Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/110

Century is rich in religious biography, written with a homiletic and didactic intent. The Lives of Eminent Persons (1683) by Samuel Clarke, although, like the mediaeval Lives of Saints, they are too monotonously alike, too little quickened with the caprices and humours of the unregenerate, yet occasionally display, in the interstices between Biblical quotation and edifying sentiment, real glimpses of living human character. We are told, for instance, of Mr. Richard Blackerby, that ‘he was exceeding careful to have none of Gods Creatures lost; he would always have a Fowl or two allowed to come familiarly into his Eating Room, to pick up the lesser Crumbs that would fall from the Table.’ But evangelical biography, which attempts to exhibit human life as a design nearly resembling a fixed pattern, has never been strong in portrait-painting. These sketches are seen to be merely childish in conception and execution if they be set beside the vivid and masterly work of John Aubrey, the best of seventeenth-century gossips. He was despised by his learned contemporaries for an idle man of fashion and a pretender to antiquities. Anthony à Wood, the author of that great work the Athenae Oxonienses—perhaps the most valuable of all early biographical collections—speaks of Aubrey as ‘a shiftless person, roving and magotieheaded, and sometimes little better than crased.’ Yet Aubrey had the true spirit of an antiquary; nothing was too trivial to be set down in his Brief Lives. He records how, walking through Newgate Street, he saw a bust of the famous Dame Venetia Stanley in a brasier’s shop, with the gilding on it destroyed by the Great Fire of London, and regrets that he could never see the bust again, for ‘they melted it down.’ ‘How these curiosi-