Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 — Life and Habits of a literary Antiquary - Oldys and his Manuscripts, part 1

LIFE AND HABITS OF A LITERARY ANTIQUARY.

--OLDYS AND HIS MANUSCRIPTS.

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.