John Aubrey: My Own Life (50 page)

. . .

I have been collecting my thoughts on education and compiling a manuscript of recommendations for an ideal school for gentlemen. I foresee that my design is likely to be opposed by the clergies of both parties. But I hope it will find some champions and supporters, especially among the Fellows of the Royal Society.

I would have my school be in a fair house with a little park, high-walled, of about a mile about.

The only time of learning is from age nine to sixteen; afterwards, Cupid begins to tyrannise, jealousies, marriage and worldly cares intertwine with studies. It is a mistake to keep boys at their books at an age more proper for matrimony, when their minds chiefly run on propagating their race. Nature will be nature at 18+. At this age their information is like writing on greasy parchment: it will not stick or leave an imprint. Trying to educate boys over eighteen is like painting anew on an old picture: the colours will not be imbibed.

My school would need
²
:

– A grammarian (one for every class)

– A mathematics teacher (elected by the President of the Royal Society and the teacher of the King’s Mathematical Boys at Christchurch Hospital School)

– A rhetorician (who may be a Scot)

– A logician (who should also read to the boys the rudiments of the civil law and ethics)

– Ten or twelve Swiss, Dutch or Scottish boys of about fifteen years old that speak Latin well, to play with and instruct the young gentlemen

– An excellent pen-man or writing master

– A dancing master (French)

– A cook (French or Swiss)

– A butler (Swiss)

– A governess (unmarried and with no daughters)

– A porter (not an old fellow or a scabby old servant in a tattered gown like a scarecrow, but a lofty young Swiss with a decent livery and long sword)

– A chaplain (who might also be library-keeper and/or logic reader)

I would like to see
³
the boys carrying Euclid’s
Elements
in their coat pockets as religiously as a monk carries his breverie. I believe Euclid’s is the best book ever written. But I would have the boys go no further than Euclid’s ninth or tenth book, not only for lightness of carriage, but also to avoid them being too perplexed.

I think the best
⁴
way of improving boys’ memories is to have one of them read aloud to the class a page at a time of Appianus (which Mr Thomas Cooper in his dictionary commends as a most excellent work on the Roman civil war) and after a time of recollection the boys should give an account of what they have heard. The boys will vie with one another to see who will remember most.

It is certain
⁵
that too much reading of the poets spoils a good prose style, wherefore I would have the boys meddle as little with the poets as is possible. Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
and Homer they should be very perfect in, for the delight and delicacy of the fancy and the lively descriptions which they should imitate in English blank verse like Mr Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. Yet I would not have them ignorant of how to make a Latin or Greek verse.

Mr Hobbes told me
⁶
that he thought boys should read Catullus before Martial, since the former are passions and the latter jests in verse. He also recommended Caesar’s
Commentaries
because he thought them the best Latin style and most courtlike.

I would have nothing
⁷
of terror in my school. There would be no turning up of bare buttocks for pedants to exercise their cruel lust. Instead there would be mild punishments: to stand in the middle of the school; to be prisoners in their chambers; to be kept at their books when their fellows are at play; not to drink wine or eat tarts and fruit. In the statutes of my school I would include this command: ‘The scholars are not to be beaten about the head.’

I would let the children sleep out their full sleep, otherwise rheumes and catarrhs, dullness, etc. follow. Some of my friends impute their unhealthiness to their too early rising at Westminster School.

I believe the disposition
⁸
of a boy is the same when he is a man, only he covers it with a cloak of cunning and dissembling, so school fellows know one another’s blind-sides or foibles, and some come to be their servants who were their play-fellows at school.

I envisage
⁹
my ideal institution to be both school and university; the boys who attend it will not need to go on to any other house of scholarship, except to some particular college of law or physic where they mean to be practitioners.

I would furnish
¹⁰
my school with microscopes, telescopes and a camera obscura for taking pictures of one’s self or of the landscape. It will set the boys agog.

I would have those
¹¹
inclined to drawing practise it for their recreation. I would have these lovers of drawing make perspectives of walls, of Cyprus trees and of pillars, in level, uphill and downhill, which is easy to do and extremely pleasant to the eye. This will train them to draw figures in perspective, which few painters understand. It will prepare and fit them for starting in landscapes, and indeed for the drawing of everything that is drawn from life. Then let them practise drawing horses as big as life on sheets of paper pasted together. This will make them understand horses better than other men. Let them draw a greyhound standing: it is reducible to a square and oblong.

In the chapel of my ideal school, at the east end, I would have a picture of Gratitude taken from
The Golden Age: Aurea
, by the Flemish artist Gérard de Lairesse: namely, a modest and beautiful virgin pouring frankincense into an aurum with live coals. Underneath is written
Gratitude
and these words of Cicero’s:
Religio est Justitia Nostra Adversus Deum
.

I would have the boys
¹²
read the prayers of Sir Francis Bacon. The first called by his lordship The Student’s Prayer; the second The Writer’s Prayer.

The Student’s Prayer

To God the Father, God the Word, God the Spirit, we pour forth most humble and hearty supplications; that he, remembering the calamities of Mankind and the pilgrimage of this our Life, in which we wear out days few and evil, would please to open to us new Refreshments out of the Fountains of His Goodness, for the alleviating of our miseries . . .

The Writer’s Prayer

Thou, O Father, who gavest the Visible Light as the First-born of thy Creatures, and didst put into Man the Intellectual Light, as the top and consummation of thy Workmanship; be pleased to protect and govern this Work, which coming from thy Goodness, returneth to thy Glory . . .

We are taught
¹³
our religion by our nurses and pedants, but when we become men every one makes a religion to himself.

In my school
¹⁴
I would have the solstices and equinoxes observed as holidays, but I would have the boys mix with their jollity arithmetical observations of the sun. Also, being Christians, we should remember with Holy Church 16 December, the day on which the first antiphon to Wisdom is sung in the last days of Advent.

Gloucester Hall
¹⁵
in Oxford would be a good place for one of these schools, but the other colleges would envy it.

I think seven of these ideal schools in England would be enough, with up to sixty scholars in each. I envisage one near London at Kensington, at Merton in Wiltshire, at Cranborne in Dorset, at Oxford, in north Wales, in Glamorgan and in Lancashire. While the expense of the education would be great, perhaps greater than that of the Inns of Court, there would be great advantages to possessing such fine learning.

It gives me much pleasure to consider and foresee how many young gentlemen’s minds would be cultivated and improved and their understandings opened by good information of the sciences. But now I think I see a black squadron marching from Oxford, set up by Dean Fell under the crozier staff he carries as Bishop of Oxford, to discomfort this pretty little flock I have imagined. And so this pleasing dream of mine is at an end.

. . .

I do not know what to do with my manuscript on the Idea of Education. If I die and leave it here, it will be lost, or seized upon by my old landlord Mr Kent’s sons. If I send it to the Ashmolean Museum, the Oxford tutors will burn it because it is very much against their interests; if I send it to Mr Wood, when he dies, his nephew will use the pages to stop up his guns. I had thought to send it to the Earl of Abingdon, but he has other fish to fry now. Perhaps the Earl of Pembroke would do best? If I had the money for an amanuensis, I would leave a copy in the hands of each of these earls.

. . .

22 December

On this day King James fled to France, two days after the Queen. London has been consumed by rioting against the Roman Catholics.

. . .

Anno 1689

13 February

On this day the Convention, which was summoned to resolve the constitutional crisis created by the flight of King James, presented its Declaration of Rights to William and Mary, who are now proclaimed King and Queen of England, following the abdication, or at least vacant throne, of King James.

. . .

The residentiary canon, Isaac Vossius, has died at his lodgings in Windsor Castle and left what is said to be the best private library in the world. It is rumoured that King William will buy it and send it to Holland. Vossius was once city librarian of Amsterdam and librarian to Queen Christina of Sweden. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society. I hope either Oxford or Cambridge University will buy his library and keep it in England.

. . .

My friend Mr John Ray the naturalist writes to me from his home in Black Notley. He tells me that Mr Evelyn countenances my observation that elms grow no further north than Stamford. My observation supports Mr Evelyn’s view that elms were originally strangers, not native trees of England; I think the Romans brought them here. Mr Ray has sent me two plant samples pasted on to a paper, and he says that the plant I found on the downs, which resembled wild thyme, was Dwarf Holy Rose.

Mr Ray approves my design for a work interpreting the names of places in England; he says it is sure to be acceptable. He thinks that ancient records and monuments will be useful and says there exists a good Saxon dictionary. The Welsh, as I have told him, is very imperfect.

I will soon make
¹⁶
a journey into Wales, and Mr Ray has asked me to send him notice of anything extraordinary relating to natural history or experiment that I encounter on my travels.

. . .

Around 1650, in Verneditch Walk, which is a part of Cranborne Chase, there were a thousand or twelve hundred fallow deer; but now there are not above five hundred left.

A glover at Tisbury says he will give sixpence more for a buckskin of Cranborne Chase than a buckskin of Groveley.

At Groveley
¹⁷
there are badgers. The grease of the badger is an admirable recipe for sciatica and old aches, but the hedgehog’s grease is even better. Some women in Bedfordshire perform wonderful cures with it.

. . .

March

I grow old
¹⁸
and my candle burns low. From now on I must transcribe my manuscripts an hour a day at least. My notes are so confused and so interlined that if I do not do it in my lifetime, they will signify nothing. I hope that by Michaelmas I will have gone through the most difficult and perplexing parts. I will write only on one side of the paper, so that the notes can be cut and transposed or pasted into a new order later on.

My brother William is insistent that we should meet to discuss our financial difficulties. He says he is sorry for anything he said amiss in passion to hurt me. I will not meet him yet. I fear he will bring me to debtors’ prison. This business grieves and vexes me.

. . .

My friend Edward Lhwyd
¹⁹
has provided me with a Welsh glossary to help with my collection of words.

. . .

11 April

Today was the Coronation of William III and Mary II, who are co-regnant over England, Scotland and Ireland. May they bring us peace!

. . .

My brother William desires to meet me to discuss the sale of Broad Chalke farm. I will not see him. He is suspected of being a Roman Catholic and has lost his job as a groom-keeper.

. . .

My candle burns low
²⁰
, heartbreaking cares shorten my days and I fear my Lives are not fit to be published. I sent them to Mr Wood in their natural state –
puris naturalibus
– more pleasing to an antiquary than to have them fricasseed. Dr Plot must not see my Surrey papers. I fear he will wrong me by putting my work under his own name – a thing too common in this world.

. . .

I have asked Mr Wood
²¹
to help find a college lease for Jane Smyth, just as he did for Edward Shirbourne. I feel more obliged to her than to anybody. If only I could get Mr Wood to help her in this way. I have also asked him to find out the price of a rare medicine that she needs for the stone from Mr Kit White, the chemist in Holywell.

. . .

Since Seth Ward
²²
, Bishop of Sarum, died, I have searched all the papers that were at his house in Knightsbridge. I have asked his nephew and heir to look over the papers in his study at Sarum too, but when the Bishop of Sarum dies, the custom is that the Dean and Chapter lock up his study and put a seal on it. When Seth Ward’s study is reopened I hope his nephew will send me an account of his papers so I can pass it on to Mr Wood. I have rescued some of Seth Ward’s scattered papers from being used by the cook to put under pies. One that I have rescued concerns his study of Common Law. It will be useful to include it in my Idea of Education.