The original title may be conjectured to have been:
'Σχεδιάσματα. Brief Lives, part ii.,'
and it possibly contained some letters, like those in the preceding volume, which made Wood think it was given to him.
On fol. 1, is a note describing the make-up of the volume:—
'Aubrey's Lives: fragments of part ii.—These scattered fragments collected and arranged by E. M. Sep. 1792.' A note (in Dr. Philip Bliss's hand?) says that E. M. is Edmund Malone.
In this, as in the other Aubrey MSS., Dr. Bliss has made several slight notes, both in pencil and ink, with a view to his edition.
The mutilation of the MS. was the crime of Anthony Wood, to whom it had been sent. Two conjectures may be hazarded—either that Wood did this in order to paste the cuttings into his rough copy of his projected Athenae, and so save transcription; or, more probably, that he was so thoroughly alarmed by the threat of Lord Clarendon's prosecution of himself (Clark's Wood's Life and Times, iv. 1-46), that he destroyed the papers containing Aubrey's sharp reflections on various prominent personages[26]. But whatever the pretext, Aubrey was, naturally, very grieved at his unjustifiable conduct. In a letter to Wood, dated Sept. 2, 1694 (MS. Ballard 14, fol. 155), he writes:—
'You have cutt out a matter of 40 pages out of one of my volumnes, as also the index. Was ever any body so unkind?—And I remember you told me comeing from Hedington that there were some things in it that "would cutt my throat." I thought you so deare a friend that I might have entrusted my life in your hands and now your unkindnes doth almost break my heart.'
When Aubrey had the volume back in his own hands, he wrote in it[27] the following censure:—
'Ingratitude! This part the second Mr. Wood haz gelded from page [1] to page [44] and other pages[28] too are wanting wherein are contained trueths, but such as I entrusted nobody with the sight of but himselfe (whom I thought I might have entrusted with my life). There are severall papers that may cutt my throate. I find too late Memento diffidere was a saying worthy one of the sages. He hath also embezill'd the index of it—quod N. B. It was stitch't up when I sent it to him.