that happy selection of circumstances, which mark the poet." Nineteenth century In 1830, an anonymous critic, in what critic Tobias Menely called a description of Selborne "as a place that lingers beyond the spatio-temporal horizon of modern life", wrote having visited the village that: 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. 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". Charles Darwin is said to have been delighted by it. Circa 1862, the retired surgeon and zoologist Thomas Bell moved to The Wakes. He devoted his time to studying White's work, and editing new edition of the book. Edwardian era The 1907–1921 Cambridge History of English and American Literature begins its essay on White's Selborne with the words: Modern White is sometimes treated as a pioneer of ecology. The British ornithologist James Fisher gives a more balanced view, writing in 1941: The medical historian Richard Barnett writes that Barnett notes, too, that: Yale nonfiction tutor Fred Strebeigh, writing in Audubon magazine in 1988, compared White with Henry Thoreau's Walden: Tobias Menely of Indiana University notes that the book "has garnered praise from Coleridge, Carlyle, Darwin, Ruskin, Woolf, and Auden" and that {{Blockquote|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 Virginia Woolf liked the book enough to devote an essay in her The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays, "White's Selborne" to it, stating that the start of the book is like a novel. Manuscript The manuscript for the book stayed in the White family until 1895, when it was auctioned at Sotheby's. The purchaser was Stuart M. Samuel, who mounted the letters and bound the book in green Morocco leather. His library was sold in 1907. The manuscript was bought by the dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach in 1923, and passed into the collection of Arthur A. Houghton. The Houghton collection was auctioned by Christie's in 1980, where the manuscript was purchased by and for Gilbert White's museum at The Wakes, Selborne, where it is displayed. Legacy Thomas Bewick, in the first volume (Land