Mr. Aubrey was born in the year 1625, or 1626; and in 1642 was entered a gentleman commoner of Trinity college in Oxford. Four years afterwards he was admitted a member of the Inner Temple, and in 1662 elected a member of the Royal Society. He died about the year 1700. It is acknowledged, that his literary attainments were considerable; that he was a man of good parts, of much learning and great application; a good Latin poet, an excellent naturalist, and, what is more material to our present object, a great lover of an indefatigable searcher into antiquities. That the greater part of his life was devoted to literary pursuits, is ascertained by the works which he has published, the correspondence which he held with many eminent men, and the collections which he left in manuscript, and which are now reposited in the Ashmolean Museum. Among these collections is a curious account of our English poets and many other writers. While Wood was preparing his Athenæ Oxonienses, this manuscript was lent to him, as appears from many queries in his handwriting in the margin; and his account of Milton, with whom Aubrey was intimately acquainted, is (as has been observed by Mr. Warton) literally transcribed from thence. Wood afterwards quarrelled

with Mr. Aubrey, whom in the second volume of his Fasti, p. 262, he calls his friend, and on whom in his History of the University of Oxford he bestows the highest encomium^{2 note}; and, after their quarrel, with his usual warmth, and in his loose diction, he represented Aubrey as “a pretender to antiquities, roving, magottie-headed, and little better than crased.” To Wood every lover of antiquity and literary history has very high obligations; and in all matters of fact he may be safely relied on; but his opinion of men and things is of little value. According to his representation, Dr. Ralph Bathurst, a man highly esteemed by all his contemporaries, was “a most vile person,” and the celebrated John Locke, “a prating, clamorous, turbulent fellow.” The virtuous and learned Dr. John Wallis, if we are to believe Wood, was a man who could “at any time make black white, and white black, for his own ends, and who had a ready knack at sophistical evasion^{3 note}

Wood in a peevish humour may have thought or said of Mr. Aubrey, by whose labours he highly profited, or however fantastical Aubrey may have been on the subject of chemistry and ghosts, his character for veracity has never been impeached; and as a very diligent antiquarian, his testimony is worthy of attention. Mr. Toland, who was well acquainted with him, and certainly a better judge of men than Wood, gives this character of him: “Though he was extremely superstitious, or seemed to be so, yet he was a very honest man, and most accurate in his account of matters of fact. But the facts he knew, not the reflections he made, were what I wanted^{5 note}.” I do not wish to maintain that all his accounts of our English writers are on these grounds to be implicitly adopted; but it seems to me much more reasonable to question such parts of them as appear objectionable, than to reject them altogether, because he may sometimes have been mistaken.

He was acquainted with many of the players, and lived in great intimacy with the poets and other celebrated writers of the last age; from whom undoubtedly many of his anecdotes were collected. Among his friends and acquaintances we find Hobbes, Milton, Dryden, Butler, Ray, Evelyn^{6 note}, Ashmole, Sir William Dugdale, Dr. Bathurst, Bishop Skinner, Dr. Gale, Sir William D'Avenant, Mr. Hook, Sir William Petty, Sir John Denham, Sir Bennet Hoskyns, (son of John Hoskyns, who was

well acquainted with the poets of Shakspeare's time), Mr. Josiah Howe, Toland, and many more^{7 note}. The anecdotes concerning D'Avenant in Wood's Athenæ Oxonienses, which have been printed in a former page, were, like the copious and accurate account of Milton, transcribed literally from Aubrey's papers. A person who enjoyed the intimacy and esteem of so many distinguished persons, must certainly have borne a very different character from that which has been given of him by Wood, who was remarkable for the violence of his temper and his strong prejudices.