But no one can read the Athenae Oxonienses without recognizing that the author was also a man of a naturally satirical wit, with a great talent for sketching the characters of men or books in a scornful phrase, or a few incisive epithets. His depreciation is the more effective in that it falls at random, with none of the air of a studied invective. He knows that the indifference of contempt, which is professed a hundred times in human society for once that it is really felt, may be better and more bitingly conveyed in a subordinate clause than in the main sentence. So in speaking of the music of his time, he says, ‘Mr. Davis Mell was accounted hitherto the best for the violin in England, as I have before told you; but after Baltzar came into England, and showed his most wonderful parts on that instrument, Mell was not so admired; yet he played sweeter, was a well-bred gentleman, and not given to excessive drinking as Baltzar was.’ So Mell loses his musical pre-eminence, and Baltzar his reputation for courtesy and sobriety.
If we consider, therefore, the enormous learning of Anthony à Wood, in a kind for which the Oxford of his day had little sympathy, his love of a solitary and retired life, his liberty of speech, his quickness of observation, even when ‘he seemed to take notice of nothing and to know nothing,’ his independent pride and sarcastic severity of judgement, we shall find no reason to wonder that the fellows of Merton, solicitous chiefly, it may be, for the dignity and comfort of the high table, were not sorry to be rid of his company.
About the greatness of his achievement there can be no question. His account of the learned writers and poets who had their education at Oxford has been used by a hundred later compilers; it has been edited with
