THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

‘New and Strange at the first, inexpressibly rare, and Delightfull, and Beautifull’; the cornfields are ‘Orient and
Immortal’ and the dust and stones of the street appear ‘as Precious as GOLD’. The vision fades not simply because the
child loses his innocence, or takes on a pressing awareness of sin, but because custom, education, and quotidian usage
intervene. To regain this lost paradise the soul must ‘unlearn,
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and becom as it were a little Child again’; what has been glimpsed in the here is to be realized in the hereafter.
Private Histories and Public History: Aubrey, Sprat, and Clarendon
The Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood (1632-95) somewhat ungenerously described one of his major sources of
biographical information, John Aubrey (1626-97), as ‘a pretender to antiquities ... a shiftless person, roving and
magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crased’. Wood’s History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford
(1674, 1792-6) and his biographical dictionary of Oxford worthies, Athenae Oxonienses (1691-2), retain some
curiosity value as once influential, if torpid, assemblages of information; Aubrey’s work, by contrast, has an
explorative freshness which stems from the very nature of its eccentric randomness. The only work that Aubrey
himself saw through the press, Miscellanies, ‘a Collection of Hermetic Philosophy’ (1696), is in its way a pioneer
essay in anthropology jumbled together with folklore, superstition, and occult learning. His other studies -
observations on the topography, natural history, and antiquities of the counties of Surrey and Wiltshire and the pithily
brief lives of British celebrities - remained in manuscript until their publication in subsequent centuries. Aubrey is
now recognized as a major figure in the early history of British archaeology, but it is as an anecdotal biographer that
he has achieved popular and posthumous celebrity. He wrote unmethodically or, as he put it himself, he set
information down ‘tumultuarily, as if tumbled out of a Sack’, but more significantly as an enterprising biographer he
recognized the importance of private history and the transitory nature of ephemeral and oral sources of information.
‘’Tis pitty that such minutes had not been taken 100 yeares since or more’, he complained to Wood in 1680, ‘for want
thereof many worthy men’s names and notions are swallowd-up in oblivion’. He relished unconsidered trifles, he
collected gossip, and he haunted the funerals and the church monuments of friends and notable strangers alike. As a
g-year-old boy he claims to have been fascinated by a series of engravings of the elaborate funeral of Sir Philip
Sidney; he was a pall-bearer at the obsequies of the satirist Samuel Butler and the anatomist William Harvey and he
recalls the details of the dramatist Sir William Davenant’s handsome walnut coffin; he is equally taken with the idea
of an old woman living amongst the bones in the crypt at Hereford Cathedral and with the discovery of the pickled
body of the humanist John Colet amidst the ruins of old St Paul’s after the Great Fire. He had a nose for gossip and an
ear for a telling expression. He notes, for example, that the mathematician Sir Jonas Moore cured his sciatica by
‘boyling his Buttock’ and that the Puritan controversialist William Prynne studied with a long quilt cap shading his
eyes, having arranged to be interrupted every three hours by a servant bringing him a
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roll ‘and a pott of Ale to refollicate his wasted spirits’. Aubrey’s lives of Milton and Hobbes (he knew the latter well)
are his most substantial and amongst his most lively. He apologizes for Milton’s republicanism by asserting that he
acted ‘out of pure Zeale to the Liberty of Mankind’, but he notes, on the evidence of John Dryden, that the poet’s
conversation was ‘pleasant ... but Satyricall’ and that he pronounced the letter R ‘very hard - a certain signe of a
Satyricall Witt’. Of Hobbes’s pleasure in geometry he recalls that he ‘was wont to draw lines on his thigh and on the
sheets, abed, and also multiply and divide’.
References throughout Aubrey’s ‘Brief Lives’ suggest something of the honour accorded by learned
contemporaries to the Royal Society, founded in London in the years of Charles II’s restoration and awarded charters
by its royal patron in 1662 and 1663. In his account of the life of the statistician Sir William Petty, for example,
Aubrey records Sir William’s suggestion that the Society should hold its annual elections on St Thomas’s rather than
St Andrew’s Day, for the former saint had required evidence before he was prepared to believe. The Royal Society was
both a club for like-minded enthusiasts and a partial realization of the progressive ‘scientific’ ideas fostered earlier in
the century by Bacon. In its professed ambition of advancing learning in general, it attempted to gather together a
broad range of thinkers, both professional and amateur, and to provide a focus for a variety of investigation and
experiment. Its early members included those whose contribution to the history of science proved remarkable, such as
Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and John Ray, and those who have since been chiefly remembered for their non-scientific
work, such as the mathematician turned architect, Sir Christopher Wren, and the writers, Cowley, Evelyn, Waller,