Aubrey’s Brief Lives is one of those books that YHB had vaguely thought would be good to read, or at least to have read. Eventually, I took it out from the library, and over the better part of a year, managed to read it. Since it is in essence a compilation of short pieces, each a separate brief life, I could read one or two pages a week, or leave off altogether for a month, without losing either any narrative throughline (which there wasn’t, of course) or any necessary information for interpretation (which there wasn’t, really, either). So that was all right. My edition was a Dover from the mid-sixties, I think, and was very questionably edited from a scholarly standpoint, but then, I wasn’t reading it from a scholarly standpoint. I was what Dover had in mind, a not-entirely-ignorant reader who was mildly interested in Civil War gossip and Elizabethan trivia, looking to be entertained in a way I could feel was vaguely edifying, without needing to actually learn anything I need to know later.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.