XVI.
Then there was a long letter, dating from the autumn after this delightful summer, in which he wrote again about Anthony à Wood, the old Oxford antiquary. He had been reading Wood's diaries, finding in them, he said, in spite of their old-fashioned pedantry and long genealogies, a vivid picture of the University and Wood's life in it, two hundred years ago. A calm life, Sutton described it, in curious contrast to the times in which Wood lived, when the academic quiet was so often disturbed by armies, and royal visits, and great events; and the noise of tumults in the Oxford streets, and troops marching by, reaching the old antiquary's ears, would draw him from the chronicles of the past, to look with blinking eyes from his library window on the turmoil and disquiet of contemporary history. For his life was spent in his own study, or in "Bodlie's Library," or among the dusty archives of the Colleges, reading and transcribing the monastic registers, the old manuscripts and histories. Sutton quoted from his diary a sentence in which he speaks of the exceeding pleasure he took in "poring on such books."
"Heraldry, musick, and painting did so much crowd upon him, that he could not avoid them, and could never give a reason why he should delight in those studies more than in others, so prevalent was nature." "My pen cannot enough describe," he writes in his enthusiasm, when he first read Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, "how A. Wood's tender affections and insatiable desire of knowledge were ravish'd and melted down by the reading of that book. What by music and rare books that he found in the public library, his life at this time and after was a perfect Elysium."
"Wood often went for long, solitary walks, collecting arms and monumental inscriptions from the churches, and visiting all the ruined religious Houses and old halls in the country about Oxford. He describes in his diary how, as he returned towards Oxford in the evening, 'after he had taken his rambles about the country to collect monuments,' he would hear the bells of Merton, his own College, ringing clearly in the distance."
"Wood had small love for the Puritans," Sutton wrote, "who in his lifetime were so long in power; and in his record of contemporary events, sudden deaths, and alleged appearances of the devil, he more than once mentions their destruction of antiquities, their contempt for the Fathers and Schoolmen, and hatred of all authority, and 'everything that smelt of an Academy, never rejoicing more than when he could trample on the gowne, and bring humane learning and arts into disgrace.'"
"Then came the Restoration, and almost the last event that Wood records is the revival of Catholicism under James II. Wood himself was suspected of being a Papist; his writings had made him enemies, and before he died he was expelled from the University, and his book burned by order of the Vice-Chancellor's Court."
"And yet, on the whole, his life was a happy one," Sutton said, writing, it was plain, with a certain envy for the tranquil occupations and lettered tastes of the old Oxford antiquary.