* * * * 1 It might be instructive if
a number of what are reckoned cultured persons gave a list of the English classics they have never -read. . Some weeks ago I acquired (comparatively honestly) a copy of the excellent new Everyman edition of White's Natural History of Selborne. For most of those weeks it lay on my table disregarded. Then one day I picked it up, read Mr. R. M.. Lockley's admirable introduction and then went on to be fascinated by the series of letters in which the unpretentious curate of Selborne set down his patient obser- vations of the swallows and the fieldfares, the woodcock, the fly-catchers, the night-jars and all the other constituents of the feathered life of the remote and quiet Hampshire village. Since then—and here, at last, is my point—I have asked quite a number of undoubtedly cultured persons who vouchsafe me their acquaintance whether they have read Gilbert White. One said he thought he had looked into the book in his school- days ; none of the others had done as much as that. More lately still, finding myself on the Dorchester road, I turned aside at Alton to see what Selborne looked like today. There was the Hanger, there was the Plestor, with the great oak in the middle' of it, before the churchyard gates. But where amid the mass of headstones was White's humble resting- place to be found ? Fortunately there was a gardener at work, clipping the grass on a grave. Where, I asked, was White buried: " Here," he said surprisingly. pointing to his feet. And here, indeed, it was, with nothing but a simple " G.W., 26 June, 1793." for identification. But that was identification enough.
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