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Updated: June 3, 2025
The sudden illness of the king postponed the festivities, but the meetings of the Conference went on as arranged. The United Kingdom was represented by Mr Chamberlain, Lord Selborne, and Mr Brodrick. Sir Edmund Barton and Sir John Forrest represented Australia, now a single Commonwealth.
And when the new bell was placed in the steeple, instead of the priestly unctions and quaint ceremonies of a past age, there was too often a heathenish scene of drunkenness and revelry. A common custom, alluded to by White of Selborne, was to fix it bottom upwards, and fill it with strong liquor. At Checkendon, in Oxfordshire, this was attended with fatal results.
Selborne joined me in the lounge for a little while, and talked about our sail next day, and then I was asked to make up a bridge table. Remembering Zena's attitude, according to Quarles, I was rather glad to get away from Mrs. Selborne. She played bridge, too, but not at my table. There was no burglary that night, and the following morning was as good for yachting as one could desire.
I think it was not until about 1865 that, retiring from a professional career, he made Selborne and the Wakes, the very house of Gilbert White his residence. Here he lived, however, for fifteen years, and here it was his delight to follow up every vestige of the great naturalist's sojourn in the parish.
So that Selborne more than a hundred years ago had, in that particular at any rate, advanced to a stage of dialect which in Worcestershire is still not fully established. Certain words beginning with "h" seem a difficulty; a "y" is sometimes prefixed, and the "h" omitted. Thus height becomes "yacth," as nearly as I can spell it, and herring is "yerring."
Presently benefice after benefice was offered him but he refused them all, having made up his mind to live and die at Selborne.
"In the churchyard of this village," writes Gilbert White in "The Antiquities of Selborne," "is a yew-tree whose aspect bespeaks it to be of great age; it seems to have seen several centuries and is probably co-eval with the church, and therefore may be deemed an antiquity; the body is squat, short and thick, and measures twenty-three feet in the girth, supporting a head of suitable extent to its bulk.
This country which we know as the Weald is obviously bounded north and south by the Downs which enclose it, as they do, too, upon the west, where between Winchester and Petersfield and Selborne the two ranges narrow and meet. Thence, indeed, the Weald spreads eastward in an ever widening delta till it is lost in the marshes and the sea.
The occurrence of the name Salter Street gives a clue to one of the original uses of the road, at any rate in Roman times, for salt was an absolute necessity in those days, as may be gathered from a passage in The Natural History of Selborne, written in 1778: "Three or four centuries ago, before there were any enclosures, sown grasses, field turnips, or field carrots, or hay, all the cattle which had grown fat in summer, and were not killed for winter use, were turned out soon after Michaelmas to shift as they could through the dead months; so that no fresh meat could be had in winter or spring.
The late Lord Selborne, who at that time was Solicitor-General, wrote for these pages the following detailed and, of course, authoritative statement of what transpired, and the facts which he recounts show that Lord Russell, in spite of the generous admission which he himself made in his 'Recollections, was in reality not responsible for a blunder which almost led to war, and which when submitted to arbitration at Geneva cost England besides much irritation the sum of 3,000,000l.
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