Mr. Lowell, in one of the most charming essays ever written about a garden, takes his text from White of Selborne, and admirably explains the charm of that worthy representative of the Waltonian spirit. 'It is good for us now and then,' says Mr. Lowell, 'to converse in a world like Mr. White's, where man is the least important of animals;' to find one's whole world in a garden, beyond the reach of wars and rumours of wars. White does not give a thought to the little troubles which were disturbing the souls of Burke and George III. The 'natural term of a hog's life has more interest for him than that of an empire;' he does not trouble his head about diplomatic complications whilst he is discovering that the odd tumbling of rooks in the air is caused by their turning over to scratch themselves with one claw. The great events of his life are his making acquaintance with a stilted plover, or his long—for it was protracted over ten years—and finally triumphant passion for 'an old family tortoise.' White of Selborne did not live in the rough old days when a country house had occasionally to be a fastness; nor in our own, when he would have to consider whether his property ought not to be 'nationalized.' He was merely a good, kindly, domestic gentleman, on friendly terms with the parson and the gamekeeper, and ready for a chat with the rude forefathers of the hamlet. His horizon, natural and unnatural, is bounded by the soft round hills and the rich hangers of his beloved Hampshire country. There is something specially characteristic in his taste for scenery. Though 'I have now travelled the Sussex Downs upwards of thirty years,' he says, 'I still investigate that chain of majestic mountains with fresh admiration year by year;' and he calls 'Mr. Ray' to witness that there is nothing finer in any part of Europe. 'For my own part,' he says, 'I think there is somewhat peculiarly sweet and amusing in the shapely figured aspects of chalk hills in preference to those of stone, which are rugged, broken, abrupt, and shapeless.' I, for my part, agree with Mr. White—so long, at least, as I am reading his book. The Downs have a singular charm in the exquisite play of long, gracefully undulating lines which bound their gentle edges. If not a 'majestic range of mountains,' as judged by an Alpine standard, there is no want of true sublimity in their springing curves, especially when harmonised by the lights and shadows under cloud-masses driving before a broad south-westerly gale; and when you reach the edge of a great down, and suddenly look down into one of the little hollows where a village with a grey church tower and a grove of noble elms nestles amidst the fold of the hills, you fancy that in such places of refuge there must still be relics of the quiet domesticities enjoyed by Gilbert White. Here, one fancies, it must be good to live; to discharge, at an easy rate, all the demands of a society which is but a large family, and find ample excitement in studying the rambles of a tortoise, forming intimacies with moles, crickets and fieldmice, and bats, and brown owls, and watching the swifts and the nightjars wheeling round the old church tower, or hunting flies at the edge of the wood in the quiet summer evening.