Other MSS. A few additional lives, and portions of lives, of persons mentioned in these four biographical volumes, have been brought in from letters by Aubrey in MS. Ballard 14 and in MS. Wood F 39 and F 49.
Three lives, in fair copy, by Aubrey, are found in MS. Rawlinson D. 727, foll. 93-96, and have been given here. They were formerly in Anthony Wood's hands: see Clark's Wood's Life and Times, iv. 192, note.
MS. Aubr. 21, a volume made up in the Ashmolean library from siftings out of Aubrey MSS. and papers; MS. Aubr. 22, a collection of grammatical tracts, brought together by Aubrey with a view to a treatise on education; MS. Aubr. 23, a volume of 125 leaves, dated on fol. 8 as 'Collectio geniturarum, made London May 29, 1674,' but on the title as '1677: for the <Ashmolean> Musaeum'; MS. Aubr. 26,'Faber fortunae,' i.e. projects for retrieving Aubrey's fortunes——have yielded additional matter.
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.