Letters Written by Eminent Persons in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

This three-volume 1813 compilation contains the manuscript notes which later became famous as John Aubrey's Brief Lives.

This three-volume 1813 compilation consists of antiquarian manuscripts from the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum, but is significant for containing the notes on the 'lives of eminent men' by John Aubrey, which were published here for the first time, and later became famous as his Brief Lives.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 1 consist of letters between antiquaries including Kenelm Digby, John Cotton and William Dugdale, on topics ranging from the Cornish language and the cure for a bite from a mad dog to the visit of the Princess Anne to Oxford during the tumult of her father's deposition in 1688.