoologist, 1893, pp. 448, 449). Subsequently he went to the grammar school at Basingstoke, then kept by (1688?-1745) [q. v.], whose two celebrated sons were White's fellow pupils, and we have White's own statement (Antiquities of Selborne, chap, xxvi.) that while at Basingstoke he was 'eye-witness [of], perhaps a party concerned in, undermining a portion of the fine old ruin known as Holy Ghost Chapel.' At Easter 1737 he seems to have been at Lyndon, where, according to the diary of his future brother-in-law (Barker), the departure of wild geese and the coming of the cuckoo were noted by 'G. W.'—an early evidence of the observant naturalist's bent. A list in his own hand of thirty books (mostly classical, but some religious) which he took back with him to school in January 1738-9