John Aubrey: My Own Life (44 page)

I have often thought
²
that there was a time when the whole globe was covered with water, and that the world is like a pomegranate, full of caverns. Anyone who has seen the caves at Wookey Hole or the Peake in Derbyshire will have a strong and lively idea of what I mean. Perhaps earthquakes caused the water to sink and then the earth appeared. I am led to believe this by the great quantity of petrified fish shells that can be found on high hills.

. . .

26 September

I dined
³
at Mr Hooke’s. He has finished his Atlas.

. . .

27 September

Today I helped carry
⁴
the pall for the satirist Samuel Butler’s coffin. He died of consumption two days ago and we have buried him in the churchyard of Covent Garden, in the north part, next to the church at the east end. His feet touch the wall. His grave is two yards from the pilaster of the door and six foot deep. He printed a witty poem against religious fanatics, called
Hudibras
, in the early 1660s, which was extremely popular. He could have had preferments aplenty, but would not accept any good ones, so died in want.

. . .

Mr Hobbes’s short
⁵
Life by himself in Latin will be printed next week, and Mr Wood shall receive six copies.

. . .

October

I am at Gresham
⁶
. Mr Pigott has written to tell me he intends to buy all the numbers of the Transactions of the Royal Society since no. 132 (1676), to complete the collection in their library at Wadham College. I reckon that since no. 132, there have been four by Mr Oldenburgh; six by Dr Grew; and two more by Mr Hooke; so twelve in total.

. . .

I have given
⁷
the Royal Society a copy of the Life of Thomas Hobbes.

. . .

I am trying
⁸
to find out whether the Ferraran library is at Ferrara, or Modena, and have written to Octavian Pulleyn, via contacts in Paris, to ask. All the princes of Italy are so careful to conserve their libraries and choice collections of manuscripts.

. . .

Mr Paschall has asked
⁹
me if I can recommend any historical writers on the West Indies, particularly concerning what the Church of Rome has done in Peru and Mexico and the English Protestants in the northern tracts (Virginia and New England).

. . .

2 December

Today I have received
¹⁰
an account of Ben Jonson’s life from Mr Isaac Walton (who also wrote John Donne’s life). Mr Walton is now eighty-seven years old. The account is in his own handwriting. I will send it on to Mr Wood for safe keeping.

. . .

Mr Wood has written
¹¹
to me to say that he is now back in Oxford and has leisure to read my Lives if I will send them to him. He encourages me to continue my collecting and researches and urges me to believe that these truly are my talents.

. . .

23 December

I went with Mr Hooke
¹²
to Jonathan’s coffee house, where Mr Henshaw refused the suggestion that he become president of the Royal Society.

Israel Tonge was buried
¹³
today in the vault of the churchyard of St Mary Staining, where there was a church before the Great Conflagration, of which he was parson. He excelled at alchemy. He also set up an excellent school following the Jesuits’ method of teaching at Durham in 1658 or 1659. Afterwards he taught in Islington at Sir Thomas Fisher’s house. I went to see him there in the long gallery where he had put up several printed heads of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Scipio, Aristotle, Archimedes, etc. with different declensions of verbs under them (the dative under one, the ablative under another, etc.). Then when the boys come to a verb that governs an ablative case, for example, it presently occurs to their memories: ‘Oh, this verb is under Julius Caesar’s head’, etc. This way of local memory makes a fast impression or idea in their tender memories.

. . .

Anno 1681

January

Dr Pell has returned my book, but without any corrections or suggestions for improvements. Poor man! He is old and disconsolate, living in poverty. Soon I will send my remarks on 120 Lives to Mr Wood in Oxford. I ought to work some more on them first, but am distracted into reading French romances. I need to rub up my French, which has gone rusty with disuse.

. . .

Dr Blackbourne and I
¹⁴
have published the ‘Vitae Hobbianae auctarium’ with Hobbes’s accounts of his own Life. Mr Wood has been a great help to me in this. Dr Blackbourne is a young man of prodigious parts but ungovernable: he does not use me well in losing my papers. The mischief of it is that the great concern of the present politics drowns and takes away the venom of my sting as to the Right Reverend Fell. The felonies of the Reverend Fell seem insignificant amidst the present troubles. A pox take plots and plotters!

Quaere: what do the academics say at the coffee shops about Mr Hobbes’s life?

. . .

18 January

On this day the King dissolved the Parliament. He refuses to compromise on the succession. The Whig, or Country, Party hopes to exclude the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York, but the King will not have it. A new Parliament will meet in Oxford in March. These turmoils remind me of my undergraduate days: God grant us peace!

. . .

Mr Dugdale has printed
¹⁵
his
Short View of the Late Troubles
, which draws on the newsbooks that grew up during those years of civil war. He says in his preface that he has delivered in his own words what he knows, but for that which is beyond his own knowledge he has relied on other authors and the common Mercuries and other public licensed narratives of the events of the civil war.

. . .

The Earl of Berkshire
¹⁶
has thanked me for my account of the waters of Leek and encouraged me to do some further experiments on their nature. He has left 10 li. for me at a draper’s in St Paul’s Churchyard and entreats me to accept it.

. . .

The King has dissolved
¹⁷
Parliament again. He convened it at Oxford on 21 March and it lasted just eight days. Now he will rule without a Parliament and it is rumoured another Popish plot is afoot. My friend George Ent was wont to say, ‘A pox take Parties!’, and I say, ‘A pox take plotters!’

. . .

I intend to send
¹⁸
my Book of Lives to Mr Wood next week, but I cannot think how to do this safely, since if it gets lost there will be no retrieving it. I could take it myself and go and see my friend Sir James Long too, but Oxford is once again crammed to bursting point and I do not intend to end up sleeping by a fireside at my age.

How much work I would get done if I did not sit up with Mr Wylde until one or two in the morning, or if there was someone to get me up in the mornings with a good scourge! I think I could finish my Lives in a week, if I were to stop wasting time. Sir James Long has invited me to stay again.

I intended to take
¹⁹
down Sir Jonas Moore’s memories, of the mathematician William Gascoigne especially, from whom he received most of his knowledge, but I delayed doing so, and now death has taken Sir Jonas away. I must set down what I can remember of what he used to say. Also, I remember that I did not take the measurements of Silbury Hill for my Monumenta Britannica because Sir Jonas had promised to give them to me. He had taken them accurately for the ordnance. I must find the measurements among his papers if I can.

Next week I will buckle to finish my Lives. I am sure I could do it in a week.

. . .

When I sent
²⁰
my small offering of books to the Bodleian Library in 1675, George Ent added to their number to make it up to a large enough donation for recording in the Benefactors’ Book. He put in
The Mystery of Jesuitism
, or
Jesuit Morals
, I forget which. Now I have never meddled with controversy in my life, nor shall I ever! I am only for mathematics, philosophy and antiquities. It is for my gift of the Historia Roffensia manuscript that I should be remembered. But now I have fears I will be caught up in the religious strife on account of the book George Ent gave to the Bodleian Library on my behalf.

. . .

Mr Paschall has sent
²¹
me an example of a desirable Utopia: a draft of a history entitled The American Adventure. The adventurers come from ‘Eleutheropolis’. Strife has arisen between Christians and pagans. The Prince seeks to compose party differences but expels the strangers. The new adventurers are accepted and the Christianising of the populace is undertaken. Schism and dispute excluded, etc.

. . .

Mr Wood complains
²²
of his deafness and considers coming to London to consult a doctor; but he fears a cure might make him worse. He worries about how I can get my Lives to him securely.

. . .

June

Sir James Long
²³
tells me there is severe drought again in Wiltshire: there is no grass or hay to cut in the fields.

. . .

21 June

Yesterday evening Mr Wood sent his pretty niece – what amorous elegies I could write for her – to call on me, and I have let her take parts one and two of my book to him at last. I have a great many more things to insert, and ten more Lives I would like to add, but no time.

Mr Wylde has given
²⁴
me a recipe for curing Mr Wood’s deafness. Mr Wood believes his deafness is caused by a cold moist head and a cold moist stomach, which give rise to noises in his head. I hope Mr Wylde’s recipe will work!

. . .

Mr Wood has sent me
²⁵
5s. He is pleased with my Lives even though they contain many things that are not fit to be published.

. . .

I went to a tavern
²⁶
with John Lacy, a player, who was Mr Ogilby’s apprentice when he had his dancing school in Grays Inn Lane, and I took down notes to add to my Life of Mr Ogilby. Among other things, John Lacy told me that Mr Ogilby would never say where in Scotland he was born as he hoped (drollingly) that there would be as much contention over the place of his birth as there is over Homer’s.

. . .

Sir William Petty writes from Ireland (where he feels he is living in a place full of exasperated enemies) to say he is not forward with the printing of his Political Arithmetic because he intends to compare his current draft with the one in Mr Southwell’s hand, which he corrected in 1679.

On behalf
²⁷
of the Royal Society, Sir William has gone to some trouble over the elephant that was so unfortunately burnt. But the owner will not part with the skeleton, guts or trunk, which he hopes to show for profit (so they cannot be obtained for the Royal Society’s repository). Sir William says he is surprised that English and Dutch surgeons living in India have not already made a perfect anatomy of the creature.

. . .

13 July

I told the Royal Society
²⁸
today that recently I saw a live marten in a shop in Cornhill. I think many of them are bred in England, and my friend Mr Wylde has received a number of skins from a tenant of his.

. . .

I hope
²⁹
, in a few weeks’ time, to see my beloved Oxford again. How much I wish the history of Jesuitism which George Ent unluckily gave to the Bodleian on my behalf were erased out.

I am concerned
³⁰
that in my Lives there are things that will cut my throat if they are not cut out. There are, for example, severe touches in my account of the life of Sir Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork (father of Robert Boyle) – perhaps I should not have included what my friend Anthony Ettrick told me about his amours and bastards. My Life of Dr Wallis is another difficulty.

If I die in London, as seems most likely, I wonder where I should be buried? Perhaps in my parish church, St Martin’s Outwych, near the door, like a poor penitent with a foot-square inscription. Or perhaps in the non-conformist churchyard by the artillery ground in Moorfields?