Chapter Three
Widening Horizons
When he was 13 or 14 years old, Gilbert went off to school in Basingstoke, to study under the Reverend Thomas Warton. This almost certainly involved private tuition, not a spell at the local school, as has often been assumed. Dr Warton was the vicar of Basingstoke and appears to have had no connection with the Basingstoke Grammar School. He was something of a maverick, an ex-Professor of Poetry at Oxford, who had once been reported to the Vice-Chancellor for sedition. He had two sons, Joseph, two years younger than Gilbert, and Thomas, born in 1728, a precocious boy who had translated the epigrams of Martial at the age of 10 and who went on to become not only Professor of Poetry, like his father, but Poet Laureate. Joseph was reported by his biographers to have been ‘educated under his father’s eye’, and it’s likely that the three boys, Tom, Jo and Gilbert, formed an intimate and precocious tutorial group under Dr Warton’s tutelage. A list made by Gilbert in one of his pocket books of ‘Books that I carryed to Basingstoke, January 17, 1738/9’ is chiefly a tally of classical texts, but also includes Wilkins’ Natural Religion and James Thomson’s epic landscape poem, The Seasons.1
Very little else is known about his school education, except that, with Selborne being fifteen miles away from Basingstoke, he probably boarded with the Wartons, at least during the week. But it would have been assumed early on that as an intelligent young man from a middle-class though not very prosperous family, he would go on to university, and then probably take holy orders. He chose Oxford, and was admitted as a commoner to Oriel College on 7 December 1739. The reason he chose Oriel rather than Magdalen, where his grandfather had been a Fellow, was almost certainly due to the influence of his Uncle Charles, who had been a student at Oriel between 1710 and 1714, and had taken a consistent interest in Gilbert’s education. But the choice couldn’t have been regarded as a matter of great importance at the time. At 19, Gilbert would hardly have been concerned about which college he attended, nor – having so far shown no hint of an exclusive attachment to his native village – that his place at Oriel meant that he could never be vicar of Selborne. In the event Gilbert did not take up residence at the usual time. By an unkind coincidence his mother Anne died on the same day (3 December) that he was formally admitted, and he had to postpone his entrance until April 1740.
What part did Oxford play in shaping Gilbert’s outlook and interests? Perhaps not a great deal in a narrow academic sense. Mid-eighteenth-century Oxford had a notorious reputation as a den of indolence, degeneracy and corruption. Standards of scholarship were at one of their lowest ebbs, and Gilbert may have found more enlightenment (as many generations of students have) outside the formal framework, in his private reading and a circle of new friends. One cause of the University’s malaise was that it had found itself, for involved historical reasons, on the losing side in the long-standing feud between the Jacobites and the reigning Hanoverians. It had lost influence, friends and money, and had seen a drastic reduction in the number of students wishing, or financially able, to enter. During the period Gilbert was an undergraduate the entire annual intake averaged less than 200.2
Yet equally one could see Oxford’s lethargy developing as a kind of buffer between the gentleman’s-club insularity of the colleges and the embryonic, untried academic structure of the university. The cultural and scientific debates of the age were not so much ignored as blunted. Some of the colleges were almost masonic in the way they awarded honours and favours. Lectures were rarities. The university library (the Bodleian) was open for only six hours a day. Some of the books were even chained to their shelves. Tutorials, and even examinations, were often little more than exchanges of stock questions and responses, or disputations upon a few standard problems in grammar or logic. Sometimes, if a tutor failed to turn up, debates were carried out with a blank stone wall.
The reaction of the students to this atmosphere – and the sanctimonious disapproval of it by outside commentators – was affectionately satirized by Gilbert’s school-friend Tom Warton in The Companion to the Guide, and a Guide to the Companion, published not long after he was appointed Professor of Poetry. This was part of his bawdy, irreverent, alternative syllabus:
NAVIGATION is learned on the Isis, GUNNERY on the adjacent hills … The Doctrin of the SCREW is practically explained most evenings in the private rooms, together with the motion of fluids … Nine-pin and skittle alleys for the instruction of scholars in Geometrical Knowledge, and particularly, for proving the centripetal principle.3
In reality things were neither as cheerfully depraved as in Warton’s skit, nor as awful as in Edward Gibbon’s famous indictment, in which, casting his mind back forty years, he claimed that ‘the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.’ Lectures and tuition were available in a range of disciplines that went beyond classics and logic, into, for example, botany, Anglo-Saxon history, modern languages, mathematics and even astronomy. And if those lectures that were given were not always the most inspiring, they were at least voluntary. In fact, students were able to study pretty much what they wanted; and this gave the more assiduous ones the freedom to construct a very broad syllabus for themselves. Gilbert was lucky in having, as his tutor at Oriel, Dr Edward Bentham, a theologian then in his early thirties, who read three lectures every week without charging attendance fees. (He also published a moderately progressive account of moral philosophy in 1745, based on some of these lectures.) Gilbert would have been able to discuss ‘natural religion’ and physico-theology with Bentham, and its influence on the growing cult of naturalism in art and literature with his contemporaries at Oriel. They were a bright company, many with a taste for poetry: John Scrope, Bob Carter, Chardin Musgrave, Nathan Wells, Tom Mander, and a rich, stout and witty bishop’s nephew from London called John Mulso, who was to become Gilbert’s closest friend.4
Gilbert had no doubt been introduced to Mulso by his other old school-friend, Jo Warton, Tom’s elder brother. Mulso, Warton and the poet William Collins, who had come up to Queen’s College in 1749, had been the top three scholars of their year at Winchester School. Collins and Jo Warton had both begun to publish naturalistic poetry somewhat in the style of Thomson in the Gentleman’s Magazine, before they ever came to Oxford. Gilbert had probably also dabbled with verse, to judge from his frequent forays into poetry later in life. Even Mulso proved to have an acute, if rather formal, critical sense. The four became close friends and shared a growing sympathy towards landscape and nature. Ten years later Jo Warton published a translation of the works of Virgil, and in his dedication praised the author’s affection for nature in the most fancifully romantic terms. Virgil was to be thanked for giving ‘life and feeling, love and hatred, hope and fear, wonder and ambition to plants and trees, and to the very earth itself: and for exalting his favourite insects, by endowing them with reason, passion, arts and civil government’.5
Gilbert was never a particularly well-to-do student, but it’s clear from his account books that he lived a full and far from puritanical life. He went boating on the river and joined the Music Club. He kept a gun, and as Mulso reminded him much later (to Gilbert’s great embarrassment) used to shoot small summer birds to keep his hand in for the winter. When it was available he indulged an undisguised taste for exotic food. As for drink, he enjoyed port, wine and cider, though never in the notorious quantities imbibed by Collins and the two Wartons. He frequented the coffee-houses that doubled as informal libraries and work-rooms, though never became an out-and-out ‘lownger’. But to see him as a model of moderation would be to make him into altogether too passive a figure. One of the central features of Gilbert’s personality was his ability – and, it seems, his need – to pursue, with equal gusto and commitment, ideas and habits which seem on the surface to be quite incongruous. It would have been absolutely in keeping with Gilbert’s character to have found him ensconced in the coffee-house in New College Lane, drinking cider with Collins and earnestly discussing Derham’s Physico-theology in an atmosphere which Tom Warton captured in his Companion:
As there are here Books suited to every Taste, so there are Liquors adapted to every species of reading. Amorous Tales may be pursued over Arrack Punch and Jellies; Insipid Odes over Orgeat or Capillaire; Politics over Coffee; Divinity over Port … In a word, in these Libraries Instruction and Pleasure go hand in hand; and we may pronounce in a literal sense, that Learning remains no longer a … dry … pursuit.6
It can be hard to keep hold of this image of Gilbert as a high-spirited young man. It is not just the formidable crusts of two centuries of history which get in the way, but the shadows of the clerical mantle and the book laboriously pieced together in later life. Together they conjure up the picture of a figure preserved in a state of permanent and studious middle age. He was still only 22 when he took his Bachelor of Arts examination on 17 June 1743, and not past celebrating with a night on the town later. His account for 28 June notes a total of eight shillings spent on ‘Horse hire and Dinner’ and wine. The Degree ceremony was two days later, and on this occasion Gilbert had the singular honour of being presented with a copy of Pope’s six-volume translation of the Iliad by Pope himself. It isn’t clear why Gilbert was favoured in this way, whether it was some kind of award, perhaps, or a surprise arranged by the family. The Whites and Pope did have a few mutual friends, notably Steven Hales (see p. 84), the non-resident Vicar of Farringdon near Selborne, and the poet’s neighbour in Teddington, and it is possible that they had plotted this ceremonial presentation by one of Gilbert’s favourite authors as a grand finale to graduation.
By his twenty-third birthday Gilbert was back in Selborne, to spend a summer free of any particular plans or responsibilities. Then it was Michaelmas again, and he returned to Oxford to attend ‘Dr Bradley’s first course of Mathematical Lectures’. On 30 March 1744 he sat a short examination, paid the necessary fees to the Vice-Chancellor’s office, ordered a peal of bells at St Mary’s in the High, and became a Fellow of Oriel College.
It was as simple as that. Fellowships then had nothing like the status they hold today, and, except in the case of exceptionally talented scholars, were chiefly intended to be temporary, short-term awards, to tide graduates (and clerics, especially) over until they came into a living or an inheritance. Certainly the appointment, at this stage, meant little more than a nominal change in Gilbert’s way of life. He continued to spend the vacations in Selborne and term-time in not very demanding academic duties and study at Oxford. But there are glimpses, now and then, of a less gregarious existence than he had enjoyed as an undergraduate. Although some of his friends, including Tom Mander and John Scrope, were still in residence, the group was beginning to drift away, some to be tutors, some to take holy orders. Jo Warton had returned to Basingstoke to act as a temporary curate to his father. William Collins had gone straight to London to try his hand as a writer and man about town. John Mulso, who had graduated the year after Gilbert, was making a long round of visits with his well-to-do family. Mulso spent his first post-Oxford summer of 1744 at Leeds Abbey near Maidstone, and, when he wrote to Gilbert describing the place, he was already clearly aware of the direction in which his friend’s interests were moving. The house was commodious and pleasant, with
a large Garden well stock’d with Fruit and adorn’d with Fountains, Cascades, & Canals: a most romantic wood behind it with large Fish ponds.
But the library had been sold off and
nothing remains but ye skeleton Cases. I really believe that my Brain will be moss’d over like our old walls, for here is very little Company, and those come so seldom that it is all Form & Starch’dness … I long to hear from You & to know ye State of that poor College, which I do not expect to see again these many months … where is Jo: Warton now and Tom? is that agreeable Toad Carter with you? All these claim my Love, never forgetting dear Tomkyns of New College: & Jack Rudge.7
So began, on 18 July 1744, the long correspondence between, the two men. Only Mulso’s letters survive, but they provide a frank and comprehensive insight into what passed between the pair, and at times read almost as if they were written with half an eye to recording Gilbert’s fortunes for posterity. On the evidence of his other surviving correspondence it is hard to believe that Gilbert was as open in return, and there is not much that he and Mulso obviously had in common. Mulso, who was rather more than a year younger than Gilbert, was the nephew of the Bishop of Winchester, and slipped automatically into a life of privilege, where comfortable livings were his virtually for the asking. He was constitutionally lazy, and hypochondriacal on an extravagant scale. The little interest he did have in ‘natural knowledge’ was largely vicarious, a reflection of – and a compliment to – his friend’s enthusiasms.
But at least Mulso was blessedly free of illusions about himself, and was for ever lampooning his own shortcomings and frailties. His wit, a kaleidoscope of extended puns, convoluted literary allusions and affectionate but wickedly accurate jibing, is one of the best things about his letters, and, in the setting of his rather corpulent prose, gives them a distinct Restoration flavour. He was always a cleverer writer than Gilbert, the sparkling columnist as against the reflective essayist. He simply did not have very much to say.
What was crucial about their relationship was the unshakeable faith Mulso had, right from the outset, in the originality and importance of Gilbert’s vision. Even when he was criticizing his style or chiding him for procrastination, it was only because of his belief in what his friend had to offer the world. He was a constant source of support and confidence, and of wise counsel when the path Gilbert had chosen proved too lonely and single-minded. If, when his own spirits were low, admiration sometimes declined into obsequiousness, it was never badly meant. The worst that can be said – and it hardly amounts to a criticism – is that the envy which he so cheerfully confessed of Gilbert’s energy and intellect occasionally made him dwell a little too fulsomely on his own blessings. Not long after they had left Oxford Mulso became engaged, and wrote to Gilbert from the security of his new relationship: ‘Jenny [Young] intends to set apart a Room in ye Vicarage by the name of ye White Room; I could almost perswade Her to have a Child or two ye less, for Fear of excluding my friend.’ It was a generous thought that Gilbert would have appreciated, but did Mulso realize the smart it would also have caused his bachelor friend?
*
Women had been on Gilbert’s mind a good deal in those first months after the camaraderie of his undergraduate days began to fade. Jenny Croke – the daughter of Mrs Croke of Oxford, a family friend who ran a high-class haberdashery and collected rents from some of Grandmother White’s tenants in the city – had taken his fancy enough for him to confide in his friends. They looked on the prospect of his ensnarement with consternation. Tom Mander reported that Gilbert was on ‘the highroad to ye dreary and dolorous land of Matrimony’, which prompted Mulso to issue a sonorous warning. ‘Do you really find Celibacy hang heavy upon your Hands?… Upon my word I would not advise You to play so much as you do with ye Tangles of Neaera’s Hair: those meshes will hold fast a Heart of stronger Wing for Flight than your’s is.’8 (Though Mulso himself was breathless about what he called ‘those mysteries’, and had been awestruck by the women of Canterbury during his stay in Kent: ‘I never met in one place such an Assembly of Beauties. I believe I saved my Heart by ye beautiful Confusion.’)
Early in 1745 Gilbert met Mulso’s sister Hester, nicknamed Hecky and then 18 years old. She was a bright and assertive young woman, but apparently no beauty. Fanny Burney’s sister, who encountered her years later, remarked that she looked ‘less forbidding than usual; but she is deadly ugly to be sure; such African nose and lips, and such a clunch figure’. Gilbert and Hecky hit it off from the start, no doubt recognizing in each other a similar independence of spirit. Gilbert had a great deal of respect for her intellect (as, in fact, he had for most of his female friends and relations) and he sent her some of his early attempts at poetry for comment. She proved to have a sharp critical eye, but also a light heart:
Your Description of Selboume has left nothing to ‘the craving imagination of Miss Hecky,’ and it was kindly done to send me so lively a Picture, as I fear I am not to see the Original … I hope your Father has not seen your more than Poetical Compliments, for if he has he must not see me, unless he has a Turn for Poetry, and knows that a Poet must give the Perfections he does not find.9
These mildly flirtatious blandishments and billets-doux passed frequently between them over the next few years. Gilbert paid her ‘a very neat compliment’ and she confessed to liking his hair. She wrote a sermon for him, and took to referring to him as ‘Whitibus’, and ‘Busser-White’, nicknames he had acquired at Oxford when the use of the word buss, meaning to kiss, was more current.* Hecky reckoned him a great asset at parties, and was full of mock distress during a family visit to Oxford because her Gil would not be there. Without Busser, Mulso reported, ‘She is apprehensive of a Dearth of Civilities … and fears She shall not get her Degree, because She has not her favourite Batchelour to answer under’.10 Mulso occasionally pretended not to understand the private jokes that passed between the pair. ‘Whether there is any particular Hint of Improvement by ye Termination She is pleased to give to your Name,’ he wrote, ‘You best know: as to me, I never see those Things, because I do as I would be done by.’11 But he knew better than most that there were no hidden intensities in the relationship, and certainly not the romantic attachment that some later writers have conjured up. It is quite clear that Gilbert and Hecky’s relationship was no more and no less than the mutually teasing friendship between a young man and his best friend’s sister.
Hecky’s waspish brilliance soon carried her into more rarefied intellectual circles. By the time she was 23 she had acquired a measure of fame for a voluminous dispute with the novelist Samuel Richardson about parental authority, sparked off by his book Clarissa (he called her ‘a little spitfire’). Her brother logged the exchange like a tennis match: ‘The first Letter was long, Mr Richardson’s answer 13 close Pages, Heck’s reply 17; & Mr. R-s 39.’ In later life she became the celebrated bluestocking Mrs Chapone, and when her works and correspondence were posthumously published there was not a single mention, affectionate or otherwise, of Busser White.12
*
Gilbert was no ascetic, and didn’t stint any of his worldly enjoyments though mindful of his limited resources, he recorded their costs minutely, down to the smallest gambling loss and plate of radishes. He played chess, went to the races, and continued to enjoy gossiping in coffee-houses. Even when he was struck down by smallpox in the autumn of 1747, he managed to keep up a semblance of the good life. It was a severe attack, for which he needed the attention of two doctors at the immense cost of £31,13 and – home comforts being the best – nursemaid Goody Marshall, specially sent up from Hampshire. (She was given a pair of shoes as a reward.) But his diet was still the sweet and sour mixture of a bon viveur determined not to let sickness ruin the style of life to which he had become accustomed. In a special list in his account books headed ‘Expenses in the Small-pox, 16 October’, his purchases include three bottles of white wine, half a pound of Corinth raisins (probably dried blackcurrants), an ounce of green tea, a pint of wine, a pound of rushlights, and a dish of tripe.14 But the regime seemed to work, and he was sufficiently recovered by the end of December to invest in a new pair of ice-skates.
Gilbert kept up his term-time residence until the summer of 1748, but in the vacations his life was almost nomadic. This was a common experience for young people in the eighteenth century, despite the myth of village confinement, and gentry and labourers alike frequently undertook a spell of travelling in search of work, fortune or just broadened horizons, before they settled down. Between 1745 and 1750 Gilbert roamed widely about lowland England, from the East Anglian marshlands to the wooded combes of Devon. No descriptive writing from this period survives, but the experience was crucial to him in later years. It gave him an insight into the variety of natural landscapes and their wild inhabitants that threw those in Selborne into sharp perspective.
Many of his trips were to relations and family friends. He became a regular visitor at his Aunt Rebecca Snooke’s house at Ringmer, on the South Downs, and to his brothers Thomas and Benjamin, who had settled in London. Less frequently he went to Lyndon, in Rutland, where his future brother-in-law Thomas Barker lived, once going a roundabout way through Shrewsbury. Then there were expeditions to old Oxford friends. In the summers of 1746 and ’47 he stayed with Tom Mander in Todenham, on the edge of the Cotswolds. Tom was now a budding physicist, but still apparently full of Oxford high spirits: ‘You may give my Love to Him,’ Mulso wrote, ‘if his apparatus does not forbid your Approach’ ‘I presume You are popping & snapping so that a Farmer can’t walk his own Fields in Security for You. Tom can walk farthest, but You shoot best; I fancy I have drawn your characters, tho’ I may add, Tom drinks cyder longest but You take ye larger Glasses at first.’15 In 1750 he journeyed down to see Nathan Wells in Devon, about 150 miles from Selborne, and entailing two or three days on the road.
His longest spells away from home were in East Anglia, where he was sent to help tidy up the affairs of his maternal grandfather’s deceased half-brother, in the Isle of Ely. He was a distant relative, but the terms of his will had far-reaching implications for Gilbert. The only real money in the family was on Gilbert’s mother’s side. It had been passed down from her mother Miss Hyde, later Mrs Holt, to her widower, the Reverend Thomas Holt, and on his death to his half-brother, also Thomas Holt. When this Thomas died without obvious heirs early in 1746, he proved to have left his money not to Anne’s eldest, but to her second son, Thomas, though the bequest was subject to so many annuities that Tom was not to see much benefit from it for another thirty years. The reasons for the tortuous path of this inheritance (passing through the lines of Thomases, as Anthony Rye has quipped) are buried deep in the arcane customs of eighteenth-century marriage settlements. The most important consequence was that Gilbert had missed his main chance of financial independence, though neither he nor any other member of the family appeared to see anything out of the ordinary in preference being given to a younger brother.
Gilbert was named as one of the executors of the will, and at the end of January 1745 he travelled east to begin the complicated task of cataloguing Holt’s estates and effects, and settling matters with his tenants. He attacked the task with diligence and enthusiasm at first, reporting back to his father regularly with observations jotted down ‘in my pocket book on the spot’. But it would have been a taxing job even for a trained surveyor. To begin with, the estates were divided between Thorney, in the Fens near Ely, and Rochford in Essex, and over the ensuing six months Gilbert was on an exhausting circuit between these two sites and London, Selborne and Oxford. The Rochford estates proved the hardest to cope with. They were occupied by forty separate tenants, and lay largely on low marshland near the River Roach. It was a landscape of perilous creeks, sodden pastures and limitless skies, as far removed from the wooded hills of Selborne as it was possible to imagine. Oysters were one of the accountable crops, and the inhabitants, then as now, doubtless saw themselves as having as much in common with fishermen as with inland farmers. Certainly they did not spare Gilbert the East Anglian’s notorious reserve with strangers. At one point Gilbert wrote to his father in some disquiet, wondering how on earth he, as a 26-year-old clerical landsman, could persuade the tenants that he was empowered to collect rents.16
It is impossible to say how well Gilbert did the job, but he succeeded in ‘getting wrong’ with the family attorney, Mr Butcher, who seems to have been acting as agent for the estate. Years later Gilbert described Butcher as a ‘very extraordinary man … He puts me in mind of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, whose resentment Mr Pope says was the most formidable thing in the world – except her favour.’17 In 1746 Mr Butcher’s resentment was directed four-square at Gilbert, whom he regarded as a naive and meddling outsider doing a job which should have been his. He complained of Gilbert selling the wrong animals, of his paying labourers too much, of his inexperience and ineptitude.18 Gilbert wrote back in the most courteously apologetic of tones, but a more tight-lipped memo went into his pocket-book during one of his trips to Thorney:
To sell the sheep as fast as possible. As many oxen as are saleable. Not to sell the Plate by auction at Thorney, but to reserve it to be disposed of at London by weight. The four men-servants not to be discharged ’till the will is proved, because they are witnesses. To take great care of the papers in the ’scrutore [sic] in the best Chamber, especially Bonds, Ledgers, &c. Use great secresy about money matters.19
Butcher finally wrote direct to Gilbert’s father. Gilbert had sold off some of the wine at Thorney, he complained, and walked off with the keys. John White’s draft reply, the only extant letter in his hand, is a timid and much amended apology. Like his son he clearly wished to be rid of the whole business, and especially of Butcher’s interference. He ends by suggesting that the attorney should avail himself of the remaining wine at Thorney in compensation for his trouble.20
Gilbert’s spell as an executor left him tired out, wiser about his native country and the ways of its inhabitants, and harbouring a deep-rooted suspicion of lawyers. It also brought to the surface a predisposition towards coach-sickness, which was to stay with him for the rest of his life. In August Gilbert wrote to Mulso with an account of how he had been overwhelmed during the middle of an earnest theological argument with a female friend. It sounds like a terrible attack, but he gets no sympathy at all:
Lucretius’s Suave mari magno &c.: was not ye Reason I laugh’d so heartily at your Stage Coach Sickness, which now you have recover’d I hope You will forgive me. I believe it was rather ye circumstances of the Sickness, than ye Sickness itself, that diverted me: I don’t think there is a better Answer to ye Question of Original Sin than a groan; or a better satire on women’s disputing it, than your cascading.21
Mulso relished Gilbert’s tales of the road, especially of the kind of journeys he was too laggardly to undertake himself. The news usually arrived in the form of ‘very exact and very entertaining’ letters which were eagerly awaited by both Whites and Mulsos, and were sometimes read out loud after family dinners. The account which he sent of his long visit to Nathan Wells in August 1750 seems to have made an especially deep impression. Wells lived at East Allington, in the South Hams district of Devon, in the kind of broken, uneven country that Gilbert had learned to love in Selborne. (‘I never see a Spot which lies much out of Levele but I think of you,’ wrote Mulso, ‘& say “ay, now this would please White”.’) There were steep woods and sunken lanes, but also much that would have been strikingly new: the grey, looming mass of Dartmoor to the north-west, the Devon cliffs, the warm south-east winds blowing in from the Atlantic. Gilbert’s description of this foreign land made Mulso almost sigh for the dullness and lack of adventure of his own daily round.
You live a scambling [sic] rantipole Life & have a great Variety of Objects to be painted upon Paper (at which Landscape Painting I think You a great & masterly Hand) & sent to your sedentary Friends; we receive them & think we are Travelling wth you for five Minutes, & then look up & find Ourselves in the same tedious Scene in which we have rather been acted than for a Length of Days.22
Reading Gilbert’s despatches was the nearest Mulso was likely to get to such exotic scenes (‘I, who have lately maintained that it is up-hill from Hampton to Sunbury should never bear the extreme Uneveness of that Country’), and he urged Gilbert to continue his ‘Tours’, and carry on writing about them. They would make an ‘agreeable Pockett Volume’, or better still, the basis for an epic poem. It should be called ‘ye Progress … It would make a fine Piece, & might tempt Gentlemen to examine their own Country before they went abroad & brought Home a genteel Disgust at ye Thoughts of England.’23
In fact Gilbert had already tried his hand at poetry of the pastoral kind, though the subject was not his rambles but the attractions of the place he had temporarily left behind. ‘The Invitation to Selborne’ had been written in 1745, while Gilbert was installed in the Fens, and the first version sent off to Mulso for his approval and comment. Since then it had become a kind of party piece, an all-purpose greetings card from what had come to be called ‘the green retreat’. It was brought out on special occasions, amended and lengthened to keep it up to date, and sent out to a succession of friends and relatives. The earliest surviving version (already altered, apparently, from the original) dates from the early 1750s.
Later in his life Gilbert quite consciously used poetry as a way of sharpening his writing technique, or, more often, of releasing strong feelings that he felt unable to express in other ways, and this early exercise shows, embedded among some extravagant and unexceptional poesy, a sharp, almost sentimental longing for his ‘native spot’. The body of the poem is little more than a tongue-in-cheek pastoral, with Selborne transformed into a part-Classical, part-Gothick Arcadia. The Hanger becomes ‘the Pendant forest’ and ‘the mountain ground’. The shades of cowled monks and Crusaders float among the local ruins. But then a quieter more heartfelt note emerges, and Selborne becomes a real, personal landscape:
Nor be the Parsonage by the Muse forgot;
The partial bard admires his native spot;
Smit with its beauties, lov’d, as yet a child,
Unconscious why, its ’scapes grotesque, and wild:
High on a mound th’ exalted gardens stand;
Beneath, deep valleys scoop’d by Nature’s hand!
Now climb the steep, drop now your eye below;
Where round the verdurous village orchards blow;
There, like a picture, lies my lowly seat
A rural, shelter’d, unobserv’d retreat.24
Gilbert spent a good deal of his late twenties away from Selborne. His sojourn in East Anglia in 1745 was the longest period he had spent away from the village in his life. It is hardly surprising that, adrift in the vast inhospitable flat-lands of Cambridgeshire, he experienced a pang of homesickness for the cosseted valleys of Hampshire.
* This was a particularly complex pun, with its suggestion of the Latin possessive case in ‘Whitibus’. But it was all beyond the wit of one nineteenth-century clerical descendant, who wrote to Onel College for more information about his relative’s spell as ‘bursar’ of the college.