SOURCE: "Jefferies," in Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1921, pp. 161-66.

Henley was an important figure in the counter-decadent movement of the 1890s. As editor of the National Observer and the New Review, Henley was an invigorating force in English literature, publishing and defending the early works of such writers as H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, and Bernard Shaw. Below, Henley focuses on the qualities that made Jefferies's writings popular.

I love to think of Jefferies as a kind of literary Leatherstocking. 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...