AUBREY'S WILTSHIRE COLLECTIONS 



AND THE SATURDAY REVIEW. 



To the Members of the Wiltshire Archceo logical Society. 



A few days ago, just as I was leaving home on my way to the Continent, I 

 received a copy of the Saturday Review of October 8th, containing an Article 

 upon Aubrey's Wiltshire Collections, the volume edited some time ago by myself 

 and printed at the expense of our Archaeological Society. 



If you have seen the Review you will no doubt have been as I was, considerably 

 astonished at the language of the Reviewer : not being quite able to understand 

 what in the world we had done to provoke so many unjust and ill-tempered 

 remarks. I can only explain it to myself in this way. The Saturday Review 

 is, (I am told, for I never read it) in the constant habit of abusiDg things and 

 people that are decent and respectable. 



Setting aside all the petty cavilling, all the sneers and personalities, all the 

 learned information about Robert the Consul and a deal of miscellaneous frivolity 

 collected together to make up a dish; and weighing what remains as the real 

 and proper substance of an article calling itself a review of a work on Wiltshire, 

 I must say that it appears to me a very feeble performance indeed. For it 

 comes to this. 



Here is a large volume relating to the County History of Wiltshire, which a 

 Reviewer has taken upon himself to condemn, and yet, please to mark well the 

 fact, he has not been able to lay his finger upon one single error of any import- 

 ance from beginning to end. In a work of very great labour, upon a subject 

 on which it is most difficult to obtain correct information, he has not produced 

 a single mis-statement, to justify his condemnation. That is my simple answer 

 to his censure. No doubt he would have done so if he could ; but the truth is, 

 he does not know anything about the matter. Through a cloud of rather pre- 

 tentious and dictatorial words, it is very easy for any one who knows anything 

 about Wiltshire History, to see that the Reviewer is as innocent as a child, of 

 any real knowledge of the book which he would dispose of in so summary a 

 way. 



I do not blame' him, still less do I use uncourteous words to him, for not 

 knowing everything, but I simply say that he is quite out of his element in the 

 present case, because he knows nothing about Wiltshire County History, nothing 

 about John Aubrey, and nothing about myself. 



If he had known only a little about Wiltshire County History, he could not 

 have failed to see that the volume before him contains in the Notes a mass of 

 new information, and that the principal object of the Notes was to supply, in as 

 condensed a form as I could put it, manorial history that had never been known 

 before. I never considered myself qualified to undertake a County History, but 

 having taken great pains to collect materials towards one, I thought this a fair 

 opportunity of recording the substance of what I had collected. The Reviewer 

 is pleased to sneer at my Notes as being too long. I must tell him this the 

 gentlemen of the county are continually complaining to me that they are not 

 long enough. Those gentlemen are much better judges of the matter than the 



