Excerpt from The Letters to Gilbert White of Selborne: From His Intimate Friend and Contemporary, the Rev. John Mulso; Edited With Notes and an Introduction

Admirers of the Selborne naturalist will greatly regret the destruction of his letters to Mulso, all the more since, with the exception of a very few lines of biography written by his nephew, John White, the publisher, there is no account of Gilbert White by any of his contemporaries, of whom all those who knew him, even in their earliest years, have now long been dead. TO these letters from his friend, then, we must turn to see what is almost the only contemporary estimate of the naturalist's character and career, as it were in a mirror: a mirror which is, perhaps, not always Of the clearest or purest lustre, but which may be trusted to give out bright, and generally faithful reflections. In reading them through I have sometimes wondered whether there ever were two men, whose friendship lasted without the smallest apparent cloud for fifty years, of more totally Opposite habits and character. Both, it is true, were men of good birth and education, and fond of books and reading; but, while Gilbert White grew up in a home situate in the depths of the country, literally five miles from anywhere, and amid circumstances which must have been such as to cultivate hardihood and self reliance, Mulso was a typical townsman, who loved the corner seat Of a carriage much better than the back of a horse, an animal which he seems to have regarded in the light of a rather disagreeable, though sometimes necessary, means of exercise. And the two friends certainly took very different views of life and its duties. They both, no doubt, in adopting the profession of a clergyman, were to some extent influenced by the expecta tion of enjoying a reasonable competence; but, while one of them, as time went on became almost absolutely idle, the other, whose circumstances would, as a bachelor, have equally admitted of laziness, spent his whole life, after taking holy orders, in the active performance Of clerical duty, from his sentiment, as his friend records, that a clergyman should not be idle and unemployed. Nor was this duty of a merely perfunctory character, since I have been frequently assured by Old people in Selborne that their parents distinctly recollected and dwelt upon the very assiduous manner in which Gilbert White visited his parishioners, by whom he was ever held in the greatest respect and regard.

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