John Aubrey: My Own Life (46 page)

. . .

August

Mr William Penn
⁵²
, the Quaker, has set off towards Deale to sail for Pennsylvania, which was named after him last year (4 March 1681) when the King granted him and his heirs a province in America, in payment of the 10,000 li. that was owed to his father (20,000 li. considering the interest). His patent is from the beginning of the 40th degree to 43 degrees in latitude, and 5 degrees longitude from Chisapeake Bay. God send him a prosperous and safe voyage. He is my countryman, since his ancestors lived in Minty in the Hundred of Malmesbury.

. . .

September

My time is taken up with mundane affairs and I am out of humour.

. . .

Today I was sent a trunk of my books, papers, manuscripts and precious objects from Wiltshire that I have not seen for the last eleven years. I wish I could have all my books together in one place.

. . .

From Africa
⁵³
, Mr Wylde Clerke has written to tell me that the plant I enquired about is unknown to the Moors. As to poisons, they know only mercury. He says he might be able to find out more about the plant if he could have more details of it. He promises to observe the methods of preserving plants and berries. As to magic, he finds that alleged manifestations are spurious and no prescription can be found in books. Alleged control of death is also shown to be false. He says they practise cruel tortures on rebels.

. . .

Sir Henry Blount
⁵⁴
, who is over eighty years of age, his mind still strong, has been taken very ill in London: his feet extremely swollen. He has gone to Tittinghanger. His motto is:
Loquendum est cum vulgo, sentiendum cum sapientibus
(Speak with the vulgar, think with the wise). He is fond of saying that he does not care to have his servants go to church lest they socialise with other servants and become corrupted into visiting the alehouse and debauchery. Instead he encourages them to go and see the executions at Tyburn, which, he claims, have more influence over them than all the oratory in the sermons.

. . .

October

Thomas Merry
⁵⁵
, who was Sir Jonas Moore’s disciple and an excellent logist, has died. He redid all of Euclid in a shorter and clearer manner than ever before, but he left his work unstitched so that when I called to enquire for it after his death, the pages had departed like S
ybillina folia
, and several were lost. I collected up what I could and took the loose sheets to the Royal Society. There they were committed to the care of Mr Paget, but he deemed them imperfect and unfit to be printed. What will become of them now, God knows!

. . .

Anno 1683

January

My mother tells me she is seventy-three years of age.

. . .

21 February

Today at the Royal Society
⁵⁶
we discussed medicated springs. Sir John Hoskyns and I confirmed that in Surrey and Kent, as far as Shooter’s Hill, the earth is full of the pale yellow mineral known as pyrites.

. . .

The curious clock
⁵⁷
that Mr Nicholas Mercator made and presented to His Majesty is for sale from Mr Fromantle’s for 200 li. It is a foot in diameter and it shows the difference between the sun’s motion and apparent motion. The clock was neglected at court, even though the King commended it. It was sold to a watchmaker for 5 li., then on to Mr Fromantle.

. . .

Whitsun

My loyal, dear, useful
⁵⁸
, faithful friend George Johnson has died. He was a strong and lusty man, but caught a malignant fever from the Earl of Abingdon’s brother, which carried him off. He left London last Monday, got home on Tuesday, was ill that night, better the next day, but then fell ill again with intermitting fever and died. He was born at Bowdon Park within four miles of where I was born. We studied at Blandford School and the Middle Temple together. If he had become Master of the Rolls, as he was expected to do, he would have made me one of his secretaries with 500 li. a year. I shall never see such an opportunity again. If I had 500 li. a year I would use it to the greater glory of God and to help my ingenious friends, Mr Wood above all.

. . .

I fear that I should not have put my Book of Lives, concerning so many great persons still living, into even Mr Wood’s hands. I ought to castigate and castrate some of the things in it that are too true and biting, and cast them aside somewhere at the end of the book to be referred to in an occult and secret way (e.g. 125 to be 521 or done retrograde).

I think it will be a long time before I get to Oxford again.

The chalybeate spring
⁵⁹
I discovered at Seend, near Devizes, in 1666, will now, I hope, become a fashionable resort. When I presented samples of the water to the Royal Society, they were much admired. I did not have enough authority personally to bring the waters into vogue, but I will insert notice of them into next year’s almanac and the gazette.

. . .

24 May

On this day
⁶⁰
Mr Ashmole’s museum in Oxford was opened to the public. It is a large stately new building next to the Bodleian Library, which will house the collection of rarities, curiosities and antiquities that he has given to the University. The collection was sent from South Lambeth to Oxford by barge: enough to fill twelve carts. Dr Robert Plot has been appointed the first Keeper of the Museum.

. . .

June

William Penn, the Quaker, writes to me from Pennsylvania, and sends his greetings to Sir William Petty, Mr Hooke, Mr Wood and Mr Lodwick. He says he prides himself on the good opinion of the gentlemen of the Royal Society and professes himself a votary of the prosperity of our enquiries since ‘It is one step to Heaven to return to nature.’ He praises our experimental age where everything is tried by the measure of experience, as against the ill tradition of foolish credulity, and he solicits the continuation of our friendship to his undertaking.

In his letter, Mr Penn describes the fertility of the country in trees, forests and crops. The soil is good and there are many springs. There are delightful fruits, as good as any in Europe, plentiful fish in the rivers and an abundance of vines, which he intends to cultivate with the help of Frenchmen from Languedoc and Poitou. The river is full of sturgeon that can be seen leaping from it by day and heard at night. The fish can be roasted or pickled. Several people from other colonies – Virginia, Maryland, New England, Road Island, New York – are moving to Pennsylvania.

Mr Penn is making
⁶¹
it his business to establish a virtuous economy and so he sits in council twice a week and has held two assemblies, which, he says, received him with all kindness.

. . .

August

My friend Jane Smyth
⁶²
is in extreme danger of dying due to suppression of urine. Her ureter is stopped.

. . .

September

Earlier this month
⁶³
I was robbed. My friend Thomas Pigott hopes the mishap has not spoilt my Knightsbridge rounds by moonlight and that he may be merry with me again in the middle of the night at the World’s End.

. . .

I have called on
⁶⁴
Mr Bushnell, an ingenious stonecutter, who lives opposite St James’s Park on the road that runs to Knightsbridge. He gave me an account of the curious marble that was used to build Charing Cross, which was pulled down around 1647. Afterwards, there was a fashion for using the marble for salt cellars and knife-handles. It was a sort of hair-coloured grey and full of little (as it were) kernels. Recently the quarry from which the marble came was rediscovered in Sussex; it was overgrown with trees and bushes, but came to light when the roots of an old oak tree were grubbed up.

. . .

Sir Jonas Moore’s books
⁶⁵
are for sale – it is such a pity that so good a collection is at risk of being scattered. I will catalogue them, and price them as far as possible, for Dr Wallis, in the hope that he can find a buyer.

Sir Jonas Moore intended
⁶⁶
to leave his books to the Royal Society, but when he died in August 1679, he had not made a will, to the Royal Society’s great loss. At the Restoration, he was made Master Surveyor of His Majesty’s ordinance and armouries. I often heard him say how Mr Wylde, who studied mathematics with him, interested him in surveying in the first place. When he surveyed the fens, he observed that the line that the sea made on the beach is not straight. He made banks to follow the line and got much credit as a result for keeping the sea out of Norfolk.

. . .

December

Alas
⁶⁷
, Oxford’s Vice Chancellor has not agreed to purchase Sir Jonas Moore’s books for the Bodleian Library. Dr Wallis tells me they will take the chance of picking up at the auction sale such important mathematical works as they lack. Perhaps one of the Cambridge colleges will purchase the collection so it can stay together.

. . .

Sir Isaac Newton
⁶⁸
tells me the cost of building prevents Trinity College, Cambridge, from buying books at present. He has been to the Vice Chancellor, who asks the price and desires to see the catalogue of Sir Jonas Moore’s books, but it is not clear whether the University will be able to purchase them either, being at present very low. Mr Newton intends to bring the matter before the Heads of Colleges at the next opportunity.

PART XIII

Manuscripts

Anno 1684

January

THE GREAT FREEZE
is upon us.

. . .

I am still grieving
¹
deeply for my friend George Johnson, and since his death last Whitsun another friend – the mathematician John Collins, Fellow of the Royal Society – has also died. Their deaths have discomposed me and left me lethargic. But I begin to consider my own mortality, and am resolved to send Mr Wood all my poor scribbles by Easter term. I hope he will have the goodness to pardon and pity my melancholy and long silence.

. . .

I am ordering
²
and revising my manuscripts. Since 1669 I have been reflecting on education. I have hundreds of notes on the design of a school for gentlemen and have taken one of my epigraphs for my Idea of Education from Seneca’s
Epistulae Morales
.

Mr Paschall urges me
³
to go on with my design. He says he believes this is the great thing the world needs and it would be worth the while of a good angel to come down from heaven to promote such work.

My mind turns back to the school days I shared with George Johnson in Blandford. Plato says that the education of children is the foundation of government. It follows then that the education of the nobility must be the pillars and ornament of government: they bear the weight of it, like Atlas. But while there is ample provision in both our universities for the education of divines and clerks, no care has been taken for the right breeding of gentlemen of quality, which could not be of greater importance in a nation, since they are the root and source of a good administration of justice. It may seem paradoxical, but no nobleman’s son in England is so well bred as the King’s Mathematical Boys at Christchurch Hospital in London, which our King Charles, founded in 1673 for producing navigators. Arithmetic and geometry are the keys that open to us mathematical and philosophical knowledge, and all other knowledge as a consequence. Arithmetic and geometry teach us to reason right and carefully and not to conclude hastily or make a false step.

Without doubt
⁴
it was a great advantage to the learned Mr William Oughtred’s natural parts that his father taught him common arithmetic perfectly while he was a schoolboy. The like advantage may be supposed of the learned Edward Davenant, whose father taught him arithmetic when a schoolboy. The like may be said of Sir Christopher Wren, Mr Edmund Halley and Mr Thomas Axe. In some men it makes no matter if they learn in later life, e.g. Mr Hobbes was forty years old, or more, when he began to study Euclid’s
Elements
. But more commonly, learning arithmetic after a good number of years is difficult: ’tis as if a man of thirty or forty should learn to play on the lute when the joints of his fingers are knit: there may be something analogous to this in the brain and understanding.