96 Kington St. Michael \_John Aubrey. 



peculiar. A writer of the present day, Mr. Charles Knight, has taken 

 a more generous view of the "Lives" ; a work which, it should always 

 be remembered, was never revised or prepared for the press by 

 Aubrey himself. " There are few books that I take up more will- 

 ingly in a vacant half hour than the scraps of biography which 

 Aubrey, the Wiltshire Antiquarian, addressed to Antony a "Wood. 

 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 and literary reverence, and so encomiastic with regard 

 to others whose memories have whoUy perished in the popular 

 view, that I shall endeavour to look at them consecutively as singu- 

 lar examples of what a clever man the .ight of his contemporaries;, 

 and of others famous in his day, whether their opinions accord with, 

 or are opposed to our present estimate."^ 



Aubrey having been at first and for a long time known as a 

 writer, only by his " Miscellanies," a collection formed in days when 

 Astrology was popular, and therefore containing much that is fan- 

 tastic and irrational, no wonder that he obtained in later times the 

 reputation of a dreamy visionary. But though he tells us in that 

 book what foolish things other people believed and reported, it does 

 not foUow that he really believed them aU: any more than that any 

 writer who should now transmit to future times the spirit-rappings 

 and table-turnings of the present day, would be obliged to have faith 

 in those tricks himself. His turn of mind being no doubt supersti- 

 tious, and his fancy leading him to such studies, he appeared to be 

 more so than probably was the case. But letting all infirmities pass, 

 his true merit is this. In daj-s when there were neither books, nor 

 students, nor societies, nor taste for English antiquities, he was 

 a pioneer single-handed in that department : and for what he did, 

 according to the best of his ability, his name deserves to be held 

 in kind remembrance, especially in the County of Wilts. 



A list of his various writings, some published and others still in 

 manuscript, is given in Mr. Britton's Memoir of him, published 

 by the Wiltshire Topographical Society in 1845, p. 83. The 

 1 " Once upon a Time," vol. I. p. 29G. 



