92 Kington St. Michael. [^John Aubrey. 



kind. In the present memoir they are accordingly entitled to 

 especial notice. 



John Aubrey F.R.S. 



Without committing the error either of over-rating or under- 

 rating Aubrey, whatever else he might be, he was certainly 

 an original.^ Though his writings present a strange farrago, 

 they have nevertheless preserved many curious facts that otherwise 

 would have been lost. His notes and memoranda of persons and 

 places jotted down at the time and on the spot, whether on horse- 

 back, or in a village church, or at the tables of his friends, have 

 now become, through lapse of years, useful to antiquaries and gene- 

 alogists: affording a clue to accurate information if not conveying 

 it themselves. To method and finish he makes no sort of pretension, 

 but simply tells what he saw or what he heard, whenever and 

 wherever it fell in his way. His anecdotes if not always historically 

 correct in every particular, are probably as near the truth as most 

 anecdotes. At all events they are told without any malicious 

 colouring, with much good humour and quaint simplicity. To be 

 critically severe upon Aubrey, considering his character and occu- 

 pations, and the. various domestic distractions \inder which he 

 followed them, is simply ridiculous. Yet he has been very harshly 

 dealt with ; by no one more than Antony Wood, who, after 25 

 vears acquaintance, could find it in his heart thus to describe his 

 deceased, but to the last, forgiving friend. " He was a shiftless 

 person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better 

 than crazed: and being exceedingly credulous would stuff his many 

 letters sent to A. W. with foUiries and misinformations which 

 would sometimes guide him into the paths of error."^ The cir- 

 cumstance which is believed to have provoked so splenetic an 

 effusion, was this. In the second volume of his " Athenije Oxon- 

 ienses, " Wood had been bold enough to put forth an undisguised 

 intimation that the late Chancellor (Lord Clarendon) had not scrupled 

 to receive bribes for preferment. For this scandahim magnatiim 



1 See some account of him in Vol. I. p. 32. 

 2 Atli. Oxon. Bliss's Edit. Life, p. Ix. 



