A Manageable Classic
GUEST, BARBARA
A Manageable Classic Aubrey's Brief Lives. Reviewed by Barbara Guest Ed. by Oliver Lawson Dick. Poet critic. contributor, Michigan. 324 pp. $5.95. "Partisan Review," "Art News' John Aubrey...
...Although neither he nor Mr...
...yet others have preceded Mr...
...Dick, and if he considers theirs landscaping to his farming, it may still be contended that the 1898 edition for a time sufficed and the other two in their differing ways were admirable...
...never completed, was to contain treaties on air minerals...
...He was of the tallest, but a little curvetting at his shoulders, not very robust...
...Wilson's conclusion about Aubrey's unmistakable value...
...Or of William Prynne, whose ears Puritans have long mourned, that they "were not quite cutt off, only the upper part, his tippes were visible...
...His Lives contains descriptions pragmatic and physical, such as: "Sir John Denham was unpolished with the smallpox, otherwise a fine complexion...
...Edmund Wilson has given us a two-page foreword which announces that John Aubrey "becomes, with Mr...
...Dick has chosen to preface each account of Aubrey's subjects with a short biography giving us what we can only suppose is the "real truth," as opposed to Aubrey's "liberties...
...Dick from his vantage point it out...
...Without disparaging the editorship of Mr...
...More personal and less reliable than Pepys, and (we can guess) more prejudiced than Dr...
...Dick for making out of John Aubrey's irresistible credulities "a manageable classic...
...He thus set about to sell off his properties and to devote the rest of his life to his peculiar strain of intellect, which caused him first "to enter into pocket memorandum hookes...
...Collier's small volume with its remarkable woodcuts, somehow closer in temper to the personality of John Aubrey, or the propinquity to his subject which we find finely traced within the craftsmanship of Mr...
...Finally, Mr...
...Anthony Powell produced an intensive and brilliant biography, John Aubrey and His Friends, followed by his own edition of Brief Lives...
...Finally, his monies and lands squandered and filched, his reputation perilous, he settled down to the obsequious life of one dependent on patronage, relatives and drink...
...If there was an odd piece of news floating about of the cares and surceases of his acquaintances, whether of wenching or drinking, gathering pounds or horns, John Aubrey was sure to hear of it and set it down...
...but we are not scholars...
...Dick, one must take up this statement of Mr...
...He was a true antiquarian whose book on the history of Wiltshire...
...His Eie was kind of light goose-gray, not big...
...John Collier's selective edition (briefest of Brief Lives, it is true) with its intelligent and witty preface, some of Aubrey's work has been available...
...Dick mentions the editorship of the great two-volume 1898 edition of Brief Lives, scholars and those who for reasons best known to themselves have made it their concern to sample the rarities of literature have long since reached Mr...
...and, upon his father's death, came into an inheritance surprisingly diminished in money but still rich in lands...
...Where, for instance, would one learn that Sir Walter Raleigh "tooke a pipe of Tobacco a little before he went to the scaffold which some for-mall persons were scandalised at, but I thinke 'twas well and properly donne, to settle his spirits...
...birds, flowers and all natural founts burgeoning in that county...
...And he did manage to compile a most robust, inquisitive, singular account of the lives of courtiers, landowners, physicians, philosophers, political servants and heirs of great families who lived in that extraordinary age extending from the Elizabethans through the Restoration...
...Oxford, until his most happy career there was interrupted first by the Civil Wars, later by an attack of smallpox which caused his final removal...
...philosophical and antiquarian retnarques...
...Dick tells us that he has gone only to primary sources, such as those resting in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the British Museum...
...It may very well be true that this is the most definitive edition and thus throws the weights in the full balance of the Lives becoming a classic...
...We are eccentric, not academic, and regret even that Mr...
...And of the physician, William Harvey: "He did delight to be in the darke, and told me he could then best contemplate...
...Yet he never lost his curiosity concerning the nooks and crannies of the world, whether it be man, philosophy or natural history...
...He should have realized that the organized and the unorganized demand a different set of sensibilities, particularly on a single page...
...This edition of Brief Lives, edited by Oliver Lawson Dick, was printed in England in 1949 and now for the first time reprinted here...
...Wilson assume...
...Partisan Review," "Art News' John Aubrey (1626-1697) was one of the most delightful eccentrics who ever flourished in a country which has been most lavish with this breed...
...This constructs an excellent case for his scholarship, but he has deprived us of comparisons while adding to the authority he and Mr...
...Dick make note...
...Aubrey stood up to his neck in a world of great men, and those who had died before his time were still visible to him in his rarefied imagination...
...Of course, there are always those of us who regret the intimacy of Mr...
...Lawson Dick's edition, an unmistakable and a manageable classic...
...Powell...
...Johnson, his Brief Lives remains a special contribution to both literature and history...
...He had a house heretofore at Combe, in Surrey, a good aire and prospect, where he had Caves made in the Earth in which in Summer time he delighted to meditate...
...He languished in the country, regretting the college which he seems to lune enjoyed to an unusual degree...
...His gate was slow and was rather a Stalking (he had long legges...
...His haire was but thin and flaxen with a moist curie...
...Yet how handy for the student and the professor, this large, sturdy volume, now authoritatively weighed...
...Indeed, we owe much to Mr...
...Not to mention those anonymous scholars who, the book's dust jacket tells us, "have known" Aubrey's Lives and "looted them for centuries...
...Dick has given us is an excellent reference book, readily got up in good print—with the exception of his introductory biography of Aubrey, which, cohesive and thoughtful as it is, deserves better than such small type—and now available to all...
...but it had a strange Piercingness, not as to shining and glory, but (like a Momus) when he conversed with you he look't into your very thoughts...
...If there is a disagreement of texts — specifically of the 1898 edition—why did not Mr...
...Wilson's...
...The son of a wealthy Wiltshire gentleman, he was schooled at Trinity College...
...What Mr...
...Of none of these publications does Mr...
...And since 1939, with the publication, in England to be sure, of Mr...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 44
