Such a picture may be furnished by some unexpected materials which my
inquiries have obtained of Oldys. This is a sort of personage little
known to the wits, who write more than they read, and to their volatile
votaries, who only read what the wits write. It is time to vindicate the
honours of the few whose laborious days enrich the stores of national
literature, not by the duplicates but the supplements of knowledge. A
literary antiquary is that idler whose life is passed in a perpetual
_voyage autour de ma chambre_; fervent in sagacious diligence, instinct
with the enthusiasm of curious inquiry, critical as well as erudite; he
has to arbitrate between contending opinions, to resolve the doubtful,
to clear up the obscure, and to grasp at the remote; so busied with
other times, and so interested for other persons than those about him,
that he becomes the inhabitant of the visionary world of books. He
counts only his days by his acquisitions, and may be said by his
original discoveries to be the CREATOR OF FACTS; often exciting the
gratitude of the literary world, while the very name of the benefactor
has not always descended with the inestimable labours.
Such is the man whom we often find leaving, when he dies, his favourite
volumes only an incomplete project! and few of this class of literary
men have escaped the fate reserved for most of their brothers.
Voluminous works have been usually left unfinished by the death of the
authors; and it is with them as with the planting of trees, of which
Johnson has forcibly observed, "There is a frightful interval between
the seed and timber." And he admirably remarks, what I cannot forbear
applying to the labours I am now to describe: "He that calculates the
growth of trees has the remembrance of the shortness of life driven hard
upon him. He knows that he is doing what will never benefit himself;
and where he rejoices to see the stem rise, is disposed to repine that
another shall cut it down." The days of the patriotic Count Mazzuchelli
were freely given to his national literature; and six invaluable folios
attest the gigantic force of his immense erudition; yet these only carry
us through the letters A and B: and though Mazzuchelli had finished for
the press other volumes, the torpor of his descendants has defrauded
Europe of her claims.[338] The Abbe Goujet, who had designed a
classified history of his national literature, in the eighteen volumes
we possess, could only conclude that of the translators, and commence
that of the poets; two other volumes in manuscript have perished. That
great enterprise of the Benedictines, the "Histoire Literaire de la
France," now consists of twelve large quartos, and the industry of its
successive writers has only been able to carry it to the twelfth
century. David Clement designed the most extensive bibliography which
had ever appeared; but the diligent life of the writer could only
proceed as far as H. The alphabetical order, which so many writers of
this class have adopted, has proved a mortifying memento of human life!
Tiraboschi was so fortunate as to complete his great national history of
Italian literature. But, unhappily for us, Thomas Warton, after feeling
his way through the darker ages of our poetry, in planning the map of
the beautiful land, of which he had only a Pisgah-sight, expired amidst
his volumes. The most precious portion of Warton's history is but the
fragment of a fragment.
Oldys, among this brotherhood, has met perhaps with a harder fate; his
published works, and the numerous ones to which he contributed, are now
highly appreciated by the lovers of books; but the larger portion of his
literary labours have met with the sad fortune of dispersed, and
probably of wasted manuscripts. Oldys's manuscripts, or O. M. as they
are sometimes designated, are constantly referred to by every
distinguished writer on our literary history. I believe that not one of
them could have given us any positive account of the manuscripts
themselves! They have indeed long served as the solitary sources of
information--but like the well at the wayside, too many have drawn their
waters in silence.
Oldys is chiefly known by the caricature of the facetious Grose; a great
humourist, both with pencil and with pen: it is in a posthumous
scrap-book, where Grose deposited his odds and ends, and where there is
perhaps not a single story which is not satirical. Our lively antiquary,
who cared more for rusty armour than for rusty volumes, would turn over
these flams and quips to some confidential friend, to enjoy together a
secret laugh at their literary intimates. His eager executor, who
happened to be his bookseller, served up the poignant hash to the public
as "Grose's Olio!"[339] The delineation of Oldys is sufficiently
overcharged for "the nonce." One prevalent infirmity of honest Oldys,
his love of companionship over too social a glass, sends him down to
posterity in a grotesque attitude; and Mr. Alexander Chalmers, who has
given us the fullest account of Oldys, has inflicted on him something
like a sermon, on "a state of intoxication."
Alas! Oldys was an outcast of fortune,[340] and the utter simplicity of
his heart was guileless as a child's--ever open to the designing. The
noble spirit of a Duke of Norfolk once rescued the long-lost historian
of Rawleigh from the confinement of the Fleet, where he had existed,
probably forgotten by the world, for six years. It was by an act of
grace that the duke safely placed Oldys in the Heralds' College as
Norroy King of Arms.[341] But Oldys, like all shy and retired men, had
contracted peculiar habits and close attachments for a few; both these
he could indulge at no distance. He liked his old associates in the
purlieus of the Fleet, whom he facetiously dignified as "his Rulers,"
and there, as I have heard, with the grotesque whim of a herald,
established "The Dragon Club." Companionship yields the poor man
unpurchased pleasures. Oldys, busied every morning among the departed
wits and the learned of our country, reflected some image from them of
their wit and learning to his companions: a secret history as yet
untold, and ancient wit, which, cleared of the rust, seemed to him
brilliant as the modern!
It is hard, however, for a literary antiquary to be caricatured, and for
a herald to be ridiculed about an "unseemly reeling with the coronet of
the Princess Caroline, which looked unsteady on the cushion, to the
great scandal of his brethren,"--a circumstance which could never have
occurred at the burial of a prince or princess, as the coronet is
carried by Clarencieux, and not by Norroy. Oldys's deep potations of
ale, however, give me an opportunity of bestowing on him the honour of
being the author of a popular Anacreontic song. Mr. Taylor informs me
that "Oldys always asserted that he was the author of the well-known
song--
Busy, curious, thirsty fly!
and as he was a rigid lover of truth, I doubt not that he wrote it." My
own researches confirm it: I have traced this popular song through a
dozen of collections since the year 1740, the first in which I find it.
In the later collections an original inscription has been dropped, which
the accurate Ritson has restored, without, however, being able to
discover the writer. In 1740 it is said to have been "made extempore by
a gentleman, occasioned by a _fly_ drinking out of his _cup of
ale_;"--the accustomed potion of poor Oldys![342]
Grose, however, though a great joker on the peculiarities of Oldys, was
far from insensible to the extraordinary acquisitions of the man. "His
knowledge of English books has hardly been exceeded." Grose, too, was
struck by the delicacy of honour, and the unswerving veracity which so
strongly characterised Oldys, of which he gives a remarkable
instance.[343] We are concerned in ascertaining the moral integrity of
the writer, whose main business is with history.
At a time when our literary history, excepting in the solitary labour of
Anthony Wood, was a forest, with neither road nor pathway, Oldys,
fortunately placed in the library of the Earl of Oxford, yielded up his
entire days to researches concerning the books and the men of the
preceding age. His labours were then valueless, their very nature not
yet ascertained, and when he opened the treasures of our ancient lore in
"The British Librarian," it was closed for want of public encouragement.
Our writers, then struggling to create an age of genius of their own,
forgot that they had had any progenitors; or while they were acquiring
new modes of excellence, that they were losing others, to which their
posterity or the national genius might return. (To know, and to admire
only, the literature and the tastes of our own age, is a species of
elegant barbarism.)[344] Spenser was considered nearly as obsolete as
Chaucer; Milton was veiled by oblivion, and Shakspeare's dramas were so
imperfectly known, that in looking over the play-bills of 1711, and much
later, I find that whenever it chanced that they were acted, they were
always announced to have been "written by Shakspeare." Massinger was
unknown; and Jonson, though called "immortal" in the old play-bills, lay
entombed in his two folios. The poetical era of Elizabeth, the eloquent
age of James the First, and the age of wit of Charles the Second, were
blanks in our literary history. Bysshe, compiling an Art of Poetry in
1718, passed by in his collection "_Spenser and the poets of his age_,
because their language is now become so obsolete that most readers of
our age have no ear for them, and therefore _Shakspeare_ himself is so
_rarely cited_ in my collection." The _best_ English poets were
considered to be the _modern_; a taste which is always obstinate!
All this was nothing to Oldys; his literary curiosity anticipated by
half a century the fervour of the present day. This energetic direction
of all his thoughts was sustained by that life of discovery which in
literary researches is starting novelties among old and unremembered
things; contemplating some ancient tract as precious as a manuscript, or
revelling in the volume of a poet whose passport of fame was yet delayed
in its way; or disinterring the treasure of some secluded manuscript,
whence he drew a virgin extract; or raising up a sort of domestic
intimacy with the eminent in arms, in politics, and in literature in
this visionary life, life itself with Oldys was insensibly gliding
away--its cares almost unfelt!
The life of a literary antiquary partakes of the nature of those who,
having no concerns of their own, busy themselves with those of others.
Oldys lived in the back ages of England; he had crept among the dark
passages of Time, till, like an old gentleman usher, he seemed to be
reporting the secret history of the courts which he had lived in. He had
been charmed among their masques and revels, had eyed with astonishment
their cumbrous magnificence, when knights and ladies carried on their
mantles and their cloth of gold ten thousand pounds' worth of ropes of
pearls, and buttons of diamonds; or, descending to the gay court of the
second Charles, he tattled merry tales, as in that of the first he had
painfully watched, like a patriot or a loyalist, a distempered era. He
had lived so constantly with these people of another age, and had so
deeply interested himself in their affairs, and so loved the wit and the
learning which are often bright under the rust of antiquity, that his
own uncourtly style is embrowned with the tint of a century old. But it
was this taste and curiosity which alone could have produced the
extraordinary volume of Sir Walter Rawleigh's life--a work richly inlaid
with the most curious facts and the juxtaposition of the most remote
knowledge; to judge by its fulness of narrative, it would seem rather to
have been the work of a contemporary.[345]
It was an advantage in this primaeval era of literary curiosity, that
those volumes which are now not even to be found in our national
library, where certainly they are perpetually wanted, and which are now
so excessively appreciated, were exposed on stalls, through the reigns
of Anne and the two Georges.[346] Oldys encountered no competitor, cased
in the invulnerable mail of his purse, to dispute his possession of the
rarest volume. On the other hand, our early collector did not possess
our advantages; he could not fly for instant aid to a "Biographia
Britannica," he had no history of our poetry, nor even of our drama.
Oldys could tread in no man's path, for every soil about him was
unbroken ground. He had to create everything for his own purposes. We
gather fruit from trees which others have planted, and too often we but
"pluck and eat."
_Nulla dies sine linea_, was his sole hope while he was accumulating
masses of notes; and as Oldys never used his pen from the weak passion
of scribbling, but from the urgency of preserving some substantial
knowledge, or planning some future inquiry, he amassed nothing but what
he wished to remember. Even the minuter pleasures of settling a date, or
classifying a title-page, were enjoyments to his incessant pen.
Everything was acquisition. This never-ending business of research
appears to have absorbed his powers, and sometimes to have dulled his
conceptions. No one more aptly exercised the _tact_ of discovery; he
knew where to feel in the dark: but he was not of the race--that race
indeed had not yet appeared among us--who could melt into their
Corinthian brass the mingled treasures of Research, Imagination, and
Philosophy!
We may be curious to inquire where our literary antiquary deposited the
discoveries and curiosities which he was so incessantly acquiring. They
were dispersed, on many a fly-leaf, in occasional memorandum-books; in
ample marginal notes on his authors--they were sometimes thrown into
what he calls his "parchment budgets," or "Bags of Biography--of
Botany--of Obituary"--of "Books relative to London," and other titles
and bags, which he was every day filling.[347] Sometimes his collections
seem to have been intended for a series of volumes, for he refers to "My
first Volume of Tables of the eminent Persons celebrated by English
Poets"--to another of "Poetical Characteristics." Among those
manuscripts which I have seen, I find one mentioned, apparently of a
wide circuit, under the reference of "My Biographical Institutions. Part
third; containing a Catalogue of all the English Lives, with Historical
and Critical Observations on them." But will our curious or our
whimsical collectors of the present day endure without impatience the
loss of a quarto manuscript, which bears this rich condiment for its
title--"Of London Libraries; with Anecdotes of Collectors of Books;
Remarks on Booksellers; and on the first Publishers of Catalogues?"
Oldys left ample annotations on "Fuller's Worthies," and "Winstanley's
Lives of the Poets," and on "Langbaine's Dramatic Poets." The late Mr.
Boswell showed me a _Fuller_ in the Malone collection, with Steevens's
transcriptions of _Oldys's notes_, which Malone purchased for 43_l._ at
Steevens's sale; but where is the original copy of Oldys? The
"Winstanley," I think, also reposes in the same collection. The
"Langbaine" is far-famed, and is preserved in the British Museum, the
gift of Dr. Birch; it has been considered so precious, that several of
our eminent writers have cheerfully passed through the labour of a
minute transcription of its numberless notes. In the history of the fate
and fortune of books, that of Oldys's _Langbaine_ is too curious to
omit. Oldys may tell his own story, which I find in the Museum copy, p.
336, and which copy appears to be a _second_ attempt; for of the _first_
Langbaine we have this account:--
When I left London in 1724, to reside in _Yorkshire_, I left in the
care of the Rev. Mr. Burridge's family, with whom I had several years
lodged, among many other books, goods, &c., a copy of this
"Langbaine," in which I had wrote several notes and references to
further knowledge of these poets. When I returned to London, 1730, I
understood my books had been dispersed; and afterwards becoming
acquainted with Mr. T. Coxeter, I found that he had bought my
"Langbaine" of a bookseller who was a great collector of plays and
poetical books: this must have been of service to him, and he has
kept it so carefully from my sight, that I never could have the
opportunity of transcribing into this I am now writing in the notes I
had collected in that.[348]
This _first_ Langbaine, with additions by Coxeter, was bought, at the
sale of his books, by Theophilus Cibber: on the strength of these notes
he prefixed his name to the first collection of the "Lives of our
Poets," which appeared in weekly numbers, and now form five volumes,
written chiefly by Shiels, an amanuensis of Dr. Johnson. Shiels has been
recently castigated by Mr. Gifford.
These literary jobbers nowhere distinguished Coxeter's and Oldys's
curious matter from their own. Such was the fate of the _first_ copy of
Langbaine, with _Oldys's notes_; but the _second_ is more important. At
an auction of some of Oldys's books and manuscripts, of which I have
seen a printed catalogue, Dr. Birch purchased this invaluable copy for
three shillings and sixpence.[349] Such was the value attached to these
original researches concerning our poets, and of which, to obtain only a
transcript, very large sums have since been cheerfully given. The Museum
copy of Langbaine is in Oldys's handwriting, not interleaved, but
overflowing with notes, written in a very small hand about the margins,
and inserted between the lines; nor may the transcriber pass negligently
even its corners, otherwise he is here assured that he will lose some
useful date, or the hint of some curious reference. The enthusiasm and
diligence of Oldys, in undertaking a repetition of his first lost
labour, proved to be infinitely greater than the sense of his unrequited
labours. Such is the history of the escapes, the changes, and the fate
of a volume which forms the groundwork of the most curious information
concerning our elder poets, and to which we must still frequently refer.
In this variety of literary arrangements, which we must consider as
single works in a progressive state, or as portions of one great work on
our modern literary history, it may, perhaps, be justly suspected that
Oldys, in the delight of perpetual acquisition, impeded the happier
labour of unity of design and completeness of purpose. He was not a
Tiraboschi--nor even a Niceron! He was sometimes chilled by neglect,
and by "vanity and vexation of spirit," else we should not now have to
count over a barren list of manuscript works; masses of literary
history, of which the existence is even doubtful.
In Kippis's Biographia Britannica we find frequent references to O. M.,
Oldys's Manuscripts. Mr. John Taylor, the son of the friend and executor
of Oldys, has greatly obliged me with all his recollections of this man
of letters; whose pursuits, however, were in no manner analogous to his,
and whom he could only have known in youth. By him I learn, that on the
death of Oldys, Dr. Kippis, editor of the Biographia Britannica, looked
over these manuscripts at Mr. Taylor's house. He had been directed to
this discovery by the late Bishop of Dromore, whose active zeal was very
remarkable in every enterprise to enlarge our literary history. Kippis
was one who, in some degree, might have estimated their literary value;
but, employed by commercial men, and negotiating with persons who
neither comprehended their nature, nor affixed any value to them, the
editor of the Biographia found Oldys's manuscripts an easy purchase for
his employer, the late Mr. Cadell; and the twenty guineas, perhaps,
served to bury their writer! Mr. Taylor says--"The manuscripts of Oldys
were not so many as might be expected from so indefatigable a writer.
They consisted chiefly of short extracts from books, and minutes of
dates, and were _thought worth purchasing_ by the doctor. I remember the
manuscripts well; though Oldys was not the author, but rather recorder."
Such is the statement and the opinion of a writer whose effusions are of
a gayer sort. But the researches of Oldys must not be estimated by this
standard; with him a single line was the result of many a day of
research, and a leaf of scattered hints would supply more _original
knowledge_ than some octavos fashioned out by the hasty gilders and
varnishers of modern literature. These _discoveries_ occupy small space
to the eye; but large works are composed out of them. This very lot of
Oldys's manuscripts was, indeed, so considerable in the judgment of
Kippis, that he has described them as "_a large and useful body of
biographical materials, left by Mr. Oldys_." Were these the
"Biographical Institutes" Oldys refers to among his manuscripts? "The
late Mr. Malone," continues Mr. Taylor, "told me that he had seen _all
Oldys's manuscripts_; so I presume they are in the hands of Cadell and
Davies." Have they met with the fate of sucked oranges?--and how much of
Malone may we owe to Oldys?
This information enabled me to trace the manuscripts of Oldys to Dr.
Kippis; but it cast me among the booksellers, who do not value
manuscripts which no one can print. I discovered, by the late Mr.
Davies, that the direction of that hapless work in our literary history,
with its whole treasure of manuscripts, had been consigned by Mr. Cadell
to the late George Robinson, and that the successor of Dr. Kippis had
been the late Dr. George Gregory. Again I repeat, the history of
voluminous works is a melancholy office; every one concerned with them
no longer can be found! The esteemed relict of Dr. Gregory, with a
friendly promptitude, gratified my anxious inquiries, and informed me,
that "she perfectly recollects a mass of papers, such as I described,
being returned, on the death of Dr. Gregory, to the house of Wilkie and
Robinson, in the early part of the year 1809." I applied to this house,
who, after some time, referred me to Mr. John Robinson, the
representative of his late father, and with whom all the papers of the
former partnership were deposited. But Mr. John Robinson has terminated
my inquiries, by his civility in promising to comply with them, and his
pertinacity in not doing so. He may have injured his own interest in not
trading with my curiosity.[350] It was fortunate for the nation that
George Vertue's mass of manuscripts escaped the fate of Oldys's; had the
possessor proved as indolent, Horace Walpole would not have been the
writer of his most valuable work, and we should have lost the "Anecdotes
of Painting," of which Vertue had collected the materials.
Of a life consumed in such literary activity we should have known more
had the _Diaries_ of Oldys escaped destruction. "One habit of my
father's old friend, William Oldys," says Mr. Taylor, "was that of
keeping a diary, and recording in it every day all the events that
occurred, and all his engagements, and the employment of his time. I
have seen piles of these books, but know not what became of them." The
existence of such _diaries_ is confirmed by a sale catalogue of Thomas
Davies, the literary bookseller, who sold many of the books and _some
manuscripts of Oldys_, which appear to have been dispersed in various
libraries. I find Lot "3627, Mr. Oldys's Diary, containing several
observations relating to books, characters, &c.;" a single volume, which
appears to have separated from the "piles" which Mr. Taylor once
witnessed. The literary diary of Oldys could have exhibited the mode of
his pursuits, and the results of his discoveries. One of these volumes I
have fortunately discovered, and a singularity in this writer's feelings
throws a new interest over such diurnal records. Oldys was apt to give
utterance with his pen to his most secret emotions. Querulous or
indignant, his honest simplicity confided to the paper before him such
extemporaneous soliloquies, and I have found him hiding in the very
corners of his manuscripts his "secret sorrows."
A few of these slight memorials of his feelings will exhibit a sort of
_Silhouette_ likeness traced by his own hand, when at times the pensive
man seems to have contemplated his own shadow. Oldys would throw down in
verses, whose humility or quaintness indicates their origin, or by some
pithy adage, or apt quotation, or recording anecdote, his self-advice,
or his self-regrets!
Oppressed by a sense of tasks so unprofitable to himself, while his days
were often passed in trouble and in prison, he breathes a self-reproach
in one of these profound reflections of melancholy which so often
startle the man of study, who truly discovers that life is too limited
to acquire real knowledge, with the ambition of dispensing it to the
world:--
I say, who too long in these cobwebs lurks,
Is always whetting tools, but never works.
In one of the corners of his note-books I find this curious but sad
reflection:--
Alas! this is but the apron of a fig-leaf--but the curtain of a cobweb.
Sometimes he seems to have anticipated the fate of that obscure
diligence which was pursuing discoveries reserved for others to use:--
He heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.
Fond treasurer of these stores, behold thy fate
In Psalm the thirty-ninth, 6, 7, and 8.
Sometimes he checks the eager ardour of his pen, and reminds himself of
its repose, in Latin, Italian, and English.
----Non vi, sed saepe cadendo.
Assai presto si fa quel che si fa bene.
Some respite best recovers what we need,
Discreetly baiting gives the journey speed.
There was a thoughtless kindness in honest Oldys; and his simplicity of
character, as I have observed, was practised on by the artful or the
ungenerous. We regret to find the following entry concerning the famous
collector, James West:--
I gave above threescore letters of Dr. Davenant to his son, who was
envoy at Frankfort in 1703 to 1708, to Mr. James West,[351] with one
hundred and fifty more, about Christmas, 1746: but the same fate they
found as grain that is sown in barren ground.
Such is the plaintive record by which Oldys relieved himself of a groan!
We may smile at the simplicity of the following narrative, where poor
Oldys received manuscripts in lieu of money:--
Old Counsellor Fane, of Colchester, who, _in forma pauperis_,
deceived me of a good sum of money which he owed me, and not long
after set up his chariot, gave me a parcel of manuscripts, and
promised me others, which he never gave me, nor anything else,
besides a barrel of oysters, and a manuscript copy of Randolph's
poems, an original, as he said, with many additions, being devolved
to him as the author's relation.
There was no end to his aids and contributions to every author or
bookseller who applied to him; yet he had reason to complain of both
while they were using his invaluable but not valued knowledge. Here is
one of these diurnal entries:--
I lent the tragical lives and deaths of the famous pirates, Ward and
Dansiker, 4to, London, 1612, by Robt. Daborn, alias Dabourne, to Mr.
T. Lediard, when he was writing his Naval History, and he never
returned it. See Howell's Letters of them.
In another, when his friend T. Hayward was collecting, for his "British
Muse," the most exquisite commonplaces of our old English dramatists, a
compilation which must not be confounded with ordinary ones, Oldys not
only assisted in the labour, but drew up a curious introduction with a
knowledge and love of the subject which none but himself possessed. But
so little were these researches then understood, that we find Oldys, in
a moment of vexatious recollection, and in a corner of one of the
margins of his Langbaine, accidentally preserving an extraordinary
circumstance attending this curious dissertation. Oldys having completed
this elaborate introduction, "the penurious publisher insisted on
leaving out one third part, which happened to be the best matter in it,
because he would have it contracted into _one sheet_!" Poor Oldys never
could forget the fate of this elaborate Dissertation on all the
collections of English poetry; I am confident that I have seen some
volume which was formerly Oldys's, and afterwards Thomas Warton's, in
the possession of my intelligent friend Mr. Douce, in the fly-leaf of
which Oldys has expressed himself in these words:--"In my historical and
critical review of all the collections of this kind, it would have made
a sheet and a half or two sheets; but they for sordid gain, and to save
a little expense in print and paper, got Mr. John Campbell _to cross it
and cramp it, and play the devil with it, till they squeezed it into
less compass than a sheet_." This is a loss which we may never recover.
The curious book-knowledge of this singular man of letters, those stores
of which he was the fond treasurer, as he says with such tenderness for
his pursuits, were always ready to be cast into the forms of a
dissertation or an introduction; and when Morgan published his
Collection of Rare Tracts, the friendly hand of Oldys furnished "A
Dissertation upon Pamphlets, in a Letter to a Nobleman;" probably the
Earl of Oxford, a great literary curiosity; and in the Harleian
Collection he has given a _Catalogue raisonne_ of six hundred. When Mrs.
Cooper attempted "The Muse's Library," the first essay which influenced
the national taste to return to our deserted poets in our most poetical
age, it was Oldys who only could have enabled this lady to perform that
task so well.[352] When Curll, the publisher, to help out one of his
hasty compilations, a "History of the Stage," repaired, like all the
world, to Oldys, whose kindness could not resist the importunity of
this busy publisher, he gave him a life of Nell Gwynn; while at the same
moment Oldys could not avoid noticing, in one of his usual entries, an
intended work on the stage, which we seem never to have had, "_Dick
Leveridge's History of the Stage and Actors in his own Time_, for these
forty or fifty years past, as he told me he had composed, is likely to
prove, whenever it shall appear, a more perfect work." I might proceed
with many similar gratuitous contributions with which he assisted his
contemporaries. Oldys should have been constituted the reader for the
nation. His _Comptes Rendus_ of books and manuscripts are still held
precious; but his useful and curious talent had sought the public
patronage in vain! From one of his "Diaries," which has escaped
destruction, I transcribe some interesting passages _ad verbum_.
The reader is here presented with a minute picture of those invisible
occupations which pass in the study of a man of letters. There are those
who may be surprised, as well as amused, in discovering how all the
business, even to the very disappointments and pleasures of active life,
can be transferred to the silent chamber of a recluse student; but there
are others who will not read without emotion the secret thoughts of him
who, loving literature with its purest passion, scarcely repines at
being defrauded of his just fame, and leaves his stores for the
after-age of his more gifted heirs. Thus we open one of Oldys's literary
days:--
I was informed that day by Mr. Tho. Odell's daughter, that her
father, who was Deputy-Inspector and Licenser of the Plays, died 24
May, 1749, at his house in Chappel-street, Westminster, aged 58
years. He was writing a history of the characters he had observed,
and conferences he had had with many eminent persons he knew in his
time. He was a great observator of everything curious in the
conversations of his acquaintance, and his own conversation was a
living chronicle of the remarkable intrigues, adventures, sayings,
stories, writings, &c., of many of the quality, poets, and other
authors, players, booksellers, &c., who flourished especially in the
present century. He had been a popular man at elections, and sometime
master of the playhouse in Goodman's Fields, but latterly was forced
to live reserved and retired by reason of his debts. He published two
or three dramatic pieces, one was the _Patron_, on the story of Lord
Romney.
Q. of his da. to restore me Eustace Budgell's papers, and to get a
sight of her father's.
Have got the one, and seen the other.
July 31.--Was at Mrs. Odell's; she returned me Mr. Budgell's papers.
Saw some of her husband's papers, mostly poems in favour of the
ministry, and against Mr. Pope. One of them, printed by the late Sir
Robert Walpole's encouragement, who gave him ten guineas for writing
and as much for the expense of printing it; but through his advice
it was never published, because it might hurt his interest with Lord
Chesterfield, and some other noblemen who favoured Mr. Pope for his
fine genius. The tract I liked best of his writings was the history
of his playhouse in Goodman's Fields. (Remember that which was
published against that playhouse, which I have entered in my London
Catalogue. Letter to Sir Ric. Brocas, Lord Mayor, &c., 8vo, 1730.)
Saw nothing of the history of his conversations with ingenious men;
his characters, tales, jests, and intrigues of them, of which no man
was better furnished with them. She thinks she has some papers of
these, and promises to look them out, and also to inquire after Mr.
Griffin, of the Lord Chamberlain's office, that I may get a search
made about _Spenser_.
So intent was Oldys on these literary researches that we see, by the
last words of this entry, how in hunting after one sort of game, his
undivided zeal kept his eye on another. One of his favourite subjects
was the realising of original discoveries respecting Spenser and
Shakspeare; of whom, perhaps, to our shame, as it is to our vexation, it
may be said that two of our master-poets are those of whom we know the
least! Oldys once flattered himself that he should be able to have given
the world a Life of Shakspeare. Mr. John Taylor informs me, that "Oldys
had contracted to supply ten years of the life of Shakspeare _unknown to
the biographers_, with one Walker, a bookseller in the Strand; and as
Oldys did not live to fulfil the engagement, my father was obliged to
return to Walker twenty guineas which he had advanced on the work."
_That interesting narrative is now hopeless for us._ Yet, by the solemn
contract into which Oldys had entered, and from his strict integrity, it
might induce one to suspect that he had made positive discoveries which
are now irrecoverable.