shall be allowed to die such. The reason you having so many bad neighbours is your nearness to a great, factious manufacturing town. Our common people are more simpleminded and know nothing of Jacobin clubs.

I admire your fortitude and resolution, and wonder that you have the spirit to engage in new woods and plantations. Our winter, as yet, has been mild and open, and favourable to your pursuits. Pray present my respects to your lady, and desire her to accept of my best wishes, and all the compliments of the season, jointly with yourself. I have now squirrels in my outlet; but if the wicked boys should hear of them, they will worry them to death. There is too strong a propensity in human nature towards persecuting and destroying!

I remain, with much esteem, yours, &c.,

GIL. WHITE.

LETTER X.

TO ROBERT MARSHAM, ESQUIRE.

SELBORNE, June 15, 1793.

ROM my long silence you will conclude that procrastination has been at work, and perhaps not without reason. But that is not all the cause, for I have been annoyed this spring with a bad nervous cough, and a wandering gout, that have pulled me down very much, and rendered me very languid and indolent.

As you love trees and to hear about trees, you will not be displeased when you are told that your old friend the great oak in the Holt forest is at this very instant under particular circumstances. For a brother of mine, a man of virtù, who rents Lord Stawell's beautiful seat near the Holt, called Moreland, is at this very juncture employing a draughtsman,

a French refugee, to take two or three views of this extraordinary tree on folio paper, with an intent to have them engraved. Of this artist I have seen some performances, and think him capable of doing justice to the subject. These views my brother proposes to have engraved, and will probably send a set to you, who deserve so well of all lovers of trees, as you have made them so much your study, and have taught men so much how to cultivate and improve them I have told you, I believe, before, that the great Holt Oak has long been known in these parts by the name of the Grindstone Oak, because an implement of that sort was in old days set up near it, while a great fall of timber was felled in its neighbourhood.

After a mild, wet winter we have experienced a very harsh backward spring with nothing but N. and N.E. winds. All the Hirundines except the sand-martins were very tardy, and do not seem even yet to make any advances towards breeding. As to the sand-martins they were seen playing in and out of their holes in a sand-cliff as early as April 9th. Hence I am confirmed in what I have long suspected, that they are the most early species. I did not write the letter in the "Gent. Mag." against the torpidity of swallows, nor would it be consistent with what I have sometimes asserted so to do.1 As to your recent

1 The letter here referred to is no doubt a letter which had then lately appeared in the "Gentleman's Magazine," dated Feb. 7th 1793, and probably the reason why Marsham attributed this to Gilbert White was that the writer had signed himself "A Parish Priest," and had stated that his house was "about thirty miles from the sea-coast of Hampshire." On the other hand it is evident that White disclaimed the authorship because the observations of the writer in regard to the supposed torpidity of Swallows were inconsistent with the views which he himself had expressed in his book. See Letters X. and XXXVIII.. to Pennant (pp. 33, 115); and Letters IX. XII. and XVIII. to Daines Barrington (pp. 161, 171, 191).

Who then was the writer of this letter? Not Dr. Stephen Hales, for although at one time he resided about the same distance as White did from the sea-coast of Hampshire, he died in 1761, or more than thirty years before the letter in question was dated.

Apropos of letters in the "Gentleman's Magazine" attributed to