White's Natural History was at once well received by contemporary critics and the public, and continued to be admired by a diverse range of nineteenth and twentieth century literary figures.

Patrick Armstrong, in his book The English Parson-Naturalist, notes that in particular, "an obvious example is the first, nominally to Thomas Pennant, but which is clearly contrived, as it introduces the parish, briefly summarizing its position, geography and principal physical features.

The covert of this eminence is altogether beech, the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous boughs.

White also described Grimm's method, which was to sketch the landscape in lead pencil, then to put in the shading, and finally to add a light wash of watercolour.

A little yellow bird (it is either a species of the Alauda trivialis, or rather perhaps of the Motacilla trochilus) still continues to make a sibilous shivering noise in the tops of tall woods.

[9] Barrington, on the other hand, liked to theorize about the natural world, but had little interest in making observations himself, and tended to accept claimed facts uncritically.

[10]Letter 65 describes the summer of 1783 as:[11] an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phenomena; for, besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunderstorms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man ...

The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting.

"[16] Richard Mabey describes White's reaction to the "Priory saga" as "grave disapproval of the monks' sensuality and ... general delinquency".

"[19] White notes that since then, even "the very foundations have been torn up for the repair of the highways"[19] so that nothing is left but a rough pasture "full of hillocks and pits, choaked with nettles, and dwarf-elder, and trampled by the feet of the ox and the heifer".

[19] White had reason to be bitter about the takeover by Magdalen College, as it had made them Lords of the Manor of Selborne, which in turn gave them the right to appoint the parish priest.

"[23] Thomas White wrote "a long, appreciative, but.. properly restrained review"[24] of his brother's book in The Gentleman's Magazine of January 1789, commenting that "Sagacity of observation runs through the work".

The book is not a compilation from former publications, but the result of many years' attentive observations to nature itself, which are told not only with the precision of a philosopher, but with that happy selection of circumstances, which mark the poet.

It has been excluded from the blessings of increasing commerce and population, from factories and filiations, manufactures and Methodism, genius and gin, prosperity and pauperism.The book was widely admired by contemporary writers.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it a "sweet, delightful book"; John Clare imitated its style of natural history letters.

[28] Thomas Carlyle wrote that "It is one of our most excellent books; White, a quiet country Parson, has preached a better sermon here than all the loud Bishops that then were".

It is, in fact, not so much a logically arranged and systematic book as an invaluable record of the life work of a simple and refined man who succeeded in picturing himself as well as what he saw.

He offers his readers the key to a walled garden of mellow Queen Anne brick, lying beside Thomas Gray's country churchyard and an ancient water meadow.Yale nonfiction tutor Fred Strebeigh, writing in Audubon magazine in 1988, compared White with Henry Thoreau's Walden:[35] Out of the ruts and the ways of its village, Selborne fashioned a new natural history.

In those words, as in all Walden, Thoreau may have had in mind the village of Selborne and the Reverend Gilbert White--the town reached only by ruts running well beneath the surface, the man whose book had leapt the ruts to round the globe.Tobias Menely of Indiana University notes that the book "has garnered praise from Coleridge, Carlyle, Darwin, Ruskin, Woolf, and Auden"[26] and that Selborne's reception in the two hundred years since its initial publication offers a vivid instance of the retrospective idealization that transforms history into heritage.The naturalist Richard Mabey writes in his biography of White that[36] I must confess that, like many others, I did not come painlessly to the Natural History.

The Houghton collection was auctioned by Christie's in 1980, where the manuscript was purchased by and for "Gilbert White's House and Gardens" at The Wakes, Selborne, where it is displayed.

[40] Charles Darwin read the Natural History as a young man, inspiring him to take "much pleasure in watching the habits of birds" and to wonder "why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist".

[41] Sara Losh, too, read the Natural History as part of her "wonderful, varied and advanced [home] education for a young girl".

It was long held ("apocryphally", according to White's biographer, Richard Mabey) to be the fourth-most published book in the English language after the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

[43] White's frequent accounts in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne of his tortoise Timothy, inherited from his aunt, form the basis for a variety of literary mentions.

"[47] Among poets, Edward Thomas wrote that "In this present year, 1915, at least, it is hard to find a flaw in the life he led"[47] while W. H. Auden stated that "Selfishly, I, too, would have plumbed to know you: I could have learned so much.

[48] The writer and zookeeper Gerald Durrell commented in The Amateur Naturalist that White "simply observed nature with a sharp eye and wrote about it lovingly.