e down to the bustard and the dodo, and outside
museums of comparative anatomy the weasel is not and the badger has
ceased from the face of the earth, it is not doubtful that the
_Gamekeeper_ and _Wild Life_ and the _Poacher_--epitomising, as they
will, the rural England of certain centuries before--will be serving as
material and authority for historical descriptions, historical novels,
historical epics, historical pictures, and will be honoured as the most
useful stuff of their kind in being.

His Limitation.

In those first books of his Jefferies compels attention by sheer
freshness of matter; he is brimful of new facts and original and
pertinent observation, and that every one is vaguely familiar with and
interested in the objects he is handling and explaining serves but to
heighten his attractiveness. There are so many who but know of hares
disguised as soup, of ants as a people on whose houses it is not good to
sit down, of partridges as a motive of bread sauce! And Jefferies,
retailing in plain, useful English the thousand and one curious facts
that make up life for these creatures and their kind--Jefferies walking
the wood, or tracking the brook, or mapping out the big tree--is some one
to be heeded with gratitude. He is the Scandalous Chronicler of the
warren and the rookery, the newsmonger and intelligencer of creeping
things, and things that fly, and things that run; and his confidences,
unique in quality and type, have the novelty and force of personal
revelations. In dealing with men and women, he surrendered most of his
advantage and lost the best part of his charm. The theme is old, the
matter well worn, the subject common to us all; and most of us care
nothing for a few facts more or less unless they be romantically
conveyed. Reality is but the beginning, the raw material, of art; and it
is by the artist's aid and countenance that we are used to make
acquaintance with our fellows, be they generals in cocked hats or
mechanics in fustian. Now Jefferies was not an artist, and so beside his
stoats and hares, his pike, his rabbits, and his moles, his men and women
are of little moment. You seem to have heard of them and to far better
purpose from others; you have had their author's facts presented
elsewhere, and that in picturesque conjunction with the great eternal
interests of passion and emotion. To be aware of such a difference is to
resent it; and accordingly to read is to know that Jeffe