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102 far from a Puritan as light from darkness"; and that when he had been caught asleep in the House of Commons, and a motion brought that such scandalous members be put out, he said: "Mr. Speaker, a motion has been to turn out the Nodders; I desire the Noddees may also be turned out."

West Lavington was the home of Sir John Danvers, who married Donne's Magdalen Herbert, mother of George Herbert and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. At West Lavington, too, Aubrey "enjoyed the contentment of solitude" in the Earl of Abingdon's walks and gardens, while he arranged his Miscellanies. The Buttons, with whom he went hunting to Avebury, lived at Tockenham. With their neighbours, the Longs of Draycot Cerne, he stayed frequently when he was homeless. Sir James had been swordsman, horseman, falconer, extemporaneous orator, and naturalist, a Cavalier, but suspected by "strict" Cavaliers because Cromwell "fell in love with his company and commanded him to wear his sword, and to meet him a-hawking." Dorothy, his wife, was "a most elegant beauty and wit." From Doll, their daughter, afterwards Lady Heron, Aubrey quotes the saying that "Poets and bravos have punks to their mothers," when he speaks of a love affair of Raleigh's.

Gratitude, hero-worship, curiosity, love-making, and litigation, left Aubrey no time to make more than notes: he could not finish nearly all his sentences. "While hiding from the bailiffs in 1671 at Broad Chalk," says his editor, Mr. Andrew Clark, Aubrey began a rustic comedy, the characters ladies and gentlemen, courtly and old-fashioned, drunken and insolent,