Two-Worlder

JOHN AUBREY AND HIS FRIENDS (335 pp.)--Anthony Powell--Scribner ($5).

Britain's John Aubrey has been called "the little Boswell" of his day (1626-1697). But not even Boswell could claim quite the same historical importance as Chronicler Aubrey, the sensitive, observant man who saw himself as the connecting link between the great days of Queen Elizabeth and the riotous Restoration.

Aubrey had a foot in both worlds. He had an Elizabethan faith in "Marvels, Magick . . . Apparitions . . . Second Sighted Men," along with an undeveloped penchant for scientific research. As a child he saw the old-fashioned shepherd leading his flock with a flute; in his old age he dreamed of emigrating to the "delicious Countrey" of New York, where the people "have such vast Snowes that they are forced to digg their wayes out of their houses, else they would be stifled."

Compleat Angler. No old tale or new notion was unworthy of Aubrey's attention--for "these curiosities," he said, "would be quite forgotten, did not such idle fellows as me putt them downe." From old Dr. William Harvey, who had discovered the circulation of the blood, Aubrey got eyewitness accounts of Sir Francis Bacon, whose eye was "like the eie of a viper." Izaak Walton regaled him with anecdotes about the young bricklayer named Ben Jonson who went to Cambridge and died court poet; from an ancient servant he heard of the historic day when Sir Walter Raleigh, fresh from the New World, threw the ladies into fits by puffing a pipe of tobacco. From here & there, Aubrey gleaned tales about a Stratford butcher's boy who was caught poaching; in fact, John Aubrey was one of William Shakespeare's first biographers.

When the great men of his own day came his way, Aubrey recorded every word he heard. Sir Isaac Newton and Philosopher Thomas Hobbes were his friends, and he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, where he knew John Dryden and Christopher Wren. No man to take irretrievable sides in 17th Century politics, he not only recorded Charles I's tall hunting stories but later listened to Cromwell declaiming at dinner that in all England Devon husbandry was best. When Charles II came home from exile, Aubrey was on hand again, recording the occasion when a Mr. Evans, who had "a fungous nose . . . kissed the King's hand and rubbed his nose with it, which disturbed the King, but cured [Mr. Evans]."

Quibbling Oldsters. Aubrey loved the medieval manor house, half dwelling, half barnyard, where the cackling and lowing of livestock were "then thought not . . . ill musique." But, unlike most antiquarians, he never allowed nostalgia to blind him to the bad aspects of the good old days: "The conversation and habits of those times were as starcht as their bands and square beards; and gravity was then taken for wisdom. The doctors in those days were but old boys, when quibbles past for wit even in their sermons ..."

Aubrey struck one of his contemporaries as "shiftless . . . roving . . . magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crazed." Yet his collection of yarns and records is today one of Oxford University's most priceless possessions. Anthony Powell's new biography of Aubrey (the first written in more than a century) shows why. He may not have been a great scholar, but like his contemporary, Sam Pepys, he had a lively eye.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.