One hundred and sixty examples of the thumbnail sketch as written two and a half centuries before Research was put on a scientific basis. Aubrey was not much hampered by the constricting distinction between fact and hearsay; his method of composition was utterly capricious; and because of an excess of sociability, he usually wrote under the influence of a hang-over. The resulting pieces, fortified by the charm of quaintness, make lively and delightful reading.
Among Aubrey’s subjects are Sir Walter Raleigh, Descartes, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. A typical wind-up: “Sir Robert Pye, Attorney of the Court of Wardes ... happened to dye on Christmas day: the news being brought to the Serjeant, said he, The devill haz a Christmas-pye.” The painstaking editing has been matched by a handsome job of bookmaking.
Challenge: An Anthology of the Literature of Mountaineering, edited by William Robert Irwin.Columbia University Press. $4.75.
This unusual collection shows that mountaineering can be almost as fascinating to read about as murder — even to the reader whose only climbing has been done in an elevator, Challenge contains twenty-five accounts of mountain climbing by American and British authors of the past hundred years. A majority of the selections are high adventure; the remainder deal with the emotional, imaginative, and other aspects of “extraordinary adventure wilfully sought.” International intrigue is mixed with mountaineering in the story by John Buchan. Thoreau chronicles an ascent of Mount Katahdin, Maine; and Sir Leslie Stephen is represented with a reflective essay on an ascent of Mont Blanc. Evelyn Waugh manages to be very amusing about an agonizing scramble up the heights beside Aden, in the company of a perfumed dandy who turns out to be a veritable eagle. In less frivolous company, the reader scales the Himalayas, the Andes, and the peaks of Africa and Asia Minor.