The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1

cassell’s national library.
by THE REV. GILBERT WHITE A.M.
Vol. I.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited: london , paris , new york & melbourne . 1887
Gilbert White was born in the village of Selborne on the 18th of July, in the year 1720. His father was a gentleman of good means, with a house at Selborne and some acres of land. Gilbert had his school training at Basingstoke, from Thomas Warton, the father of the poet of that name, who was born at Basingstoke in 1728, six years younger than his brother Joseph, who had been born at Dunsford, in Surrey. Thomas Warton, their father, was the youngest of three sons of a rector of Breamore, in the New Forest, and the only son of the three who was not deaf and dumb. This Thomas, the elder, was an able man, who obtained a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, became vicar of Basingstoke, in Hampshire, and was there headmaster of the school to which young Gilbert White was sent. He was referred to in Amhurst’s “Terræ Filius” as “a reverend poetical gentleman;” he knew Pope, and had credit enough for his verse to hold the office of Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1718 to 1728. His genius for writing middling verse passed on to his
more famous sons, Joseph and Thomas, and they both became in due time Oxford Professors of Poetry.
Gilbert White passed on from school to Oxford, where he entered Oriel College in 1739. He became a Fellow of Oriel, graduated M.A. in 1746, at the age of six-and-twenty, and six years afterwards he served as one of the Senior Proctors of the University. His love of nature grew with him from boyhood, and was associated with his earliest years of home. His heart abided with his native village. When he had taken holy orders he could have obtained college livings, but he cared only to go back to his native village, and the house in which he was born, paying a yearly visit to Oxford, and in that house, after a happy life that extended a few years over the threescore and ten, he died on the 26th of June, 1793.