Books: Master Gossipmonger

AUBREY’S BRIEF LIVES (341 pp.)—Edited by Oliver Lawson Dick—University of Michigan ($5.95).

John Aubrey, 17th century English gentleman of leisure, had a painter’s eye for human traits and a gossip columnist’s passion for scandal. Both talents he diligently brought to his famous prose portraits, one of which was 23,000 words long, while another never got beyond one line, i.e., “Dr. Pell is positive that his name was Holybushe.” Aubrey’s Lives have been the historian’s bounty and bane: his research was fascinating, but often based on mere hearsay. Whatever his shortcomings, no other biographer has ever written more vivid, true-to-life descriptions of Aubrey’s lusty century.

Bypassing what he called “Knotty Studies,” Oxonian Aubrey turned his intelligent, squirrel-like mind towards whatever was new in chemistry, archaeology, philosophy, medicine, astrology, witchcraft and zombis. He became the friend or acquaintance of virtually all the great thinkers of his day, from Sir Christopher Wren to Sir Isaac Newton. In time he lost his estates, was reduced to living on handouts. He died hoping that some “Ingeniose and publick-spirited young Man” might one day “polish and compleat what I have delivered rough hewen.” Aubrey confessed that his frank sketches contained things “that would raise a Blush in a young Virgin’s cheeke,” and urged the sewing-on of “some Figge-leaves.”

More than a decade ago Historian and Publicist Oliver Lawson Dick, “electing myself” to be the “young Man,” went to work sorting out the huggermugger of 66 sprawling volumes of Aubrey manuscripts. The result, now published for the first time in the U.S., is a fascinating, alphabetically ordered collection of 134 portraits. As not a single Figge-leaf hides Elizabethan ribaldry, the book is scarcely suitable for young Virgins. Samples:

WILLIAM HARVEY, discoverer of the circulation of the blood: “He did delight to be in the darke, and . . . had Caves made in the Earth, in which in Summer time he delighted to meditate . . . Had he been stiffe, starcht, and retired, as other formall Doctors are, he had known no more than they [for] Pride has been one of the greatest stoppers of the Advancement of Learning … He was wont to say that man was but a great mischievous Baboon … He kept a pretty young wench . . . which I guesse he made use of … as King David did … After his Booke of the Circulation of the Blood came-out . . . ’twas beleeved by the vulgar that he was crack-brained … I was at his Funerall, and helpt to carry him into the Vault.”

MRS. ELIZABETH BROUGHTON : “She lost her Mayden-head to a poor young fellow … in 1660 . . . and away she gott to London, and did sett up for her selfe. She was a most exquisite beautie, as finely shaped as Nature could frame . . . and her price was very deare . . . Richard, Earle of Dorset, kept her [but] at last she grew common and infamous and gott the Pox, of which she died … I remember thus much of an old song:

From the Watch at Twelve a Clock,

And from Bess Broughton’s buttond smock,

Libera nos Domine.

[Her father] was the first that . . . made an experiment of improving [land] by soape-ashes.”

MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. “His father was a Butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when [young William] killed a Calfe he would doe it in high style, and make a Speech … He was a handsome, well-shap’t man: very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smoothe Witt

. . . Though … he had little Latine and lesse Greek, He understood Latine pretty well: for he had been in his younger yeares a schoolmaster in the countrey. He was wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life. Sayd Ben Johnson, I wish he had blotted out a thousand.”