Herald_ till he was
nearly thirty. Then he went to London, and in 1878 published some
sketches (previously contributed to the _Pall Mall Gazette_) under the
title of _The Game-Keeper at Home_. These, though not much bought, were
very much admired; and Jefferies was encouraged to devote himself to
work of the same kind, which he varied with curious and not very
vigorous semi-philosophic speculations and attempts at downright novels
(a kind which he had also tried in his youth). Unfortunately the
peculiar sort of descriptive writing in which he excelled was not very
widely called for, could hardly under the most favourable circumstances
have brought in any great sums of money, and was peculiarly liable to
depreciate when written to order. It does not appear that Jefferies had
the rare though sometimes recorded power of accommodating himself to
ordinary newspaper hack-work, while reserving himself for better things
now and then; and finally, he had not been long in London before
painful and ultimately fatal disease added to his troubles. He died in
August 1887, being not yet forty. A burst of popularity followed; his
books, _The Game-Keeper at Home_, _Wild Life in a Southern Country_,
_The Amateur Poacher_, _Round about a Great Estate_, etc., none of which
had been printed in large numbers, were sold at four or five times their
published price; and, worst of all, cheap imitations of his style began
to flood the newspapers. Nay, the yet later results of this imitation
was that another reaction set in, and even Jefferies' own work was once
more pooh-poohed.

The neglect, the over-valuation, and the shift back to injustice, were
all examples of the evils which beset literature at the present time,
and which the much-blamed critic is almost powerless to cause or cure.
In other days Jefferies was quite as likely to have been insufficiently
rewarded at first by the public; but he would then have had no
temptation to over-write himself, or try alien tasks, and he would have
stood a very good chance of a pension, or a sinecure, or an easy office
in church or state, on one or other of which he might have lived at ease
and written at leisure. Nothing else could really have been of service
to him, for his talent, though rare and exquisite, was neither rich nor
versatile. It consisted in a power of observing nature more than
Wordsworthian in delicacy, and almost Wordsworthian in the presence of a
sentimental philosophic background of