Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/51

 December 1790, says: 'Alas! my good friend, how should we now do to converse if we met? for you cannot hear, and I cannot now speak out.' Many times in the correspondence with Marsham each complained of the hold which 'the Hag procrastination' had taken upon himself, but there is really little sign of the power of 'this daemon' upon White, and his 'Naturalist's Journal' was continued until within four days of his death. On 14 June 1793 the son of his oldest friend, John Mulso (who had died in September 1791), came to Selborne, where he stayed for a night, and next day White wrote his last letter to Marsham, which ended with the words. 'The season with us is unhealthy.' In it he said he had been annoyed in the spring by a bad nervous cough and 'a wandering gout.' His fatal illness must have been of short duration, though, according to Bell, it was attended by much suffering. On the 26th he died at his house, The Wakes, which has since been visited by so many of his admirers. He lies buried among his kinsfolk on the north side of the chancel of Selborne church, 'the fifth grave from this wall' as recorded on a tablet originally placed against it on the outside, but since removed within, and inappropriately affixed to the south wall of the building. The grave, however, is still marked by the old headstone bearing the initial letters of his name and the day of his death.

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, 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. The gravest is perhaps that on the formation of honeydew (Letter lxiv. to Barrington); but it was not until some years later that the nature of that substance was discovered in this country by [q. v.], and it was not made known until 1800 (Transactions Linnæan Society, vi. 76-91); while we have editor after editor, many of them well-informed or otherwise competent judges, citing fresh proofs of White's industry and accuracy. 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 defeat analysis.

No portrait of White was ever taken, and, though some have pleased themselves with a tradition that one of the figures in the frontispiece of the quarto editions of his book was intended to represent him, Bell's authority (vol. i. p. lviii n.) for otherwise identifying each of those figures must be accepted. Bell was told by Francis White, the youngest son of Gilbert's youngest brother, that he well remembered his uncle, who 'was only five feet three inches in stature, of a spare form and remarkably upright carriage.'

A complete bibliography of White's