Nor was it a mere unmeaning hobby, this love of the feathered tribe which was so strong in the benevolent alderman. He was another Gilbert White in diligence of observation on their habits in the woods and fields, and on the heath and the moor. In his rural rides as a surgeon, he was ever learning some fact relative to their economy, and he most diligently chronicled it. And at the return of the season, he was as punctually periodical as the fall of the leaf in acquainting his friendly circle with his impressions relative to the severity or the openness of the ensuing winter, from his observations on the feathered tribe. Many of these "prognostications," as some people called them, although he never assumed the character of a prophet himself, were registered in the _Stamford Mercury_, the long-established and ably-conducted medium of information for the extensive though thinly-peopled district of Lincolnshire; and they so seldom failed to be realised, that the ornithological surgeon was often complimented on his prophecies. "Nay," he would reply, "I am no prophet: I only go by Nature's books: you may do the same, if you'll read them." Was it his diligent and loving perusal of these books which imbued him with that never-failing zeal to relieve the miserable? was it by his continued drinking of the lessons of bounty and care discoverable in those books, that kept open, to his latest day, the sluices of his beneficent heart,--so that the icy influences of the world never froze them up,--but they were left to well out goodness, and tenderness, and pity, for the poor, and hungry, and sick, and miserable, to the end of his life? One cannot suppress a persuasion of this kind; and it seems next to impossible but that Gilbert White must have gladdened the poor of his "Selborne," to the very extent of his means, and, perhaps, sometimes beyond it,--secretly, humbly, and unobtrusively,--while his amiable mind was displaying so simply and charmingly, in that correspondence with Tennant and Barrington, its devoted love and admiration of the characters in "Nature's books." This thought may be but a prejudice of the imagination; but such prejudices are less criminal than the prejudices of the judgment or understanding, and one feels unwilling to have them removed in a case like this: we have, alas! too many examples of evil contradictions in the characters we thirst to love,--and our worship even of the noblest intelligences,--such as Bacon,--is too often checked by them.