And Aubrey did not forget his own epitaph. Among his papers he left two suggestions, made at different times, for an inscription to be placed on his tomb. ‘I would desire,’ he says at the foot of one of these, ‘that this Inscription shod be a stone of white Mble about the bigness of a royal sheet of paper, scilicet about 2 foot square. Mr. Reynolds of Lambeth, Stone-cutter (Fox-hall), who married Mr. Elias Ashmole’s widow, will help me to a Marble as square as an imperial sheet of paper for 8 shillings.’
But Aubrey’s greatest quality as an antiquary is his sympathy with the living, and with life in all its phases. He writes best when he is recording his memories of men that he had seen and known. Where these men were famous, and remembered by after generations, his vivid phrases have long since been embodied in biographical dictionaries. Some of his best work, however, is done on perishable names, and no better example of his art can be found than his account of Dr. Ralph Kettell, for forty-five years President of Trinity College, Oxford, a humorous pedagogue of the old school, who died soon after Aubrey came into residence at the college:
