year, and illustrated with large notes and observations. Such a beginning might induce more able naturalists to write the history of various districts and might in time occasion the production of a work so much to be wished for—a full and complete natural history of these kingdoms." Yet the famous Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne did not appear until 1789. It was well received from the beginning, and has been reprinted time after time.
To be a typical parish natural history so far as completeness or order is concerned, it has of course no pretensions; batches of letters, an essay on antiquities, a naturalist's calendar and miscellaneous jottings of all kinds are but the unsystematized material of the work proper, which was never written. Yet it is largely to this very piecemeal character that its popularity has been due. The style has the simple, yet fresh and graphic, directness of all good letter-writing, and there is no lack of passages of keen observation, and even shrewd interpretation. White not only notes the homes and ways, the times and seasons, of plants and animals—comparing, for instance, the different ways in which the squirrel, the field mouse and the nuthatch eat their hazel-nut—or watches the migrations of birds, which were then only beginning to be properly recorded or understood, but he knows more than any other observer until Charles Darwin about the habits and the usefulness of the earthworms, and is certain that plants distil dew and do not merely condense it. The book is also interesting as having appeared on the borderland between the medieval and the modern school of natural history, avoiding the uncritical blundering of the old Encyclopaedists, without entering on the technical and analytic character of the opening age of separate monographs. Moreover, as the first book which raised natural history into the region of literature, much as the Compleat Angler did for that gentle art, we must affiliate to it the more finished products of later writers like Thoreau or Richard Jefferies. Yet, while these are essential merits of the book, its endearing charm lies deeper, in the sweet and kindly personality of the author, who on his rambles gathers no spoil, but watches the birds and field-mice without disturbing them from their nests, and quietly plants an acorn where he thinks an oak is wanted, or sows beech-nuts in what is now a stately row. He overflows with anecdotes, seldom indeed gets beyond the anecdotal stage, yet from this all study of nature must begin; and he sees everywhere intelligence and beauty, love and sociality, where a later view of nature insists primarily on mere adaptation of interests or purely competitive struggles. The encyclopaedic interest in nature, although in White's day culminating in the monumental synthesis of Buffon, was also disappearing before the analytic specialism inaugurated by Linnaeus; yet the catholic interests of the simple naturalist of Selborne fully reappear a century later in the greater naturalist of Down, Charles Darwin.
The Life and Letters of Gilbert White of Selborne, by his great grandnephew, Rashleigh Holt-White, appeared in 1901.
WHITE, HENRY KIRKE (1785-1806), English poet, was born at Nottingham, the son of a butcher, on the 21st of March 1785. He was destined at first for his father's trade, but after a short apprenticeship to a stocking-weaver, was eventually articled to a lawyer. Meanwhile he studied hard, and his master offered to release him from his contract if he had sufficient means to go to college. He received encouragement from Capel Lofft, the friend of Robert Bloomfield, and published in 1803 Clifton Grove, a Sketch in Verse, with other Poems, dedicated to Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire. The book was violently attacked in the Monthly Review (February 1804), but White was in some degree compensated by a kind letter from Robert Southey. Through the efforts of his friends, he was entered as a sizar at St John's College, Cambridge, spending a year beforehand with a private tutor. Close application to study induced a serious illness, and fears were entertained for his sanity, but he went into residence at Cambridge, with a view to taking holy orders, in the autumn of 1805. The strain of continuous study proved fatal, and he died on the 19th of October 1806. He was buried in the church of All Saints, Cambridge. The genuine piety of his religious verses secured a place in popular hymnology for some of his hymns. Much of his fame was due to sympathy inspired by his early death, but it is noteworthy that Byron agreed with Southey in forming a high estimate of the young man's promise.
His Remains, with his letters and an account of his life, were edited (3 vols., 1807-1822) by Robert Southey. See prefatory notices by Sir Harris Nicolas to his Poetical Works (new ed., 1866) in the "Aldine Edition" of the British poets; by H. K. Swann in the volume of selections (1897) in the Canterbury Poets; and by John Drinkwater to the edition in the "Muses' Library." See also J. T. Godfrey and J. Ward, The Homes and Haunts of Henry Kirke White (1908).
WHITE, HUGH LAWSON (1773-1840), American statesman, was born in Iredell county, North Carolina, on the 30th of October 1773. In 1787 he crossed the mountains into East Tennessee (then a part of North Carolina) with his father James White (1737-1815), who was subsequently prominent in the early history of Tennessee. Hugh became in 1790 secretary to Governor William Blount, and in 1792-1793 served under John Sevier against the Creek and Cherokee Indians, and in the battle of Etowah (December 1793), according to the accepted tradition, killed with his own hand the Cherokee chief Kingfisher. He studied in Philadelphia and in 1796 he was admitted to the bar at Knoxville. He was a judge of the Superior Court of Tennessee in 1801-1807, a state senator in 1807-1809, and in 1800-1815 was judge of the newly organized Supreme Court of Errors and Appeals of the state. From 1812 to 1827 he was president of the State Bank of Tennessee at Knoxville, and managed it so well that for several years during this period it was the only western bank that in the trying period during and after the War of 1812 did not suspend specie payments. In 1821-1824 he was a member of the Spanish Claims Commission, and in 1825 succeeded Andrew Jackson in the United States Senate, serving until 1840 and being president pro tem, in 1832-1834. In the Senate he opposed internal improvements by the Federal government and the recharter of the United States Bank, favoured a protective tariff and Jackson's coercive policy in regard to nullification, and in general supported the measures of President Jackson, though his opposition to the latter's indiscriminate appointments caused a coolness between himself and Jackson, which was increased by White's refusal to vote to expunge the resolutions of a former Senate censuring the president. In 1830, as chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, he secured the passage of a bill looking to the removal of the Indians to lands west of the Mississippi. He was opposed to Van Buren, Jackson's candidate for the presidency in 1836, was himself nominated in several states as an independent candidate, and received the twenty-six electoral votes of Tennessee and Georgia, though President Jackson made strong efforts to defeat him in the former state. About 1838 he became a Whig in politics, and when the Democratic legislature of Tennessee instructed him to vote for Van Buren's sub-treasury scheme he objected and resigned (Jan. 1840). His strict principles and his conservatism won for him the sobriquet of "The Cato of the United States Senate." He died at Knoxville on the 10th of April 1840.
See Nancy N. Scott (ed.), A Memoir of Hugh Lawson White (Philadelphia, 1856).
WHITE, JOSEPH BLANCO (1775-1841), British theologian and poet, was born at Seville on the 11th of July 1775. He was educated for the Roman Catholic priesthood; but after his ordination (1800) religious doubts led him to escape from Spain to England (1810), where he ultimately entered the Anglican Church, having studied theology at Oxford and made the friendship of Arnold, Newman and Whately. He became tutor in the family of the last-named when he was made archbishop of Dublin (1831). While in this position he embraced Unitarian views; and he found an asylum amongst the Unitarians of Liverpool, where he died on the 20th of May 1841.
White edited El Español, a monthly Spanish magazine in London, from 1810 to 1814, and afterwards received a civil list pension of £250. His principal writings are Doblado's Letters from Spain (1822); Evidence against Catholicism, (1825); Second Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion (2 vols., 1834); Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy (1835). They all show literary ability, and were extensively read in their day. He also translated Paley's Evidences and the Book of Common Prayer into Spanish. He is best remembered, however, by his sonnet "Night and Death" ("Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew"), which was dedicated to S. T. Coleridge on its appearance in the Bijou for 1828 and has since found its way into several anthologies. Three versions are given in the Academy of the 12th of September 1891.
See Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White, written by himself, with portions of his Correspondence, edited by John Hamilton Thorn (London, 3 vols., 1845).
