Three years later he was still thinking of doing something, but putting off the hour of action.  In 1776 he was suddenly spurred to decide by the circumstance that Barrington had written to propose a joint work on natural history.  “If I publish at all,” said Gilbert White to his nephew, “I shall come forth by myself.”  In 1780 he is still unready:  “Were it not for want of a good amanuensis, I think I should make more progress.”  He was now sixty years of age.  Eight years later he was preparing the Index, and at last, in the autumn of 1789, the volume positively made its appearance, in the maiden author’s seventieth year.  Few indeed, if any, among English writers of high distinction, have been content to delay so long before testing the popular estimate of their work.  His book was warmly welcomed, but the delightful author survived its publication less than four years, dying in the parish which he was to make so famous.  Gilbert White was, in a very peculiar sense, a man of one book.

Countless as have been the reprints of The Natural History of Selborne, its original form is no longer, perhaps, familiar to many readers.  The first edition, which is now before me, is a very handsome quarto.  Benjamin White, the publisher, who was the younger brother of Gilbert, issued most of the standard works on natural history which appeared in London during the second half of the century, and his experience enabled him to do adequate justice to The History of Selborne.  The frontispiece is a large folding plate of the village from the Short Lythe, an ambitious summer landscape, representing the church, White’s own house, and a few cottages against the broad sweep of the hangar.  On a terrace in the foreground are portrait figures of three gentlemen standing, and a lady seated.  Of the former, one is a clergyman, and it has often been stated that this is Gilbert White himself; erroneously, since no portrait of him was ever executed;[1] the figure is that of the Rev. Robert Yalden, vicar of Newton-Valence.  The frontispiece is unsigned, and I find no record of the artist’s name.  It is not to be doubted, however, that the original was painted by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, the Swiss water-colour draughtsman, who sketched so many topographical views in the South of England.

[Footnote 1:  That discovered in 1913 has yet to prove that it represents Gilbert White in any way.]

The remaining illustrations to this first edition, are an oval landscape vignette on the title-page, engraved by Daniel Lerpiniere; a full-page plate of some fossil shells; an extra-sized plate of the himantopus that was shot at Frensham Pond, straddling with an immense excess of shank; and four engravings, now of remarkable interest, displaying the village as it then stood, from various points of view.  They are engraved by Peter Mazell, after drawings of Grimm’s, and give what is evidently a most accurate impression of what Selborne was a century ago.  In these