tter accredited royalty, the Prince of Wales; this
picture, of an old beau, with his toy-shop of gold snuff-boxes, his
agate-rings, his senseless obelisk, his rattle of faded jokes and
blunted stories--all this had something very attractive to Goldsmith
both in its humour and its pathos; and he has left us, in his _Life of
Nash_, a study which is far too little known, but which deserves to
rank among the best-read productions of that infinitely sympathetic
pen, which has bequeathed to posterity Mr. Tibbs and Moses Primrose
and Tony Lumpkin.

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE

THE NATURAL HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF SELBORNE, IN THE COUNTY OF
SOUTHAMPTON; _with Engravings, and an Appendix. London: Printed by
T. Bensley, for B. White and Son, at Horace's Head, Fleet Street.
MDCCLXXXIX_.

It is not always the most confidently conducted books, or those
best preceded by blasts on the public trumpet, which are eventually
received with highest honours into the palace of literature. No more
curious incident of this fact is to be found than is presented by the
personal history of that enchanting classic, White's _Selborne_. If
ever an author hesitated and reflected, dipped his toe into the bath
of publicity, and hastily withdrew it again, loitered on the brink and
could not be induced to plunge, it was the Rev. Gilbert White. This
man of singular genius was not to be persuaded that the town would
tolerate his lucubrations. He was ready to make a present of them to
any one who would father them, he allowed his life to slip by until
his seventieth year was reached, before he would print them, and when
they appeared, he could not find the courage to put his name on the
title-page. Not one of his own titlarks or sedge-warblers could be
more shy of public observation. Even the fact that his own brother was
a publisher gave him no real confidence in printers' ink.

Gilbert White was already a middle-aged man when he was drawn into
correspondence by Thomas Pennant, a naturalist younger than himself,
who had undertaken to produce, in four volumes folio, a work on
_British Zoology_ for the production of which he was radically
unfitted. It has been severely, but justly, pointed out that wherever
Pennant rises superior, either in style or information, to his own
dead level of pompous inexactitude, he is almost certainly quoting
from a letter of Gilbert White's. Yet no acknowledgment of the
Selborne parson is vouchsafed; "even in