he shrouded his life; a man of retired habits, of few friends, he stood outside and apart from the whole circle of literary society. This aloofness is fully reflected in his writings, for in his general manner of thought and expression he resembles no other author, and appears to be indebted to no other; his faults and his merits are equally peculiar and distinctive.-SALT, H. S., 1891, Richard Jefferies, Temple Bar, vol. 92, p. 223.

Reposing in one of the double transcepts of the most symmetrical of English cathedrals, the ancient fane at Salisbury, is a marble bust typifying a face remarkable for its strength and charm in repose, at once the effigy of a poet, artist, and thinker, in whom the perceptive quality of beauty and inherent love for the beautiful are revealed by every feature. Calm and majestic, Calm and majestic, thoughtful and serene, it is a countenance that arrests the beholder, and haunts him, like some sweetly cadenced strain, long after the richly dight spire and hallowed Close of Sailsbury have receded from the view. Upon the pedestal is graven this inscription:

To the Memory of Richard Jefferies, Born at Coate in the Parish of Chiselden and County of Wilts, 6th November, 1848. Bied at Goring in the County of Sussex, 14th August, 1887.

Who Observing the Work of Almighty God with a Poet's Eye,

Has Enriched the Literature of His Country, And won for Himself a Ploce Amongst

Those who Have Made Men

Happier and Wiser.

observer of Nature and as a literary artist, have received many tributes since his decease. He has been praised, in fact, like probitas in the well-known line of Juvenal, and unhappily it would seem with much the same result.... Of the real meaning and the real charm of "The Gamekeeper" and "Wild Life" it appears to me that the class of readers I am speaking of have never got so much as an inkling. To make anything of these books than mere collections of "Stories about Animals" or "Wonders of the Woods," or, at any rate, to get their full value out of them, and to recognize them as books to be kept by us, and read again and again, as we keep and read, or are supposed to keep and read, the works of our favourite poets, it is necessary that the reader should study them in that peculiar posture of the mind and will which . . . is the sole, the indispensable, condition of finding an enduring charm in the country. -TRAILL, HENRY DUFF, 1887, In Praise of the Country, Contemporary Review, vol. 52, pp. 477, 480.

In Jefferies' later books the whole of the country life of the nineteenth century will be found displayed down to every detail. The life of the farmer is there; the life of the labourer; the life of the gamekeeper; the life of the women who work in the fields, and of those who work at home. . . . He revealed Nature in her works and ways; the flowers and the fields; the wild English creatures; the hedges and the streams; the wood and coppice. . . . But this is not all. For next he took the step-the vast stepacross the chasm which separates the poetic from the vulgar mind, and began to clothe the real with the colours and glamour of the unreal; to write down the response of the soul to the phenomena of nature: to interpret the voice of Nature speaking to the soul. Unto this last. And then he died; his work, which might have gone on forever, cut off almost at the commencement.Richard Jefferies, pp. 228, 229. BESANT, SIR WALTER, 1888, The Eulogy of

The truth is that Richard Jefferies's work, his wonderful descriptive faculty, his minute and sympathetic observation of nature, can only appeal to a small circle. The general public will probably continue to hurry past him. But his place in English literature may be considered assured; and, of the small band of English writers who have laboured in the same field, he not

only understood but can teach, above all others, the wisdom of the field and of the forest. Mr. Besant associated him with Thoreau and Gilbert White. But Jefferies was not so conscious a mystic-to use a much abused word-as the American recluse, though he wanders into mystic reveries in the "Story of my Heart;" and he is less primarily a naturalist, and also a far greater literary artist, than the simpler historian of Selborne. The author of "The The author of "The Pageant of Summer" lived in a different literary tradition. He became a great master of that art of word-painting which is at once the distinctive excellence and principal danger of modern English style. Jefferies's accurate observation kept him free from the danger.-DAWKINS, C. E., 1888, The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies by Walter Besant, The Academy, vol. 34, p.

316.

I love to think of Jefferies as a kind of literary Leather-stocking. His style, his mental qualities, the field he worked in, the chase he followed, were peculiar to himself, and as he was without a rival, so was he without a second. Reduced to its simplest expression, his was a mind compact of observation and of memory. He writes as one who watches always, who sees everything, who forgets nothing. As his lot was cast in country places, among wood and pasturage and corn, by coverts teeming with game and quick with insect life, and as withal he had the hunter's patience and quick-sightedness, his faculty of looking and listening and of noting and remembering, his readiness of deduction and insistence of pursuit-there entered gradually into his mind a greater quantity of natural England, her leaves and flowers, her winds and skies, her wild things and tame, her beauties and humours and discomforts, than was ever, perhaps, the possession of writing Briton.-HENLEY, WILLIAM ERNEST, 1890, Views and Revievs, p. 177.

side of Jefferies' genius are perhaps the four by which he is at present very generally known-the "Gamekeeper at Home," the "Amateur Poacher," "Wild Life in a Southern County," and "Round About a Great Estate," in all of which he manifests the same extraordinary knowledge of the fauna and flora of his native district, a knowledge based on an exceptionally keen habit of observation, and strengthened by a powerful memory and a diligent course of journal-keeping. . . . That a permanent historical value will attach to writings of this kind can hardly be doubted; they will be studied, centuries hence, along with White's Selborne and a few similar works, as a chronicle of natural history—a museum to which artist and scientists will repair for instruction and entertainment. I cannot, however, at all agree with those of Jefferies' admirers who consider these volumes (to wit, the "Gamekeeper at Home," and the rest of the same class) to be his literary masterpieces, and who speak of them as exhibiting, in contrast with his later books, what they call his "simpler and better style;" I believe, with Mr. Walter Besant, that Jefferies' word-pictures of the country life are "far from being the most considerable part of his work." . . . An innate distrust of all the precepts of custom and tradition was one of Jefferies' most noticeable characteristics; Thoreau himself was scarcely more contemptuous of conventional usages and restraints.-SALT, H. S., 1891, Richard Jefferies, Temple Bar, vol. 92, pp. 215, 216, 217, 219.

Still as the page was writ

"Twas nature held his hand and guided it: Broadcast and free the lines were sown as

meadows kingcup lit.

Vague longings found a tongue;
Things dim and ancient into speech were wrung;
The epic of the rolling wheat, the lyric hedge-
row sung!

He showed the soul within

The veil of matter luminous and thin,

He heard the old earth's undersong piercing the modern din.

He opened wide to space

The iron portals of the commonplace:
Wonder on wonder crowded through as star on

star we trace. Others might dully plod

Purblind with custom, deaf as any clodHe knew the highest heights of heaven bent o'er the path he trod. -GEOGHEGAN, MARY, 1892, Richard Jefferies, Temple Bar, vol. 94, p. 28.

Since Gilbert White wrote of his beloved Selborne, there has perhaps hardly been a more delightful writer on natural history than Richard Jefferies, author of the "Gamekeeper at Home," and of other charming works, such as have made the town-bred boy bewail the fortune that did not cast his lines among those pleasant places, and the careless country lad curse the negligence which has made him overlook the beautiful things that others can find everywhere to see.-OLIPHANT, MARGARET O. W., 1892, The Victorian Age of English Literature, p. 389.

This is a book ["The Toilers of the Field"] to be deplored and deprecated, a desperate attempt to make hay while the sun shines, out of weeds, rushes, and rubbish, old and new. The only scrap of fresh matter we find is a "True Tale of the Wiltshire Labourer," written years ago for a local newspaper, but somehow never printed. It is a powerful, one-sided sketch, after the manner of La Terre, but frequent imitation of this manner has since reduced its directness to a suspicion of brutality. With this exception the book is entirely made up of reprints, or reprints of reprints, under a capital fancy title "The Toilers of the Field," which suggested a separate, authentic, homogeneous book. The work has, however, a certain curious value. It is in two parts. . . . Jefferies in his prime is to me as yet but a name; free from the glamour of his genius, I am therefore able to judge calmly these bye-blows of his pen. The sole notice they call for, the sole feeling they rouse, is one of astonishment that their writer ever became famous. In themselves they are just the harmless, amateur, ordinary stuff to which one is indulgently indifferent. PURCELL, E., 1892, Literature, The Academy, vol. 42, p. 599.

If the critics really enjoy, as they profess to, all this trivial country lore, why on earth don't they come into the fresh air and find it out for themselves? There is no imperative call for their presence in London. Ink will stain paper in the country as well as in town, and the Post will convey their articles to their editors. As it is, they do but overheat already overheated clubs.

These books are already supplying the club-novelist with his open-air effects; and, therefore, the club-novelist worships them. From them he gathers that "wild appletrees, too, are not uncommon in the hedges,"

and straightway he informs his public of this wonder. But it is hard on the poor countryman who, for the benefit of a streetbred reading public, must cram his books with solemn recitals of his A, B, C, and impressive announcements that two and two make four and that a hedge-sparrow's egg is blue.-QUILLER-COUCH, A. T., 1893, Richard Jefferies, The Speaker.

But for a certain repugnance to using the literary slang of the day I would call him an impressionist; although, by those who misname themselves impressionists, he is persistently misrepresented as addicted to catalogue-making. Yet it need hardly be pointed out that he never made a systematic study, never a complete list of anything. From the scientific student's point of view he was an idler in the land, sensuous, and therefore sensitive to nature's choicest colours and sounds and fragrancies; passionate, and so given to dreams and musings and speculations. When he one by one enumerates the birds and flowers and weeds of an English hedgerow, you feel, in the end, that his object has been neither botanical nor ornithological, but poetical. It is not into the study of a zoologist you have gone, but to the presence of an artist who has transferred a mood from his own mind into yours. The reader carries away little new knowledge, but many pleasant memories. . . . He is an enchanter who, at will, transports you into the midst of a green English landscape, where the swallows skim the cornfields, and the butterflies flutter among the wildflowers, where the chaffinch chirps from the expanding oak-leaves, and the water sparkles to the sunshine. The result differs from that produced by Gilbert White as night differs from day. One man pleases by his love of facts, and by ministering to our thirst for knowledge; the other by adding to our æsthetic pleasures.-GRAHAM, P. ANDERSON, 1893, Round About Coate, Art Journal, vol. 45, p. 16.

Few people have a reputation at once so limited and so wide. When his bust was unveiled in Salisbury Cathedral not long ago, there was enough stir in the papers to make one imagine his celebrity to be wider than it really is. One has only to read how he lived in penury through his latter troublous days, because his books would not sell, to get a truer insight into the extent of his popularity; and even now, when he is

better known and appreciated than ever before, those to whom he is but the shadow of a name are sufficiently numerous to make all mention of him as a celebrity savour of irony. It is, in fact, with the few and not with the many that Jefferies must be content to hold the place that he deserves; to those to whom he appeals he is of such value, that were reputation judged by depth of admiration rather than by number of admirers, he were famous beyond measure already. . . . His power of expression is not connected with an easy and polished literary style. His constructions are often loose and his sentences bald and unfinished. The more one reads his essays, the more obvious it becomes that he could write only because he could feel, because Earth was his passion; and one is tempted to think that this passion which was the cause of his unique power of delineating her features, was due in turn to an acute sensitiveness of perception, a certain intense æstheticism that is visible in all his works. - MUNTZ, IRVING, 1894, Richard Jefferies as a Descriptive Writer, Gentleman's Magazine, N. S. vol. 53, pp. 516, 519.

Speaking generally, the language is perfectly simple and direct; there is no savour of bookishness; upon everything is the stamp of sincerity-a sincerity born of loving intercourse with the objects described. The chief defect is a sense of discontinuity, occasionally felt in some essays in which Jefferies, contrary to his usual practice, presents us with "bushel baskets full of facts," the whole not being fused together by any unifying power of the imagination. But when at his best, his style is impassioned and throbs with emotion; it is imaginative as only fine poetry can be. He displays, too, a curiosa felicitas in the choice of apt words and images which condense for us the life and movement of a whole scene. .. Of Jefferies' style at its best the "Pageant of Summer" is the most sustained example. Taken as a whole, it may be said to form one grand hymn in praise of the fulness and beauty of life which culminates in the crowning glory of the summer. There is a purely human quality, too, about this essay which imparts to it the imaginative charm in which. it is steeped.-FISHER, CHARLES, 1896, A Study of Richard Jefferies, Temple Bar, vol. 109, pp. 504, 505.

His talent, though rare and exquisite, was neither rich nor versatile. It consisted in a power of observing nature more than Wordsworthian in delicacy, and almost Wordsworthian in the presence of a sentimental philosophic background of thought. Unluckily for Jefferies, his philosophic background was not like Wordsworth's, clear and cheerful, but wholly vague and partly gloomy. Writing, too, in prose not verse, and after Mr. Ruskin, he attempted an exceedingly florid style, which at its happiest was happy enough, but which was not always at that point, and which when it was not, was apt to become trivial or tawdry, or both. It is therefore certain that his importance for posterity will dwindle, if it has not already dwindled, to that given by a bundle of descriptive selections. But these will occupy a foremost place on their particular shelf, the shelf at the head of which stand Gilbert White and Gray.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1896, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, p. 397.

Jefferies' special place in literature, and his rank as a sympathising interpreter of Nature, it is safe to assume, could never have fallen to any one other than himself. There can be no second "Life of the Fields." Other Idyls may instruct and please, but in a different degree. A finer literarian may arise to hymn the pæan of the open-air; but the combinative qualities that speak from Jefferies' later work must remain to him alone. . . . Incontestably, he wrote too much; he lacked the margin of leisure, and was constantly under the goad of providing for his livelihood, for which he depended solely upon his pen. Owing to his peculiar artistic temperament, as well as to various individual characteristics, it is difficult to compare him with some other Nature-observers who were equally as painstaking as he. His work may not be appropriately classed with that of the learned Selborne rector, than whom none had a more watchful eye; nor with that of the Walden recluse, whose powers of observation in all that appertained to Nature's sights and sounds could not be surpassed. . . . Jefferies was an essayist; and, above all, the idyllist and painter of country-life as it exists in England.-ELLWANGER, GEORGE H., 1896, Idyllists of the Country Side, pp. 132, 133.

The early books of Richard Jefferies, those by which he won his fame, those, no