John Aubrey: My Own Life (35 page)

I do not think
⁴⁴
I will get to Oxford again until the middle of October.

. . .

19 August

I went to Joe’s
⁴⁵
coffee house in Mitre Court, Fleet Street, with Mr Hooke and Mr Wylde until late.

. . .

The Earl of Rochester
⁴⁶
has smashed the glass dials in the garden at Whitehall that were made by the Jesuit Father Franciscus Linus, who printed a discourse on dials in Latin. The Earl and his friends were returning from their evening revels: ‘What!’ said the Earl. ‘Doest thou stand there to mark time?’ Then he and his drunken friends set about destroying the dials. How it pains me to record this. I have heard Andrew Marvell say that the Earl of Rochester is the only man in England that has the true vein of satire, but nothing can excuse this wanton destruction.

. . .

I am reconsidering
⁴⁷
: perhaps it was not right to tell Mr Wood to show George Ent Mr Hobbes’s life in prose. I could not see how to deny him, he was so importunate, but I think I was wrong and it is not fit.

. . .

I cannot persuade
⁴⁸
the booksellers to buy and insert Mr Hobbes’s letter into the second volume of
Historia et antiquitates universitatis oxoniensis.
I fear they will include instead Dr Fell’s abusively defiant reply to Mr Hobbes’s complaints.

. . .

September

The more I think of it, the surer I am that my second thoughts are right: Mr Hobbes will be angry with me if George Ent obtains a copy of his life in prose. I have written again to Mr Wood and told him he should let George Ent read the life, but not to let him have a copy.

It is a shame
⁴⁹
that in his book Mr Wood has cut short some eminent lives: James Harrington’s for example. He has left others out. I urged him to include Mr Hooke, but he has not done so, even though England has never produced a greater wit for mechanics.

. . .

I am very concerned. If George Ent gets a copy of Mr Hobbes’s life it will fly about like lightning. Mr Hobbes, who is apt to be choleric about such matters, will be very angry and I will lose his friendship, which I have enjoyed since childhood.

The antiquary
⁵⁰
Dr Robert Plot of Magdalen Hall has been granted a letter of approval and recommendation from the Vice Chancellor, Ralph Bathurst, for his search after rarities (both natural and artificial) in His Majesty’s kingdom. He will begin with Oxfordshire. I wish to help and can furnish him with many fine things I have collected myself. His plan for his book pleases me greatly. He concerns himself less with the chronicles and histories of the county than with the climate, geography, rivers and geology. He will follow Pliny’s divisions in organising his natural history of the region and his researches are intended to extend knowledge of science as well as encourage the practical use of natural resources for trade. I hope the engraver will copy my drawing of Osney Abbey handsomely for inclusion in Dr Plot’s book.

Meanwhile, Thomas Gore
⁵¹
– the Cuckold of Alderton – has published his catalogue of all the authors who have written on heraldry and omitted my name! I let him peruse my manuscript, he has done his business, and now a fart for me.

The time seems long before I shall leave London and get to Oxford again. I fear I shall not get there in October, but if not, I shall, God willing, go at Christmas, by the coach or wagon.

. . .

26 September

Mr Hooke lent me
⁵²
another three shillings. Now I owe him forty-three shillings.

. . .

October

I have easily answered
⁵³
Mr Wood’s question about the tower at Osney Abbey.

. . .

I have been to see
⁵⁴
my honoured friend Mr Francis Potter, whom I have not seen these past three years. His lippitude has now become blindness, which it grieved me to behold. He has let his beard grow unkempt, which used to be but little and trimmed. I asked him why he did not get some cousin of his to live with him and look after him at his great age of eighty. He said he had tried this but found it did not suit him, since his relatives begrudge what money he spends, thinking it is being taken away from them, whereas servants and strangers are kinder.

. . .

November

I am exceeding sorry that Mr Wood has left Mr Hooke – so eminent a person at home and abroad – out of his book. In one of my letters I know I gave him details of the tracts Mr Hooke has written.

I wish I had
⁵⁵
a copy of the astrological book
Leovicius de Directonibus
. I will ask Mr Wood to look out for it in the stationers at Oxford.

. . .

I am concerned about
⁵⁶
my lord the Earl of Thanet’s health. He has consulted physicians and others, but their advice is that only Apollo can cure him completely! He says he would perform a pilgrimage to Apollo as far as the Bermudas, were he not in Diana’s grove. He has read that Bacchus as well as Apollo and Aesculapius was adored as the God of health, and says he will partake of a few years of well-concocted wine in a southern clime. He needs an ingenious person to report for him on Bermuda. I do not think that person can be me.

. . .

December

I have been asked (together with Mr Collins) to help make a catalogue of all the gifts that the Royal Society has received and the names of the donors (one copy to be left with the keeper of the repository and the other with the treasurer); also a catalogue of all the instruments and other apparatus of the Society, paid for out of the public treasury; and a catalogue of all the books, discourses, letters and accounts brought to the Society, together with the names of the authors. These books and papers are to be kept somewhere convenient under lock and key (the President and the Secretaries will be keepers of the keys). Sir William Petty has suggested that all the discourses entered into the Society’s register books should be divided into several sections and chapters.

Sir Jonas Moore
⁵⁷
was elected and admitted to the Society today.

. . .

10 December

I went to Garraway’s
⁵⁸
coffee house with Mr Hooke and the Bishop of Sarum. Mr Hooke has bought my Greek
Chrysostom
from me for 4 li. 10s. I had planned to leave it to Jesus College in my will but am now forced to sell some of my books for want of money.

. . .

24 December

I went to Joe’s
⁵⁹
coffee house with Mr Hooke and Mr Wylde. How much I like his lady, Mistress Jane Smyth! They cohabit – just as Mary, Countess of Pembroke, and Sir Martin Lister did. I feel I owe most of Mr Wylde’s civility to Jane Smyth’s goodness. She tells me she was born on Venus’s day (Friday) on 15 April 1649, the year the late King was beheaded, and there was thunder and lightning and the house caught fire as she was born.

Mr Wylde has
⁶⁰
a fine collection of books and pictures including Jonas Moore’s model of a citadel, which was made for Oliver Cromwell, and the manuscript of Sir Walter Raleigh’s
A Tryall of oares and indications of metalls and mines
.

. . .

Anno 1675

January

I am in London
⁶¹
trying to obtain some preferment at court. The days are now so short and cold.

. . .

I have asked Mr Wood
⁶²
to send to Weston for me for information for my Templa Druidum about the Rollright Stones: the diameter, how many yards or paces, and the height of the stones and the number.

I hear that in Oxford, George Ent and Mr Wood are quarrelling. Perhaps they can make peace over a glass of sack.

. . .

February

Sir John Hoskyns
⁶³
has been encouraging me to research and write the Natural History of England. He believes it will be important to examine different soils through the microscope and study them carefully. He tells me that Colonel Blunt and the munificent Sir Charles Howard will help, and that no man alive is so well suited to this work as me. He has already mentioned the project to my good friends Mr Ashmole, Mr Ettrick and Sir Christopher Wren.

. . .

Sir Christopher Wren says
⁶⁴
that all along the River Thames, many miles downwards from London Bridge, are great banks to keep out the river, which were chargeable to construct, and must be the work of the Romans, nobody else. He says London Bridge was built without diverting the river, by piles, which are not more than two feet under the riverbed, made of oak.

. . .

Mr Wood gave my brother a small amount of money for me, but my brother has not yet passed it on: he is very slow letting money go out of his hand.

If I can
⁶⁵
, I will go to see the Rollright Stones at Weston this Lent so I can study them more severely for myself.

In his book
⁶⁶
, William Camden described the tradition of the common people who believe that the stones were once men in the army of a would-be King of England: the largest of the stones the would-be King on horseback.

. . .

I have sent
⁶⁷
Mr Hobbes a printed copy of Sir William Petty’s book,
Concerning the Use of Duplicate Proportion
, published at the end of last year. Its ‘Appendix of Elasticity’ sets out Petty’s atomic theory, which Mr Hobbes tells me he believes is correct. I have passed on Mr Hooke’s desire to publish through the Royal Society any of Mr Hobbes’s treatises of philosophy or mathematics that are not already in print, but he writes to say there are none, and even if there were, he would not be content for them to pass through the hands of his enemy Dr Wallis.

. . .

All men cry out
⁶⁸
against Dr Fell’s spoiling of Mr Wood’s book. I have asked Mr Wood to mention my name, just briefly, in the preface to the next edition. He told me he intended to do this and I am sure Dr Fell scratched it out.

. . .

I was sorely mistaken
⁶⁹
! Mr Wood refuses to mention my name in the preface to his book: will only mention me as one of the authors of Trinity College if I have published something before the next edition of his book is printed. After all I have done to help Mr Wood in his researches this is hurtful indeed! He is right, though: I must publish my work. I have so much unfinished work upon the loom.

Mr Wood has asked me to find out what I can from Mr Ashmole and others about the claim that the skeletons of King Edward V and Richard Duke of Gloucester, murdered by King Richard III, were found lately in the Tower.

. . .

March

George Ent will give
⁷⁰
the librarian Mr Hyde five books to enter into the Bodleian Library under my name. His quarrel with Mr Wood gets worse and worse.

. . .

Now that the days
⁷¹
lengthen and the weather is warmer, I will make progress with transcribing my manuscripts for the press.

George Ent has Dr Charleton’s collection of all the Latin mistakes in Mr Wood’s book: I believe there are 10,000. There is not a page without false Latin or solecisms, which are as bad. Last year Mr Wood and the Latin translator Dr Fell forced on him fell to fisticuffs.

. . .

25 March

On this day
⁷²
my nose bled at the left nostril at about 4 p.m. An ill omen, but nothing eventful followed.

. . .

8 April

Sir Robert Southwell read his discourse – or rather his collection of eight miscellanies – concerning water to the Royal Society today.

. . .

Mr Wylde is thinking
⁷³
of buying land in New York. But my lord the Earl of Thanet has been told that though the land is fertile in summer, the cold and deep snow of winter reduces the diet there to salt meat and fish. His advice to anyone buying land in America is: let it be in the Bermudas.

The Earl of Thanet complains that my lodging, like an enchanted castle, can never be found out, so he will continue to address his letters to me via Mr Hooke at Gresham College.

. . .

My friend George Ent
⁷⁴
has presented some books to the Bodleian Library on my behalf. The books I meant to give are a collection of the newssheet
Mercurius Pragmaticus
and a book on fencing. The librarian Mr Hyde would not enter so small a donation into the Benefactors’ Book, so Mr Ent has added these others:

The Grounds of Obedience & Government
, by Thomas White (London, ’55)

Medela Medicinae,
by Marchamont Needham (London, ’65)

Bodie of the Common Law
, by Edmund Wingate (London, ’62)

Les Provinciales or the Mystery of Jesuitisme
, by Blaise Pascal, done into English (London ’57)

He says we must not fall out over this but discuss the matter further when we meet. He suggests that I should present any other books I wish to place in a library to Trinity College, but not my manuscripts, which the Vice Chancellor says should go to the Bodleian Library.