Yet he is not, and will never be, widely popular. There are many persons, presumably persons of culture, who cannot read Jefferies. A country parson--poor man!--observed to me in Swindon itself, that he hoped the biography of Richard Jefferies would not prove so dry as the works of Richard Jefferies. These, he said, with the cheerful dogmatism of his kind, were as dry as a stick, and impossible to read. Now, this good man was probably in some sort a scholar. He lives in the Jefferies county. All round him are the hills and downs described in these works. To us those hills and downs are now filled with life, beauty, and all kinds of delightful things, entirely through those very books. The good vicar finds them so dry that he cannot read them. Others there are who complain that Jefferies is always "cataloguing." One understands what is meant. To some of us the picture is always being improved by the addition of another blade of grass, another dead leaf, or the ear of a hare visible among the turnip-tops; others are fatigued by these little details. Jefferies is too full for them. Another thing against him in the minds of the frivolous is that you cannot skip in reading Jefferies. To take up a volume is to read it right through from beginning to end. You can no more skip Jefferies than you can skip Emerson. Now, most readers like to rush a volume. You cannot rush Jefferies. I defy the most rapid reader to rush Jefferies. You might as well try to rush the Proof of the Binomial Theorem. Others there are who like to be made to laugh or to cry. This man never laughs. You may, perhaps, put down the book and smile at the incongruities of the rustic talk, but you do not laugh. Hardy's rustics will make you laugh a whole summer's day through, but Jefferies' rustics never. He is always in earnest. Hardy is a humorist; Jefferies is not. And, worst sin of all in him who courts popularity, he makes his readers think. Men who live alone, who walk about alone, who commune with Nature all day long, do not laugh, and do not make others laugh. For these reasons, then, among others, Jefferies was never popular, despite the laudatory reviews and the readiness with which editors welcomed his work.