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.