thereabout, the Hermitage, by reason of some vandal outrage, has wholly disappeared. The only memorial the traveller will find now in that region of the Ossianic harping, of which we spoke in the last chapter, is the Macpherson Stone, which some twenty-five miles farther northward, {259} on the Highland trail, peers out from green copses in the upper valley of the Spey. I spoke also in our last talk of the literary ferment that had declared itself, and was in active progress along the Scottish border, and in Edinboro'. We had somewhat to say of the poet Crabbe, and of his long and successful poems--now little read; and of those other poems by Cowper, some of which will be always read, and which, when their art shall grow old-fashioned and out of date, will show a tender humanity and a kindly purpose, which I trust will never go out of date. _Parson White._ [Sidenote: White of Selborne.] You will remember that we found both of the last-named poets in the country; and that their work concerned itself largely with country life and with country scenes. And now we sidle into the country again, for our first studies to-day;--into the county of Hampshire, where lived, toward the close of the last century, two personages--not far apart in that pleasant region of rolling downs; unknown to each other; their ages, indeed, {260} differing by more than a score of years; but both leaving books you ought to know something about. The first of these personages was a quiet clergyman[1] of very simple tastes and simple habits, who lived in a beautiful parsonage--still standing, and still overgrown with ivies and banked about with great waving heaps of foliage--where he wrote _The Natural History of Selborne_. It is not a formal book or an ambitious book; it is simply a bundle of short letters extending over dates that cover twenty years in their stretch; and yet the book is so small you could carry it in your pocket. Its title describes the book; it tells what this quiet old gentleman saw and learned through twenty odd years of observation, about the birds, the beasts, the fishes, the trees, the flowers, the storms, the sunshine and the clouds of that little country parish of Selborne. And yet that simple story is told with such easy frankness, such delicacy, such simplicity, such truthfulness, such tender feeling for all God's creatures, whether beast or bird, that the little book has become almost as much a classic {261} as _Walton's Complete Angler_; and the name of Gilbert White, which scarce a hundred Londoners knew when he died, is now known to every well-equipped English library everywhere. I have compared it with _Walton's Complete Angler_, though it has not the old fisherman's dalliance with the muses; nor has it much literary suggestiveness. There are no milkmaids courtesying to its periods, nor any songs, except those of the birds. Good old Parson White is simpler (if maybe); he is more homely; he is