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Brief Lives, Vol. 1

Chapter 272: Note.
By John Aubrey
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BiographiesHistory - Early Modern (c. 1450-1750)

About This Book

A collection of concise biographical sketches compiled from the author's manuscript notes, offering anecdotal portraits of a wide range of literary, scientific, political, and social figures across several generations. Entries blend remembered quotations, learned citation, personal recollection, and occasional gossip, producing uneven but vivid character sketches. Material is presented alphabetically and supplemented by antiquarian notes, a short theatrical piece, and facsimiles of manuscript drawings and plans. An introduction outlines editorial principles and reproduces the manuscript spellings and citations where appropriate, preserving the informality and immediacy of the original notes.

Edmund Gunter (1581-1626).

[1024]Mr. Edmund Gunter[EK]:—for his birth, etc., see in Antiq. Oxon. <by> A. Wood.

Captain Ralph Gretorex, mathematical instrument maker in London, sayd that he was the first that brought mathematicall instruments to perfection. His booke of the quadrant, sector, and crosse-staffe did open men's understandings and made young men in love with that studie. Before, the mathematical sciences were lock't up in the Greeke and Latin tongues and so[1025] lay untoucht, kept safe in some libraries. After Mr. Gunter published his booke, these sciences sprang up amain, more and more to that height it is at now (1690).

When he was a student at Christ Church, it fell to his lott to preach the Passion sermon, which some old divines that I knew did heare, but they sayd that 'twas sayd of him then in the University that our Saviour never suffered so much since his passion as in that sermon, it was such a lamentable one—

Non omnia possumus omnes.

The world is much beholding to him for what he hath donne well.

Gunter is originally a Brecknockshire family, of Tregunter. They came thither under the conduct of Sir Bernard Newmarch when he made the conquest of that county (Camden).—'Aubrey, Gunter, Waldbeof, Havard, Pichard' (which is falsely express'd in all Mr. Camden's bookes, scil. Prichard, which is non-sense).

Note.

[EK] Aubrey gives in trick the coat:—'sable, 3 gauntletts argent'; and adds 'quaere if these gauntletts are dextre or sinistre?'