COUNTRY LIFE
Save Selbome !
If there is one village in England which has a supreme. claim to be left to its pristine calm it is Selborne in Hampshire. The proposal to drive a great main road between the village and the famous hangar should outrage our national feeling. There is a passage in a German history that may be fitly quoted again and again and again, which affirms the supremacy of White's Selborne as a type of English literature: The historian goes so far as to say. that you can scarcely understand England without opening the corers of the book. His thorough and affectionate survey of the place and all within it reveals a sort of enthusiasm for natural beauty that is pre-eminently English. Selborne itself was essentially responsible for Gilbert White. It is quiet and lovely beyond imagination. I made pilgrimage there the other day and was clean over- whelmed by the charm of the village and its setting. The National Trust hold the most characteristic part of the hangar where White listened to the wood-wren ; and of all their properties this is one of the most precious. The village belongs to the hangar and the hangar to the village. The association is unique. Over all the world the English village is regarded as an ideal social unit, with a form eloquent of its spirit; and Selbome is its archetype : it is a holy of holies not only for naturalists ; and that new road would drive right through the midst of the shrine. It would be an act of sacrilege, resulting from a sin in the soul. The proposed act of Vandalism would proclaim England as deliberately sacrificing the best thing in English civilisation. A proposal to re-roof the COtsWold Cottages with slate would be 'less Philistine than to drive a great motOr road between the village and the hangar of Selborne.
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