That thought gave me comfort, and I braced myself under it. I drew a long breath and turned my back on the soft stars and the lights of Venice and the pitiless, lovely, still lagoon, and went to bed convinced of two things: one being that it was fortunate our visit to this accursed beauty-spot was nearly done, and the other that I would do all I could to keep out of the black pit of melancholia, for I saw swiftly down a vista of very dark possibilities. CHAPTER XXII MR. BEMERTON'S SECOND BED BOOK SOLACES ME WITH THE ODD AND HUMANE HUMOURS OF STUARTS AND TUDORS John Aubrey, whose _Brief Lives_ Mr. Bemerton has sent me with a strong recommendation, and to whom I turned that night, is a man after my own heart. He had an eye for character, if you like, and his interest in the picturesque foible was at least as great as his interest in virtue. To read his concise little summaries of Elizabethan and Stuart personalities is to be made free of a most conversible company very near real life. He knows his value as a kind of footpage to the Muse of Biography. He admits it in the following passage:--"About 1676 or 5, as I was walking through Newgate-street, I sawe Dame Venetia's bust standing at a stall at the Golden Crosse, a brazier's shop. I perfectly remembered it, but the fire had gott-off the guilding: but taking notice of it to one that was with me, I could never see it afterwards exposed to the street. They melted it downe. _How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them downe!_" The italics are mine. Then again in the following passage in the notes on John Hoskyns:--"He lies buried under an altar monument on the north side of the choirs of Dowre Abbey in Herefordshire. (In this abbey church of Dowre are two _frustums_ or remaynders of mayled and crosse-legged monuments, one sayd to be of a Lord Chandois, th'other the lord of Ewyas-lacy. A little before I sawe them a mower had taken one of the armes to whett his syth.)" That is the seeing eye. All sorts and conditions of men, provided they had some merit or station, appear in his pages, just as in my Chinese book; but Aubrey kept a special corner for mathematicians and merry ladies. His chief mathematician and perhaps greatest hero was Hobbes of _The Leviathan_; but there are many others. Here, for example, is the description of one:--"He is of little stature, perfect; black haire, of a delicate moyst curle; darke eie, but of great vivacity of spirit. He is of a soft temper, of great temperance (_amat Venerem aliquantum_), of a prodigious invention, and will be acquainted (familiarly) with nobody." Who was that? A thousand guesses. I will tell you. Do you remember at the beginning of atlases a map of the world with the hemispheres flattened out, entitled Mercator's projection? Well, that is a description of Mercator--Mr. Nicholas Mercator. Philip Melancthon, says Aubrey, was Mercator's great-grandmother's brother.