V. The Old Edition.
The pith of these lives was extracted by Anthony Wood, and incorporated in his Athenae, vol. i. in 1691, vol. ii. in 1692, and the 'appendix' left in MS. at his death (published in the second edition of the Athenae in 1721).
The MSS. of Aubrey's 'Lives' were placed in the library of the Ashmolean Museum, in the personal custody of the Keeper, Edward Lhwyd, in 1693. Aubrey, writing[73] to Thomas Tanner, intimates that his MSS. will show how greatly Wood's Athenae was indebted to his help, and makes a special request that Wood shall not know that they have been placed in the Museum.
Beginning[74] on Sept. 16, 1792, Edmund Malone made a transcript of 174 lives from the three MSS. (MS. Aubr. 6, 7, 8), with notes, with a view to publication. The first volume of this contained folios 1-152, forty-four lives of poets and sixty-eight of prose writers. It is now in the Bodleian, by the gift of C. E. Doble, Esq.; but mutilated, folios 126-152 having been torn off from the end of the volume. The second volume, containing folios 153-385, sixty-two lives, was MS. 9405 in Sir Thomas Phillipps' library, was mentioned in Notes and Queries (8 S. vii. 375), and has recently been bought by the Bodleian.
Some years later, James Caulfield, of London, publisher, arranged for the issue of a select number of biographies from Aubrey's MSS., illustrated by engravings from originals in the Ashmolean and elsewhere. They were to appear under the title of 'The Oxford Cabinet'; and one part, 32 pp., a very pretty book, was published at London in 1797. This part contains the lives of William Aubrey, Francis Bacon, John Barclay, and Francis Beaumont, with engravings (inter alia) of Aubrey's drawings of Verulam House, and Bacon's fishponds. At this point the Keeper of the Ashmolean, at Malone's instance, withdrew the permission which had been granted to Curtis to transcribe for Caulfield. The reason given was that Curtis had taken away papers and title-pages from Oxford libraries, and was not to be trusted in the Ashmolean—see Macray's Annals of the Bodleian, p. 273.
The dates, however, suggest that Malone's action may have been in part inspired by a wish to keep the course clear for his own project. The transcription made for Caulfield, although not always accurate in point of spelling, is by no means badly done: certainly it is much better than that which was made for the later issue.
In 1813 appeared 'Letters written by Eminent Persons ... and Lives of Eminent Men by John Aubrey, Esq. ... from the originals in the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean 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[75] 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?