e still alive, and too good to destroy. 'The
Dawn' is beautiful.

Among these eighteen papers are examples from nearly every kind
and period of Jefferies' work, though his earliest writing is
still decently interred where it was born, in Wiltshire and
Gloucestershire papers (chiefly the _North Wilts Herald_), except
such as was disinterred by the late Miss Toplis for 'Jefferies
Land,' 'T.T.T.,' and 'The Early Fiction of Richard Jefferies.'
From his early youth Jefferies was a reporter in the north of
Wiltshire and south of Gloucestershire, at political and
agricultural meetings, elections, police-courts, markets, and
Boards of Guardians. He inquired privately or officially into the
history of the Great Western Railway works at New Swindon, of the
local churches and families, of ancient monuments, and he
announced the facts with such reflections as came to him, or might
be expected from him, in newspaper articles, papers read before
the Wiltshire Archaeological Society, and in a booklet on 'The
Goddards of North Wilts.' As reporter, archaeologist, and
sportsman, he was continually walking to and fro across the vale
and over the downs; or writing down what he saw, for the most part
in a manner dictated by the writing of other men engaged in the
same way; or reading everything that came in his way, but
especially natural history, chronicles, and Greek philosophy in
English translations. He was bred entirely on English, and in a
very late paper he could be so hazy about the meaning of
'illiterate' as to say that the labourers 'never were illiterate
mentally; they are now no more illiterate in the partial sense of
book-knowledge.' He tried his hand at topical humour, and again
and again at short sensational tales. But until he was twenty-four
he wrote nothing which could have suggested that he was much above
the cleverer young men of the same calling. There was nothing fine
or strong in his writing. His researches were industrious, but not
illuminated. If his range of reading was uncommon, it gave him
only some quotations of no exceptional felicity. His point of view
could have given no cause for admiration or alarm. And yet he was
not considered an ordinary young man, being apparently idle,
ambitious, discontented, and morose, and certainly unsociable and
negligently dressed. He walked about night and day, chiefly alone
and with a noticeable long stride. But if he was ambitious, it was
only that he desired success--the s