Letters Written by Eminent Persons in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: To Which Are Added, Hearne’s Journeys to Reading, and to Whaddon Hall, the Seat of Browne Willis, Esq., and Lives of Eminent Men

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 a 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 1 contains letters to and from the librarian and antiquary Thomas Hearne, as well as two accounts of Hearne’s travels, on foot to Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire in 1716, and on horseback to Reading and Silchester in 1714, and the first fifty (organised alphabetically from Aiton to Fletcher) of Aubrey’s ‘lives’.