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.

Aubrey, John, 1626-1697.

Date:: 1898

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.

47/460 (page 23)

$from the originals in the Bodleian Library and Ash- molean Museum : in two volumes.’ The editors are said to have been Dr. Philip Bliss and the Rev. John Walker, Fellow of New College. The Lives by Aubrey occupy pp. 197-637 of Volume II. Dr. Bliss’s interests were bibliographical, and he was not careful a to collate with original MSS. either the printed text of earlier editions or transcripts made for himself. As a result, that issue of Aubrey’s Lives, although making accessible the greater portion of what is interesting in the originals, is marred by many grave blunders and arbitrary omissions. A comparison of a few pages of Dr. Bliss’s edition with Aubrey’s MS. copy suggests a troublesome question in English textual criticism. If two eminent Oxford scholars in the beginning of the nineteenth century could thus pervert their author’s meaning, can we have trust in the earlier redaction of greater texts, such as Shakespeare ? a I have shown this as regards the much more important matter of the text of Anthony Wood’s Life\ and text of the Athenae. I hope some day to show it in the$