Brief life

Sir: Trevor Grove was perhaps better in- spired than he realised in setting as your Competition No. 553 the 'brief life' of a demoted saint, since John Aubrey would have fully appreciated (although he might not have approved) the reasoning behind this demotion. Indeed, he accumulated a great deal of material on pagan elements in Christian belief and practice for his Rentaines of Gentilisnte and Judaisme. By an even stranger coincidence one of the prize-winners, Vera Telfer, selected St George, and it might not be uninteresting for your readers to see what Aubrey him- self had to say on the. subject in the Remaines.

His point of departure is the parallel be- tween the Legend of St George's saving the princess from a dragon and the myth of Perseus's similar feat with Andromeda and the sea-monster. After quoting Ovid's account (Metamorphoses IV 699 if), he continues: 'The Story of St George does so much resemble this that it makes us suspect 'tis but copied from it. Dr Peter Heylin did write the History of St George of Cappo- docia, which is a very blind business.

Ned Bagshaw of Christ Church 1652 shewed me somewhere in Nicephoras Gre- goras, That the Picture of St George's horse on a wall neighed upon some occasion'. I don't thinke Dr Heylin consulted so much Greeke.

When I was of Trinity College there was a Sale of Mr William Cartwright's (Poet) bookes, many whereof I had; amongst others (1 know not how) was Dr Daniel Featley's2 Handmayd to Devotion; which was printed shortly after Dr Heylin's His- tory aforesaid. In the Holyday Devotions he speaker of St George, and asserts the story to be fabulous: and that there was never any such man. William Cartwright writes in the margent, "For this assertion was Dr Featley brought upon his knees before William Laud Arch-Bishop of Canter- bury."

Methinks the picture of St George fight- ing with the Dragon bath some resemblance of St Michael fighting with the Devil, who is pourtrated like a Dragon. See Sir Thomas Brownes Vulgar Errors concerning St George where are good Remarks. He is of opinion that the picture of St George was only Emblematical. I will conclude this paragraph with these following verses, that I remember somewhere:

To save a Mayd, St. George the Dragon slew, A pretty tale, if all is told be true; Most say, there are no Dragons: and 'tis sayd, There was no George; pray God there was a Mayd.

But notwithstanding these verses, there was such a one as St George of Cappo- docia; who was made Bishop of Alexandria, and is mentioned by St Heirome, etc. ('Quis credere possit? Ovid Metamorph. 15. 2He was the minister at Lambeth, where

he is buried.) [Aubrey's marginal notes.]' And yet, to judge both by the entries themselves and by Trevor Grove's remarks, one wonders how Aubrey would have fared had he submitted this to your competition. It has been his peculiar misfortune to have been known to successive generations by

only one of his works (once it was the Miscellanies, now it is the Brief Lives) and

to have had the bulk of his writings on so many and varied topics ignored. I hope, then, I may not be accused of envious pedantry if, while paying tribute to Patrick

Garland's undoubted skill in isolating and adapting Brief Lives to the stage and to

Roy Dotrice for a brilliant performance, I do protest that his John Aubrey has only the slightest basis of historical fact and that his portrayal is a slight on the memory of a remarkable and representative figure of a remarkable age.

This decrepit, grubby and garrulous old man was in fact robust enough to travel the breadth of England in the rugged con- ditions of the seventeenth century until the day of his death, sufficiently attentive to his appearance to praise henna as a hair- dye and very far from being a dirty-minded old gossip. Our age enjoys grubbing for

dirt, and if we find it in Aubrey, we find it because he was interested in all aspects

of human behaviour. This breadth of inter- est in humanity is matched by the range

of his intellectual interests. He was on terms of friendship with the leading men of his day in so many branches of learning. with antiquarians such as Dugdale and Tanner, geologists such as Lister, scientist such as Hooke, astronomers and meteor- ologists such as Halley, naturalists such as Ray, physiologists such as Hervey and his pupil Ent or mathematicians such as Wren, that it is an injustice to think of him merely as a scandal-monger. True his Brief Lives give us a marvellous insight into his world, but it is the world of Baconian science, Aubrey was the pupil of the first English materialist philosopher, Hobbes, and it is in the study of this singularly gifted man, John Aubrey, that we can assess the impact of one of the greatest revolutions of human thought.

John Buchanan-Brown Highwood Lodge, 85 Fortis Green, London N2