ABSTRACT
Ovall face. His eie a dark grey. (John Aubrey)
Perhaps the sun liked Nanny (10-year-old)
John Aubrey lived from 1626 to 1697. The quotation above comes from a book known as Brief Lives, which is a collection of biographical notes – anecdotes, really – about famous people. Some of the notes are very short, seven or eight lines; others, like the one on the poet John Milton, go on for pages. The book has a gossipy style which makes it inviting and unthreatening to this modern reader. I learn, for example, that ‘Ben Johnson’ (sic – that is, conventionally, ‘Jonson’) ‘had one eie lower that t’other’ and that Aubrey ‘suppose[s]’ that the death of the poet George Herbert at 36 was ‘hastened’ by his ‘mariage’.
