JOHN AUBREY, AND HIS EMINENT MEN. THERE are few books that I take up more willingly in a vacant half-hour, than the scraps of biography which Aubrey, the antiquary, addressed to Anthony à Wood; and which were published from the original manuscripts in the Ashmolean Museum, in 1813. These little fragments are so quaint and characteristic of the writer-so sensible in some passages and so absurd in others-so full of what may be called the Prose of Biography, with reference to the objects of historical or literary reverence,--and SO encomiastic with regard to others whose memories have wholly perished in the popular view-that I shall endeavour to look at them a little consecutively, as singular examples of what a clever man thought of his contemporaries and of others who were famous in his day, whether their opinions accord with, or are opposed to, our present estimates. And first of John Aubrey himself. Our common notion of the man used to be that he was a dreaming, credulous old gossip, with some literary preten sions, and nothing more. He believed in astrology, in omens, dreams, apparitions, voices, knockings. Is he without followers, even at this hour? Anthony à Wood, who was under many obligations to his correspondence, calls him a shiftless person, roving and maggoty-headed." 'Roving,' indeed he was; for he wandered up and down the land when travelling was not quite so easy as now; and, according to the testimony of Gough, an antiquary after the sober fashion of the race, first brought us ac quainted with the earliest monuments on the face of the country-the remains of Druidism, and of Roman, Saxon, and Danish fortifications.' 'Shiftless,' too, he might be called. He possessed an estate in Kent, which was destroyed by an irruption of the sea; he became involved in law-suits; he made an unhappy marriage; in a word, to use his own astrological solution of his misfortunes, he was 'born in an evil hour, Saturn directly opposing my ascendant.' But he was not shiftless,' in the sense of one who had no proper business in life. He wanted little for his support, and as he had rich friends his dependence was not very burthensome to them. He lived about in country houses with kind squires, with whom he took his diet and sweet otiums.' What could the man do when his estates were gone, but to enjoy what he called a happy delitescency-the obscurity of one who was never idle in noting down what he saw around him, for the use of others, or the benefit of those who were to come after him? He had no constructive power to make a great original book. His age was not an age of periodicals, when his gossiping propensities might have shaped themselves into articles fit for the literary market. It is true that he might have become an almanac-maker like some of his friends;but perhaps there was a glut of the commodity. He had nothing for it but to lounge about in coffee-houses; and go to meetings of the Royal Society; and gossip with Mr. Evelyn and Mr. Isaac Walton; and venture to ask Mr. D'Avenant something about Shakspere; and speak of Milton to Mr. Dryden when they met at Will's; and correspond with Mr. Tanner, and Mr. à Wood, the famous antiquaries; and study a horoscope with Mr. Dee, or Mr. Vincent Wing, the astrologers. If he had concentrated his power of picking up anecdotes, and recording sayings, upon more of the really eminent of his time, as he has done upon Hobbes and Milton, he might have left Boswell without the merit of being the first, as well as the greatest, in his line. Wood, according to Hearne, used to say of him'Look! yonder goes such a one, who can tell such and such stories; and I'll warrant Mr. Aubrey will break his neck down stairs rather than miss him.' My venerable friend Mr. Britton, in his Memoir of John Aubrey,* terms the notice of him by D'Israeli, in the 'Quarrels of Authors,' hasty,' for D'Israeli calls him the little Boswell of his day. We would desire no higher compliment for our curious and talkative inquirer.' D'Israeli certainly does not mean to lower Aubrey; for in the very passage which suggests the little Boswell,' Aubrey has been giving an account how Hobbes composed his Leviathan,' and then D'Israeli terms this passage very curious for literary students.' Aubrey was born in 1626. He lived seventy-two years in the greatest period of transition in our English history. The despotic Buckingham ruled England when Aubrey was first opening his inquisitive eyes;-the Whig Somers was Chancellor when he closed them. He lived through the Civil War, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, the Revolution. When he first heard of literature, men were talking of Shakspere, and Jonson, and Beaumont, and Fletcher; when he prattled about his septuagenarian memories, Milton and Cowley were getting obsolete. The opinions and manners of the people were wholly changed. Aubrey gives a remarkable instance of this change. When the civil wars broke out, Hollar, the famous engraver, went into the Low Countries, where he stayed till about 1649. I remember he told me, that when he first came into England, which was a serene time of peace, the people, both poor and rich, did look cheerfully; but at his return, he found the countenances of the people all changed-melancholy, spiteful as if bewitched.'t In another place Aubrey writes, with that half-poetry of his nature which made him superstitious, Before printing, Old Wives' Tales were ingenious; and since printing came in fashion, till a little before the Civil Wars, the ordinary sort of people were not taught to read. Now-a-days, books are * Mr. Britton's Memoir is a handsome 4to volume, published by the Wiltshire Topographical Society; it contains a great deal of curious matter, collected with much care. † Lives, p. 402. Anecdotes and Traditions, edited by J. Thom; p. 102. common, and most of the poor people understand letters; and the many good books, and variety of turns of affairs, have put all the old fables out of doors. And the divine art of printing, and gunpowder, have frighted away Robin Good-fellow and the Fairies.' Bishop Corbet thought that the fairies went out when Protestantism came in. According to Aubrey they lingered till the people became readers. The variety of turns of affairs' made them readers. The change was beginning when Aubrey was in his swaddlingclothes. One almost of the latest masques of Jonson which was presented before James I., 'Time Vindicated,' whispers an echo of that turmoil whose hoarse sounds were still distant. Two ragged rascals' are thus described in the antemasque: One is his printer in disguise, and keeps His press in a hollow tree, where, to conceal him, Who, in an angle where the ants inhabit, (The emblems of his labours,) will sit curl'd Whole days and nights, and work his eyes out for him.' This was the age of libels--straws,' as Selden has it, 'thrown up to show which way the wind blows.' The 'press in a hollow tree' was no mere poetical exaggeration. That terrible machine did its work in silence and darkness. It laboured like a mole. If it was sought for in the garret, it was in the cellar; if it was hunted to the hovel, it found a hiding-place in the palace. The minds of men were in a state of preternatural activity. Prerogative had tampered with opinion, and opinion was too strong for it. The public mind, for the first time in England, began to want news--coarse provender for opinion to chew and ruminate. Jonson wrote his Staple of News,' in which we have an office with a principal and clerks busily employed in collecting and recording news, to be circulated by letter. The countrywoman at the office would have 6 "A groatworth of any news, I care not what, To carry down this Saturday to our vicar.' There was then, in reality, a weekly pamphlet of news published under the high-sounding editorial name of Mercurius Britannicus. Jonson had a right notion of what gave authority to such a publication:- See divers men's opinions! unto some The very printing of 'em makes them news, Jonson called the newspaper 'a weekly cheat to draw money; and he sets about ridiculing the desire for news, as if it were an ephemeral taste easily put down, and people had a diseased appetite for news, made all at home, and no syllable of truth in them.' The people were thirsting for pamphlets of news because therein they found glimpses of truth. The age was indeed credulous: but credulity and curiosity are nearly allied; and curiosity goes before comparison, and comparison goes before discontent, and discontent goes before revolt; and so in less than twenty years after Jonson's Staple of News' the country was plunged in civil war. 6 Anthony à Wood asked Aubrey to write these Lives,' seeing that he was fit for it, by reason of his general ac quaintance; and, in 1680, Aubrey sends the Oxford antiquary Minutes,' which may easily be reduced into order." He says, that he undertook the task, having now not only lived above half a century of years in the world, but have been also much tumbled up and down in it, which hath made me so well known. Besides the modern advantage of coffee-houses in this great city-before which men knew not how to be acquainted, but with their own relations or societies-I might add that I come of a longævous race, by which means I have wiped some feathers off the wings of time for several generations.' These lives, as we have said, were first printed from the Ashmolean Manuscripts in 1813. They had been previously examined and used by Warton: and by Malone, who made a transcript of them. He also made some arrangement of the scattered papers. In the volumes of 1813 they are given alphabetically. Our notices |