Curiosities of Literature Volume Iii Part 44

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." Ma.s.singer 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, pa.s.sed 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 ma.n.u.script, or revelling in the volume of a poet whose pa.s.sport of fame was yet delayed in its way; or disinterring the treasure of some secluded ma.n.u.script, 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 pa.s.sages 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 c.u.mbrous magnificence, when knights and ladies carried on their mantles and their cloth of gold ten thousand pounds' worth of ropes of pearls, and b.u.t.tons 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 compet.i.tor, 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 acc.u.mulating ma.s.ses of notes; and as Oldys never used his pen from the weak pa.s.sion of scribbling, but from the urgency of preserving some substantial knowledge, or planning some future inquiry, he ama.s.sed nothing but what he wished to remember. Even the minuter pleasures of settling a date, or cla.s.sifying a t.i.tle-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 bra.s.s 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 t.i.tles 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 ma.n.u.scripts which I have seen, I find one mentioned, apparently of a wide circuit, under the reference of "My Biographical Inst.i.tutions. 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 ma.n.u.script, which bears this rich condiment for its t.i.tle--"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 pa.s.sed 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 _Yorks.h.i.+re_, 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. c.o.xeter, 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 c.o.xeter, 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 s.h.i.+els, an amanuensis of Dr. Johnson. s.h.i.+els has been recently castigated by Mr. Gifford.

These literary jobbers nowhere distinguished c.o.xeter'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 ma.n.u.scripts, of which I have seen a printed catalogue, Dr. Birch purchased this invaluable copy for three s.h.i.+llings 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 pa.s.s negligently even its corners, otherwise he is here a.s.sured that he will lose some useful date, or the hint of some curious reference. The enthusiasm and diligence of Oldys, in undertaking a repet.i.tion 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 ma.n.u.script works; ma.s.ses of literary history, of which the existence is even doubtful.

In Kippis's Biographia Britannica we find frequent references to O. M., Oldys's Ma.n.u.scripts. 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 a.n.a.logous 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts an easy purchase for his employer, the late Mr. Cadell; and the twenty guineas, perhaps, served to bury their writer! Mr. Taylor says--"The ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 fas.h.i.+oned out by the hasty gilders and varnishers of modern literature. These _discoveries_ occupy small s.p.a.ce to the eye; but large works are composed out of them. This very lot of Oldys's ma.n.u.scripts 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 Inst.i.tutes" Oldys refers to among his ma.n.u.scripts? "The late Mr. Malone," continues Mr. Taylor, "told me that he had seen _all Oldys's ma.n.u.scripts_; 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 ma.n.u.scripts of Oldys to Dr.

Kippis; but it cast me among the booksellers, who do not value ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts, 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 prompt.i.tude, gratified my anxious inquiries, and informed me, that "she perfectly recollects a ma.s.s 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 partners.h.i.+p 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 ma.s.s of ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 pa.s.sed 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 ap.r.o.n of a fig-leaf--but the curtain of a cobweb.

Sometimes he seems to have antic.i.p.ated 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.

a.s.sai 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts, and promised me others, which he never gave me, nor anything else, besides a barrel of oysters, and a ma.n.u.script 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 a.s.sisted 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 circ.u.mstance 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 compa.s.s 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 n.o.bleman;" 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, "_d.i.c.k 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 a.s.sisted his contemporaries. Oldys should have been const.i.tuted the reader for the nation. His _Comptes Rendus_ of books and ma.n.u.scripts 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 pa.s.sages _ad verb.u.m_.

The reader is here presented with a minute picture of those invisible occupations which pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sion, 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 n.o.blemen 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_.