JOHN AUBREY
JOHN AUBREY was a gossip whose odds and ends about men, things, and places, are now better than most full-dress literature. Those about men were set down at first merely as material for a biographer whom he thought his better, Anthony à Wood, and, as he was inquisitive and precise, there were some strange things amongst them, so that he said they were "not fit to let fly abroad till about thirty years hence, for the author and the persons (like medlars) ought to be first rotten." They were "put in writing tumultuarily," and he fancied himself "all along discoursing" with Wood. The "Brief Lives" will now survive whatever is made out of them. So with his observations of antiquities and natural history. Who but Aubrey would have noticed and entered in a book that in the spring after the Fire of London "all the ruins were overgrown with an herb or two, but especially with a yellow flower, Ericolevis Neapolitana"? Who but he would have included this in a sketched life of Thomas Hobbes?—"Though he left his native county [Wiltshire] at fourteen, and lived so long, yet sometimes one might find a little touch of our pronunciation—old Sir Thomas Malette, one of the judges of the King's Bench, knew Sir Walter Ralegh, and sayd that, notwithstanding his great travells, conversation, learning, etc., yet he spake broad Devonshire to his dying day."
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