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 "Terrae 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.
Gilbert White never married, but lived in peaceful performance of light
clerical duties and enjoyment of those observations of nature which his
book records. His brothers, who shared his love of nature, aided instead
of thwarting him in his studies of the natural history of Selborne, and
as their lives were less secluded and they did not remain unmarried, they
provided him with a family of young people to care about, for he lived to
register the births of sixty-three nephews and nieces.
It was one of his brothers, who was a member of the Royal Society, by
whom Gilbert White was persuaded, towards the close of his life, to
gather his notes into a book. It was first published in a quarto volume
in the year of the outbreak of the French Revolution with the fall of the
Bastile. He was more concerned with the course of events in a martin's
nest than with the crash of empires, and no man ever made more evident
the latent power of enjoyment that is left dead by those who live
uneventful lives surrounded by a world of life and change and growth
which they want eyes to see. Gilbert White was in his seventieth year
when his book appeared, four years before his death. It was compiled
from letters addressed to Thomas Pennant and the Hon. Daines Barrington.
Thomas Pennant was a naturalist six years younger than Gilbert White. He
was born at Downing, in Flintshire, in 1726, and died in 1798, like
White, in the house in which he had been born. His love of Natural
History made him a traveller at home and abroad. He counted Buffon among
his friends. He had written many books before the date of the
publication of White's "Selborne." Pennant's "British Zoology," his
"History of Quadrupeds" and "Arctic Zoology," had a high reputation. He
wrote also a Tour in Wales and a History of London.
Daines Barrington, fourth son of the first Viscount Barrington, was a
year younger than Pennant, and died in 1800. He became Secretary to
Greenwich Hospital, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and President
of the Royal Society. His "Miscellanies," published in 4to in 1781, deal
with questions of Natural History, and of Antiquities, including a paper
first published in 1775 asserting the possibility of approaching the
North Pole. His most valued book was one of "Observations on the more
Ancient Statutes."