Volume 1

'Brief Lives', chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the years 1669 & 1696. / Edited from the author's mss. by Andrew Clark.

  • John Aubrey
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: 'Brief Lives', chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the years 1669 & 1696. / Edited from the author's mss. by Andrew Clark. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    or double letters, ‘ie’ or other diphthong where we write c ei,’ and the like. The English of Aubrey’s age is so like our own that it is not unimportant to mark even its minor differences. All merely artificial tricks of writing (wch for which, and the like) have been neglected. (c) Where a date, a word, or a name has been inserted, the insertion is enclosed in angular brackets ( ). Where it seemed requisite to mark that a word or phrase was added at a later date, or by another hand, square brackets have been used [ ]. The use of these symbols, borrowed from Vahlen’s edition of Aristotle’s Poetics, has been censured as pedantic, but I know of no clearer or shorter way of making plain in a printed text just what is, and what is not, in the MS. text. (d) Punctuation is generally absent in Aubrey’s text, as might be expected, and where it is found, it is often mis- leading. The points and marks in this edition are therefore such as seemed to make the meaning clear to myself, and therefore, I hope, to others. (e) As regards the order of the paragraphs, Aubrey’s text has been given, where convenient, sentence by sen- tence, and page by page. But I have taken full liberty to bring into their proper place marginalia, interlinear notes, addenda on opposite pages, &c. In some cases, indeed, to give in print the MS. text sentence by sentence is to do it injustice. In the MS., the difference of inks between earlier and later notes, the difference of pen-strokes (on one day with a firm pen, on another with a scratchy quill), and similar nuances, impress the eye with a sequence of para- graphs which in print can be shown only by redistribution. For example, I claim that the life of Milton, in this edition, is, from its bolder treatment, truer to the MS., than the servile version in the old edition. 4. As regards notes and explanations. Aubrey’s lives supply an inviting field for comment, correction, and addition. But, even so treated, they will never be a