Letters Written by Eminent Persons in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

This three-volume compilation by the Oxford antiquary John Walker (1770–1831) consists mainly of manuscripts from the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum, but is significant because it contains the biographical notes on the 'lives of eminent men' furnished by John Aubrey (1626–97) to Anthony à Wood, who was at the time compiling his Athenae Oxonienses. Aubrey's subsequently famous Brief Lives were published for the first time in this 1813 work, and, although described as the fourth appendix to it, in fact comprise slightly less than half of the second volume and the entirety of the third. Volume 2, Part 2 consists of the remainder of Aubrey's 'lives', organised alphabetically from Foote to Wright, together with his extended biography of Thomas Hobbes, which the famous philosopher had asked his friend Aubrey to write, but which again existed only in manuscript form until it was published in this compilation.