MILLAND CHAPEL.

But here let us leave the Portsmouth Road awhile for an expedition of some five miles into the still wild and rarely-travelled tract of country in whose midst lies the village of Selborne, memorable as the home, during his long life, of that most amiable and placid student of Nature and her works, the Rev. Gilbert White, D.D. When you have passed through the village of Liss, you come at once into a broad expanse of country whose characteristics resemble the typical scenes of Devonshire rather than those of Hants. Swelling hills and fertile vales, still intersected by the deeply-rutted lanes of which Gilbert White speaks, lead on to the sequestered village of Selborne, as remote now from the rumours and alarums of the outer world as when the naturalist penned his “Natural History of Selborne,” over a hundred years ago.

The village occupies, with its few cottages, its church and vicarage, and Gilbert White’s home, “The Wakes,” a long and narrow valley. The Hanger, covered now as in White’s time with his favourite tree, the beech, rises at the back of the village street, and trees indeed abound everywhere, coming even to aid the simple architecture of the place.

The butcher’s shop at Selborne rests its front on three polled limes which form living pillars to the roof, and give, apart from their rustic appearance, a welcome shade and grateful coolness to that country shop in the heats of summer. But the most remarkable tree in Selborne, as indeed anywhere in Hampshire, is the noble churchyard yew, mentioned by the naturalist, and still standing to the south-west of the church. This remarkable tree has a circumference of twenty-five feet two inches at a height of four and a half feet from the ground; it rises to a total height of sixty-two feet, and its great branches spread a distance of twenty-two yards from north to south. It is still in the perfection of good health, and its foliage wears the dark and lustrous appearance characteristic of the yew when in a thriving state. It must have been a remarkable tree even in Gilbert White’s time, and its age can only be counted by centuries.

The Wakes, where this simple soul lived so long, stands in the village street, by the open grass-plot, familiar to readers of the “Natural History” as the Plestor. Additions have been made to the house since White’s time, but so judiciously that its appearance is little altered. His summer-house is gone to wreck, but the sunny garden, with its narrow red-brick path, remains, and so does the American juniper tree, together with the sculptured sun-dial, both set up by this quiet curate-in-charge.His life in this quiet and isolated parish, wherein his observation of and delight in the living things of garden and lane, hanger and pond, were mingled with the duties of a country clergyman and the contemplative recreations of the book-lover, was suave and untroubled. Of the events—so to call them—of this calm and kindly life there is but a slender outline to record. He was born here, at the Wakes, the residence of his father and his grandfather before him, on July 18, 1720. Educated first at Basingstoke, under the care of the Rev. Thomas Warton, father of Warton the Poet Laureate, he was entered at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1739; took his B.A. in 1743; obtained a Fellowship in the succeeding year, and the degree of M.A. in 1746. He was ordained as a priest in 1747, and subsequently served, it is said, as curate to his uncle, the Vicar of Swarraton. He soon removed to Selborne, where he lived the remainder of his days, dying here on June 26, 1793. It has been said that he accepted the College living of Moreton Pinkney in Northamptonshire, but he certainly never went into residence there, and refused other offers of preferment. A Fellow of his College, he never forfeited his fellowship by marriage, and he was never Vicar of Selborne, but only curate-in-charge.

His only regret seems to have been that he had no neighbours whose pursuits resembled his own in any way. Thus, one of his letters records the regret that it had been his misfortune “never to have had any neighbours whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge”: to which he attributes his “slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been tenderly attached from my childhood.”

But it was owing to this seclusion and want of companionship that we are become the richer, by his letters to Thomas Pennant and the Hon. Daines Barrington, which have delighted successive generations. Little has come down to us concerning the personal attributes of Gilbert White. No portrait of him is known. We are told that he was a little man—some say but five feet three inches in height—who wore a wig and rode on a pony to Farringdon Church, where he officiated for a quarter of a century, or ambled benignantly about the lanes and by-ways of the neighbourhood. In one of his letters to a friend in Norfolk, he speaks of himself as riding or walking about the parish “attended daily (for although not a sportsman I still love a dog) by a beautiful spaniel with long ears, and a spotted nose and legs,” and watching the village folk “as they sit in grave debate while the children frolic and dance before them.” All that remains of his memory in village traditions and recollections indicates the modest, kindly nature of a courteous gentleman, such as peeps out from the pages of the “Natural History of Selborne.”

Selborne Church is a roomy and handsome building in the Transitional Norman and Early English styles. It consists of a nave of four bays, a south aisle, chancel, and massive western embattled tower. It has, however, a somewhat unfortunate effect of newness, owing to the restoration of 1883, when the south aisle was almost completely rebuilt, under the direction of a grand-nephew of the naturalist—Mr. William White, architect.

A memorial slab to the memory of Gilbert White is placed within the altar-rails, on the south wall of the chancel, and records that he was the son of John White, of Selborne, and Anne, daughter of Thomas Holt, Rector of Streatham. Another tablet, on the north wall, records the death, in 1759, of John White, barrister-at-law; and an earlier Gilbert White, Vicar of Selborne and grandfather of the more famous naturalist, lies in the chancel, beneath a ledger-stone bearing the date 1727.

Gilbert White is buried in the churchyard, among the tall grasses and waving wild-flowers, in a manner peculiarly fitting for that simple soul; and his grave—one of a row of five belonging to the White family—has a plain headstone, grey and lichened now, with the simple inscription, “G. W., 26th June, 1793.”

It seems strange that so simple and uneventful a chronicle of the lives and habits of familiar birds and “wee sma’ beasties,” together with the plain records of sunshine and storm, rains and frosts, the blossoming of flowers and the fall of the leaf, which the “Natural History of Selborne” presents, should have attained so great and lasting a popularity. This book is become as sure a classic as the “Pilgrim’s Progress” or the “Compleat Angler,” and no one would have been more surprised at this result of his patient labours, undertaken simply for the joy they gave him, than old Gilbert himself. You see, in every page, nay, in every line, that he wrote for himself and his friends alone, and not with an observant eye upon the booksellers and their clients. Nay, more! Had he written thus, we should have missed the better part of his book; the observation of years, which thought nothing of profit for labour and time expended; the just language, written without any cudgelling of the brain for effect, and the homely incidents that make him live more surely than aught else. You can claim Timothy the tortoise as a personal friend, and are thrilled with the curious annals of the idiot boy whose strange appetite for honey-bees excited the naturalist’s sympathies, both for the bees and the boy. Colonies might revolt and become the “United States”; French Revolutions and other dreadful portents shake thrones and set the world in arms, but Gilbert was a great deal more interested in the butcher birds, and in predatory rats, than in soldiers or blood-boltered human tyrants. The mid-day snoring of sleepy owls in the dusky rafters of some capacious barn, the hum of the bees, the scream of the peewits, and the clattering cabals of noisy starlings were more to him than instrumental music or the disputes of parliaments. And so he lived an uninterrupted round for forty years and died peacefully at last, happy and contented always, while dwellers in towns, then as now, beat their hearts out in unavailing ambitions and fruitless hatreds.

Ornithology owes much to Gilbert White’s patient observations, and his “Natural History” bids fair to become a possession for all time. Numberless editions of it have been issued, annotated by men of science, who have found little of import to add to his work; and other editions are constantly in the making. But best monument of all is that association of friends to birds and beasts, the Selborne Society, that, taking its name from Gilbert White’s old home, owns him as master in many branches and local centres throughout England. When the centenary of the simple naturalist’s death was celebrated in 1893, the large attendance at Selborne of members of the Society showed that here lies one whose memory the lovers of nature and wild life will not willingly let die.