this by being the contemporary of more distinguished writers in his own fields, and by the fact that the pulpit, though still powerful, was less powerful than it had been, and that the gradual "taming" process, of which Tillotson had set the example, had brought its exercises close to the uninteresting. As a mere writer he could not vie with Addison or Swift;

as a writer in controversial divinity he could not vie with Law on one side or Berkeley on another. Nevertheless, he exhibited the earlier form of eighteenthcentury prose in a very good measure, and showed it capacities in the various uses to which he applied it.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1894, English Prose, ed. Craik, vol. III, p. 300.

PERSONAL

Alas!-Oldys was an outcast of fortune, 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. 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, who he facetiously dignified as "his Rulers," and there, as I have heard, with the grotesque whim of a herald, established "The Dragon Club.' —DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1791-1824, Oldys and His Manuscripts, Curiosities of Literature.

Nothing, I firmly believe, would ever have biassed him to insert any fact in his writings he did not believe, or to supress any he did. Of this delicacy he gave an instance at a time when he was in great distress. After his publication of the life of Sir Walter Raleigh, some booksellers, thinking his name would sell a piece they were publishing, offered him a considerable sum to father it, which he rejected with the greatest indignation.-GROSE, FRANCIS, 1793, The Olio.

Was equally noted for his love of "old

books" and regard for "old wine," or rather strong ale. "Old friends" he too often disgusted by his deep potations: e.g. at the funeral of the Princess Caroline. He made large literary collections, and aided any who asked his assistance in their books, but published little himself.-ALLIBONE, S. AUSTIN, 1870, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature, vol. II, p. 1453.

Oldys was connected with the College of Arms for nearly five years. His library was a large room up one flight of stairs in Norroy's apartments, in the west wing of the college. His notes were written on sified and deposited in parchment bags slips of paper, which he afterwards classuspended on the walls of his room. In this way he covered several quires of paper with laborious collections for a complete life of "Shakespeare" and from these notes Isaac Reed made extracts which are included among the "Additional Anecdotes" appended to Rowe's life of the poet. At this period Oldys frequently passed his evenings at the house of John Taylor the oculist of Hatton Garden, where he always preferred the fireside in the kitchen, so that he might not be obliged to mingle with the other visitors. His last literary production was "The Life of Charles Cotton," prefixed to Sir John Hawkins's edition of Walton's "Complete Angler," 1760. He died at his apartments in the College of Arms on 15 April

1761, and was buried on the 19th in the north aisle of the church of St. Benet, Paul's Wharf. His friend John Taylor on 20 June 1761, administered as principal creditor, defrayed the funeral expenses, and obtained possession of his official regalia, books, and valuable manuscripts. -COOPER, THOMPSON, 1895, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XLII, p. 122.

GENERAL

If its author ["British Librarian"], who is of all men living the most capable, would pursue and perfect this plan, he would do equal justice to the living and to the dead.-CAMPBELL, JOHN, 1754, Rational Amusement.

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. . . At the close of every century, in this growing world of books, may an Oldys be the reader for the nation! Should he be endowed with a philosophical spirit, and combine the genius of his own times with that of the preceding, he will hold in his hand the claim of human thoughts, and, like another Bayle, become the historian of the human mind!-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1791-1824, Oldys and His Manuscripts, Curiosities of Literature.

Well versed in English antiquities, a correct writer, and a good historian. -BRYDGES, SIR SAMUEL EGERTON, 1800, ed. Phillip's Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, p. lxvii.

My additions to the notes of Oldys in the "Harleian Miscellany" will not be very numerous, for no editor could ever have been more competent to the undertaking than he was; but a successive editor must seem at least to have done something more than his predecessor.-PARK, THOMAS, 1807, Letter to Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges.

Oldys's interleaved Langbaine is reechoed in almost every recent work connected with the belles-lettres of our country. Oldys himself was unrivalled in this method of illustration; if, besides his Langbaine, his copy of "Fuller's Worthies" be alone considered! This Oldys was the oddest mortal that ever scribbled for bread. Grose, in his Olio, gives an amusing account of his having "a number of small parchment bags inscribed with the names of the persons whose lives he intended to write; into which he put every circumstance and anecdote he could collect, and from thence drew up his history."--DIBDIN, THOMAS FROGNALL, 1809, The Bibliomania, p. 64, note.

This distinguished writer and indefatigable antiquary, whose extended life was entirely devoted to literary pursuits, and whose copious and characteristic accounts of men and books, have endeared his memory to every lover of English literature. If Oldys possessed not the erudition of Johnson or of Mattaire, he had at least equal patience of investigation, soundness of judgment, and accuracy of criticism, with the most eminent of his contemporaries. One remarkable trait in his character was the entire absence of literary and posthumous fame, whilst he never begrudged his labour or considered his toil unproductive, so long as his researches substantiated Truth, or promoted the study of the History of Literature, which in other words is the history of the mind. of man. Hence the very sweepings of his library have since been industriously collected, and enrich the works of Malone, Ritson, Read, Douce, Brydges, and others, and will always serve, as it were, for landmarks to those following in his wake. In his own peculiar departments of

literature -history and biography he has literally exhausted all the ordinary sources of information; and when he lacked the opportunity to labour himself, or to fill up the circle of his knowledge, he has nevertheless pointed out to his successors new

or unexplored mines, whence additional facts may be gleaned, and the object of his life the development of Truth-be secured.-THOMS, W. J., 1862, Memoir of William Oldys, Notes and Queries, Third Series, vol. 1, p. 85.

PERSONAL

Though Folly, robed in purple, shines,
Though Vice exhausts Peruvian mines,
Yet shall they tremble, and turn pale,
When Satire wields her mighty flail;
Or should they, of rebuke afraid,
With Melcombe seek hell's deepest shade,
Satire, still mindful of her aim,
Shall bring the cowards back to shame.
-CHURCHILL, CHARLES, 1762, The Ghost,
bk. iii, v. 923-30.

When he passed from Pall-Mall to La Trappe it was always in a coach, which I could not but suspect had been his ambassadorial equipage at Madrid, drawn by six fat unwieldy black horses, short-docked, and of colossal dignity. Neither was he less characteristic in apparel than in equipage; he had a wardrobe loaded with rich and flaring suits, each in itself a load to the wearer, and of these I have no doubt but many were coeval with his embassy above mentioned, and every birth-day had added to the stock. In doing this he so contrived as never to put his old dresses out of countenance, by any variations in the fashion of the new; in the meantime, his bulk and corpulency gave full display to a vast expanse and profusion of brocade and embroidery, and this, when set off with an enormous tye-periwig and deeplaced ruffles, gave the picture of an ancient courtier in his gala habit, or Quin in his stage dress. Nevertheless, it must be confessed this style, though out of date, was not out of character, but harmonized so well with the person of the wearer, that I remember when he made

his first speech in the House of Peers as Lord Melcombe, all the flashes of his wit, all the studied phrases and well-turned periods of his rhetoric lost their effect, simply because the orator had laid aside his magisterial tye, and put on a modern bag-wig, which was as much out of costume upon the broad expanse of his shoulders, as a cue would have been upon the robes of the Lord Chief Justice.-CUMBERLAND, RICHARD, 1806, Memoirs Written by Himself, vol. 1, p. 185.

Cumberland, in his own memoirs, has introduced a humorous sketch of lord Melcombe, which appears to be drawn from. the life. His passion for magnificence and display was quite puerile, and his eccentricities were scarcely rational: yet we are told that he had an ornamented fancy, and a brilliant wit, was an elegant Latin classic, well versed in history ancient and modern, and that his favourite, prose writer was Tacitus. But upon the whole, his character appears to have been concisely summed up by sir E. Brydges, that he was a heartless man, with a very powerful capacity.-PARK, THOMAS, 1806, ed. Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors, vol. IV, p. 282.

He is a character typical in many respects of his age; utterly unconscientious and cheerfully blind to his unconscientiousness; and a liberal rather than discriminating patron of literary men.WARD, ADOLPHUS WILLIAM, 1869, ed. Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, p. 279, note.