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228 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Dryden=s modernity, however, John Dryden=s Aeneas is a useful addition to Dryden studies. (TANYA CALDWELL) Roger North. Notes of Me: The Autobiography of Roger North. Edited by Peter Millard University of Toronto Press. xx, 354. $65.00 Peter Millard prefaces Roger North=s Notes of Me with some words on >North Studies.= Their growth these last twenty years owes much to Millard=s 1984 edition of the General Preface and Life of Dr John North, and his new volume of the biographer=s writings about himself is especially welcome. Notes of Me appears to date from the mid-1690s, when its author was in his early forties; the manuscript is in >a fairly finished state,= suggesting from its inconsistencies that North B a habitual rewriter B intended to recopy and revise it. It remained unpublished until 1887, and this new edition is the first complete one. Millard modernized the text of the General Preface and Life of Dr John North but now falls in with North=s other recent editors by retaining the spelling with certain modifications, conservatively altering punctuation and modernizing capitalization. This compromise, with its scattering of square brackets, does not really represent the manuscript; it is intended for >a generalist audience.= One hopes there still is a generalist audience, like the one that bought Bohn=s Standard Library Edition in 1890, and that the readership will not be confined to researchers in English history. North is a vigorous and informative writer, and a most engaging one despite his occasional moralizing or the technicality of subjects he may take up. Certainly some sections come alive most readily if readers already know the people involved B the popish plotter William Bedloe, for example, or Judge Jeffreys B but most of the narrative requires just intelligent curiosity about those >private men=s lives= which North in his General Preface holds >more profitable than state history.= Millard=s detailed notes and unhurried introduction supply the necessary information about people, places, or dates (unhelpfully described as >normally New Style=). In the old biographical tradition, North organizes his material as much by topic as chronology; Millard highlights this by introducing headings from North=s >Index seriatim.= The section >Architecture, Perspective, Mathematics , and Light= is a good illustration of North=s fascination with the >practique,= or applied sciences, first evident in his manufacturing at school >lanthornes of paper, balls, thredd purses= and >fireworks as serpents.= North tells us things we won=t learn from more theoretically minded writers: how music, a great passion of the North family, ought to be taught, or how a London half-crown concert was, after a fashion, organized and performed. So too in his career at the bar, with its >fatigue unknowne to all that have not HUMANITIES 229 bin practisers there, for such is the heat, sweat, and paine of standing.= His accounts of cases B together with anecdotal characters of the judges: Hale, Saunders, Jeffreys, and his own revered brother Francis B let us see how lawyers actually worked. On circuit, North records different county dialects and observes as he travels further from London, >coming into Dorsetshire; the country grows new and things lookt a litle strang; the people spoke oddly, and the weomen wore white mantles which they call whittells. And the houses were of stone and slatt, and what wee call gentility of every thing began to wear off.= He vividly describes the Temple burning in the freezing January of 1679. The sequel, more enjoyable for the reader than for North, was the Templars= inability to agree about rebuilding B until the intervention of the megalomaniac developer Nicholas Barbon, a perennial type, as North=s portrayal shows. >There was at last a fail (as allwais in Barbon=s affairs) so the hous was fain to take upon them the winding up of the matter.= Meanwhile North busied himself with the interior design of his >litle chamber= there. North despised the corrupt Restoration court, and later, like his admired patron Sancroft, could never accept the Revolution. He took comfort in believing >that it is, in all cases and circumstances, better to dy[e] then to live= and thought suicide...

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