or did
it allow him to deal with many contemporaries whom he had known. In
the present volume it has therefore been found best to represent him
by the studies of Bacon and Laud in his _Church-History_. Bacon he
must have described largely from hearsay, but what he says of Laud is
an admirable specimen of his manner, and leaves us wishing that he had
devoted himself in larger measure to the worthies of his own time.

There are no characters in Aubrey's _Brief Lives_, which are only a
series of rough jottings by a prince of gossips, who collected what
he could and put it all on paper 'tumultuarily'. But the extracts from
what he says of Hobbes and Milton may be considered as notes for a
character, details that awaited a greater artist than Aubrey was to
work them into a picture; and if Hobbes and Milton are to be given a
place, as somehow or other they must be, in a collection of the kind
that this volume offers, there is no option but to be content with
such notes, for there is no set character of either of them. The value
of the facts which Aubrey has preserved is shown by the use made of
them by all subsequent biographers, and notably by Anthony a Wood,
whose _Athenae Oxonienses_ is our first great biographical dictionary.

Lives of English men of letters begin in the seventeenth century,
and from Rawley's _Life of Bacon_, Sprat's _Life of Cowley_, and the
anonymous _Life of Fuller_ it is possible to extract passages which
are in effect characters. But Walton's _Lives_, the best of all
seventeenth century Lives, refuse to yield any section, for each of
them is all of a piece; they are from beginning to end continuous
character studies, revealing qualities of head and heart in their
affectionate record of fact and circumstance. There is therefore
nothing in this volume from his _Life of Donne_ or his _Life of
Herbert_. As a rule the characters that can be extracted from Lives
are much inferior to the clearly defined characters that are inserted
in Histories. The focus is not the same. When an author after dealing
with a man's career sums up his mental and moral qualities in a
section by itself, he does not trust to it alone to convey the total
impression. He is too liable also to panegyric, like Rawley, who could
see no fault in his master Bacon, or Sprat who, in Johnson's words,
produced a funeral oration on Cowley. There are no characters
of scholars or poets so good as Clarendon's Hales, or Earle, or
Chillingworth,