the Whigs would in the same predicament; a secret re- This hideous, but descriptive image of The Rump,' bad, however, got forward before; for the collector of the Rump Songs' tells us. If you ask who named it Rump, know 'twas so styled in an honest sheet of prayer, called The Bloody Rump," written before the trial of our late sovereign; but the word obtained not universal notice, till it flew from the mouth of Major-General Brown, at a public assembly in the days of Richard Cromwell.' Thus it happens that a stinging nick-name has been frequently applied to render a faction eternally odious; and the chance expression of a wit, when adopted on some public occasion, circulates among a whole people. The present nick-name originated in derision on the expulsion of the majority of the Long Parliament, by the usurping minority. It probably slept; for who would have stirred it through the Protectorate? and finally awakened at 'Richard's restored, but fleeting, Rump,' to witness its own ridiculous extinction. Our MP passed through three stages in its political progress. Preparatory to the trial of the sovereing, the antimonarchical party constituted the minority in the Long Parliament: the very by name by which this parliament is recog nized seemed a grievance to an impatient people, vacillating with chimerical projects of government, and now accustomed from a wild indefinite notion of political equality, "to pou down all existing institutions. Such was temper of the times, that an act of the most violent injustice, openly performed, served only as the jest of the day, a jest which has pasged into history. The forcible expulsion of two hundred of their brother members, by those who afterwards were saluted as The Rump,' was called 'Pride's Purge,' from the activity of a colonel of that name, a military adventurer, who was only the bind and brutal instrument of his party; for when he stood at the door of the commons, holding a paper with the naraes of the members, he did not personally * History of Independency, Part II, p. 32. know one! And his Purge' might have operated a quite opposite effect, administered by his own unskilful hand, had not Lord Grey of Groley, and the doorkeeper,-worthy dispersers of a British senate-pointed out the obnoxious members, on whom our colonel laid his hand, and sent off by his men to be detained, if a bold member, or to be deterred from sitting in the house, if a frightened one. This colonel had been a dray-man; and the contemptible knot of the Commons, reduced to fifty or sixty confederates, which assembled after his Purge,' were called 'Col. Pride's Drayhorses!"' It was this Rump which voted the death of the sovereign, and abolished the regal office, and the house of peers-as unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous! Every office in parliament seemed 'dangerous' but that of the 'Custodes libertatis Angliæ,' the keepers of the liberties of England! or rather the gaolers!" The legislative half-quarter of the House of Commons indignantly exclaims Clement Walker-the 'Montagne' of the French revolutionists! The Red-coats,' as the military were nick-named, soon taught their masters, 'the Rumpers,' silence and obedience: the latter having raised one colossal man for their own purpose, were annihilated by him at a single blow. Cromwell, five years after, turned them out of their house, and put the keys into his pocket. Their last public appearance was in the fleeting days of Richard Cromwell, when the comi-tragedy of the Rump' concluded by a catastrophe as ludicrous as that of Tom Thumb's tragedy! How such a faction used their instruments to gather in the common spoil, and how their instruments at length converted the hands which held them, into instruments themselves, appears in their history. When the Long Parliament' opposed the designs of Cromwell and Ireton, these chiefs cried up the liberty of the people,' and denied the authority of parliament:' but when they had effectuated their famous purge, and formed a house of commons of themselves, they abolished the House of Lords, crying up the supreme authority of the House of Commons, and crying down the liberty of the people. Such is the history of political factions, as well as of statesmen! Charles the Fifth alternately made use of the pope's authority to subdue the rising spirit of the protestants of Germany, or raised an army of protestants to imprison the the pope! who branded his German allies by the novel and odious name of Lutherans. A chain of similar facts may be framed out of modern history The Rump,' as they were called by every one but their own party, became a whetstone for the wits to sharpen themselves on; and we have two large collections of Rump Songs,' curious chronicles of popular feeling! Without this evidence we should not have been so well informed respecting the phases of this portentious phenomenon. The Rump' was celebrated in verse, till at length it became the Rump of a Rump of a Rump!' as Foulis traces them to their dwindled and grotesque appearance. It is pourtrayed by a wit of the times The Rump's an old story, if well understood, 'Tis a thing dressed up in a parliament's hood, And like it but the tail stands where the head shou'd "Twould make a man scratch where he does not itch! They say 'tis good luck when a body rises With the Rump upwards; but he that advises To live in that posture is none of the wisest. Cromwell's hunting them out of the house by military force is alluded to Our politic doctors do us teach, That a blood-sucking red coat's as good as a leech In the opening scene of the Restoration, Mrs Hutchin son, an honest republican, paints with dismay a scene otherwise very ludicrous. When the town of Nottingham, as almost all the rest of the island, began to grow mad, and declared themselves in their desires of the king? or, as another of the opposite party writes, "When the soldiery, who had hitherto made clubs trumps, resolved now to turn up the king of hearts in their affections,' the rabble in town and country vied with each other in burning the Rump; and the literal emblem was hung by chains on gallowses, with a bonfire underneath, while the cries of 'Let us burn the Rump! Let us roast the Rump! were echoed every where. The suddenness of this universal change, which was said to have maddened the wise, and to have sobered the mad, must be ascribed to the joy at escaping from the yoke of a military despotism; perhaps, too, it marked the rapid transition of hope to a res toration which might be supposed to have implanted gratitude even in a royal breast! The feelings of the people expected to find an echo from the throne. The Rump,' besides their general resemblance to the French anarchists, had also some minuter features of ugliness, which Englishmen have often exulted have not marked an English revolution-sanguinary proscriptions! We had thought that we had no revolutionary tribunals! no Septembrisers! no Noyades! no moveable guillotines awaiting for car's loaded with human victims! no infuriated republican urging, in a committee of public safety, the' necessity of a salutary massacre! But if it be true that the same motives and the same principles were at work in both nations, and that the like characters were performing in England the parts which they did afterwards in France, by an argument a priori we might be sure that the same revolting crimes and chimerical projects were alike suggested at London as at Paris. Human nature even in transactions which appear unparalleled, will be found to preserve a regularity of resemblance not always suspected. added that he had contracted with two merchants to ship them off. There was a most bloody-minded 'maker of washing-balls,' as one John Durant is described, appoint ed a lecturer by the House of Commons, who always left out of the Lord's prayer, 'As we forgive them that trespass against us,' and substituted, Lord, since thou hast now drawn out thy sword, let it not be sheathed again till it be glutted in the blood of the malignants.' I find too many enormities of this kind. Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord negligently, and keepeth back his sword from blood! was the cry of the wretch, who, when a celebrated actor and royalist sued for quarter, gave no other reply than that of fitting the action to the word.' Their treatment of the Irish may possibly be admired by a true Machiavelist: they permitted forty thousand of the Irish to enlist in the service of the kings of Spain and France-in other words, they expelled them at once, which, considering that our Rumpers affected such an abhorrence of tyranny, may be considered as an act of mer cy! satisfying themselves only with dividing the forfeited lands of the aforesaid forty thousand among their own party by lot and other means. An universal confiscation, after all, is a bloodless massacre. They used the Scotch soldiers, after the battles of Dunbar and Worcester, a little differently-but equally efficaciously-for they sold their Scotch prisoners for slaves to the American planters.† France. Such monstrous persons and events are not crediblebut this is no proof that they have not occurred.-Many incredible things will happen! Another disorganizing feature in the English Rumpers was also observed in the Sans-culottes-their hatred of literature and the arts. Hebert was one day directing his satellites towards the bibliotheque nationale, to put an end to all that human knowledge collected for centuries on centuries-in one day! alleging of course some good reason. This hero was only diverted from the enterprise by being persuaded to postpone it for a day or two, when luckily the guillotine intervened: the same circumstance occurred here. The burning of the records in the Tower was certainly proposed; a speech of Selden's, which I cannot immedi The first great tragic act was closely copied by the French; and if the popular page of our history appears unstained by their revolutionary axe, this depended only on a slight accident; for it became a question of yea' and 'nay and was only carried in the negative by two voices in the council! It was debated among the bloody The Robespierres and the Marats were as extraordi Rump,' as it was hideously designated, whether to mas- nary beings, and in some respects the Frenchmen were sacre and put to the sword all the king's party! 1* Crom-working on a more enlarged scheme. These discoverwell himself listened to the suggestion; and it was only ed, that the generation which had witnessed the preput down by the coolness of political calculation-the ceding one would always regret it; and for the security of dread that the massacre would be too general! Some of the Revolution, it was necessary that every person who the Rump not obtaining the blessedness of a massacre, was thirty years old in 1788 should perish on the scaffold! still clung to the happiness of an immolation; and many The anarchists were intent on reducing the French peopetitions were presented, that two or three principal gentle-ple to eight millions, and on destroying the great cities of men of the royal party in EACH COUNTY might be sacrificed to justice, whereby the land might be saved from blood-guiltiness! Sir Author Haslerigg, whose 'passionate fondness of liberty' has been commended,† was one of the committee of safety in 1647-I too, would commend' a passionate lover of liberty,' whenever I do not discover that this lover is much more intent on the dower than on the bride. Haslerigg, an absurd bold man,' as Clarendon at a single stroke, reveals his character, was resolved not to be troubled with king or bishop, or with any power in the state superior to the Rump's.' We may safely suspect the patriot who can cool his vehemence in spoliatian. Haslerigg would have no bishops, but this was not from any want of reverence for church-lands, for he heaped for himself such wealth as to have been nick-named 'the bishop of Durham! He is here noticed for a politi-ately turn to, put a stop to these incendiaries. It was decal crime different from that of plunder. When, in 1647, this venerable radical found the parliament resisting his views, he declared, that 'Some heads must fly off!' adding, the parliament cannot save England; we must look another way;-threatening, what afterwards was done, to bring in the army! It was this 'passionate lover of liberty' who, when Dorislaus, the parliamentary agent, was assassinated by some Scotchmen in Holland, moved in the house, that Six royalists of the best quality' should be immediately executed! When some northern counties petitioned the Commons for relief against a famine in the land, our Maratist observed, that this want of food would best defend those counties from Scottish invasion!' The slaughter of Drogheda by Cromwell, and his frightening all London by what Walker calls a butchery of prentices,' when he cried out to his soldiers, to kill man, woman, and child, and fire the city'§ may be placed among those crimes which are committed to open a reign of terror-but Hugh Peter's solemn thanksgiving to Heaven that none were spared!' was the true expression of the true feeling of these political demoniacs. Cromwell was cruel from politics, others from constitution. Some were willing to be cruel without bloodguiltiness.' One Alexander Rigby, a radical lawyer, twice moved in the Long Parliament, that those lords and gentlemen who were malignants,' should be sold as slaves to the Dey of Algiers, or sent off to the new plantations in the West Indies. He had all things prepared; for it is * Clement Walker's Hist. of Independency, Part II, p. 130. Confirmed by Barwick in his Life, p. 163. ap The Rev. Mark Noble's Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell, 1, 405. Clement Walker's Hist. of Independency, Part II, 173. bated in the Rump parliament, when Cromwell was general, whether they should dissolve the universities? They concluded that no university was necessary; that there were no ancient examples of such education, and that scholars in other countries did study at their own cost and charges, and therefore they looked on them as unnecessa ry, and thought them fitting to be taken away for the public use-How these venerable asylums escaped from being sold with the king's pictures, as stone and timber, and why their rich endowments were not shared among such inveterate ignorance and remorseless spoliation, might claim some inquiry. The Abbé Morellet, a great political economist, imagined that the source of all the crimes of the French Revolution was their violation of the sacred rights of pro perty. The perpetual invectives of the Sans-culottes of France against proprietors and against property proceeded from demoralized beings, who formed panegyrics on all crimes; crimes, to explain whose revolutionary terms, & new dictionary was required. But even these anarchists, in their mad expressions against property, and in their Mercurius Rusticus, XII, 115. Barwick's Life, p. 12. I am indebted to my friend Mr Hamper of Detitend House, Birmingham, for the following account drawn from Sir Wil liam Dugdale's interleaved Pocket-book for 1648.- Aug. 17. The Scotch army, under the command of Duke Hamilton, defeated at Preston in Lancashire. 24th. The Moorlanders rose upon the Scots and strip some of them. The Seich prisoners miserably used; exposed to eat cabbage-leaves in Ridgley (Staffordshire) and carrot-tops in Coleshill, (War wickshire.) The soldiers who guarded them sold the victuals which were brought in for them from the country.' Desodoard's Histoire Philosophique de la Revolution de France, IV, 5. wildest notions of their egalité,' have not gone beyond the daring of our own Rumpers! Of those revolutionary journals of the parliament of 1649, which in spirit so strongly resemble the diurnal or hebdomadal effusions of the redoubtable French Hebert, Marat, and others of that stamp, one of the most remarkable is The Moderate, impartially communicating martal affairs to the kingdom of England; the monarchical title our commonwealth-men had not yet had time enough to obliterate from their colloquial style. This writer called himself in his barbarous English, The Moderate! It would be hard to conceive the meanness and illiteracy to which the English language was reduced under the pens of the rabble-writers of these days, had we not witnessed in the present time a parallel to their compositions. The Moderate was a little assumed on the principle on which Marat denominated himself' l'ami du peuple.' It is curious, that the most ferocious politicians usually assert their moderation. Robespierre, in his justification, declares m'a souvent accusé de Moderantisme.' The same actors, playing the same parts, may be always paralleled in their language and their deeds. This' Moderate' steadily pursued one great principle-the overthrow of all Property. Assuming that property was the original cause of sin an exhortation to the people for this purpose is the subject of the present paper: the illustration of his principle is as striking as the principle itself. It is an apology for, or rather a defence of robbery! Some moss-troopers had been condemned to be hanged, for practising their venerable custom of gratuitously supplying themselves from the flocks and herds of their weaker neighbours: our Moderate' ingeniously discovers, that the loss of these men's lives is to be attributed to nothing but property. They are necessitated to offend the laws, in order to obtain a livelihood! On this he descants; and the extract is a political curiosity, in the French style! Property is the original cause of any sin between party and party as to civil transactions. And since the tyrant is taken off, and the government altered in nomine, so ought it really to redound to the good of the people in specie; which though they cannot expect it in a few years, by reason of the multiplicity of the gentry in authority, command, &c, who drive on all designs for support of the old government, and consequently their own interest and the people's slavery, yet they doubt not, but in time the people will herein discern their own blindness and folly.' In September, he advanced with more depth of thought. Wars have even been clothed with the most gracious pretences-viz., reformation of religion, the laws of the land, the liberty of the subject, &c; though the effects thereof have proved most destructive to every nation; making the sword, and not the people, the original of all authorities for many hundred years together, taking away each man's birthright, and settling upon a few a cursed propriety; the ground of all civil offences, and the greatest cause of most sins against the heavenly Deity. This tyranny and oppression running through the veins of many of our predecessors, and being too long maintained by the sword upon a royal foundation, at last became so customary, as to the vulgar it seemed most natural-the only reason why the people of this time are so ignorant of their birth-right, their only freedom,' &c. bid race of obscure lawyers, and discontented men of family, of blasted reputations; adventurers, who were to command the militia and navy of England,-governors of the three kingdoms! whose votes and ordinances resounded with nothing else but new impositions, now taxes, excises, yearly, monthly, weekly sequestrations, composi tions, and universal robbery ! Baxter vents one deep groan of indignation, and presciently announces one future consequence of Reform! In all this appeared the severity of God, the mutability of worldly things, and the fruits of error, pride, and selfishness, to be charged hereafter upon reformation and religion.' As a statesman, the sagacity of this honest prophet was narrowed by the horizon of his religious views; for he ascribes the whole as prepared by Satan to the injury of the protestant cause, and the advantage of the papists! But dropping his particular application to the devil and the papists, honest Richard Baxter is perfectly right in is general principle concerning Rumpers,''Sans-culottes,'-and Radicals.' LIFE AND HABITS OF A LITERARY ANTIQUARY-OLDYS AND HIS MANUSCRPTS. Such a picture may be furnished by some unexpected This is a sort of personage little known to the wits, who materials which my inquiries have obtained of Oldys. write more than they read, and to their volatile votaries, who only read what the wits write. It is time to vindi cate 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 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. books. Such is the man whom we often find, leaving, when he dies, his favourite volumes only an incomplete project! reserved for most of their brothers. Voluminous works and few of this class of literary men have escaped the fate 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 when 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. The Abbé Goujet, who had designed a classified history of his national literature, in the eighteen volumes we possess, could only conclude that of the trans The birth-right of citoyen Egalité to a cursed propriety settled on a few,' was not even among the French jacobins, urged with more amazing force. Had things proceeded according to our Moderate's' plan, the people's slavery' had been something worse. In a short time the nation would have had more proprietors than property..lators and commence that of the poets; two other volumes We have a curious list of the spoliations of those members of the House of Commons, who, after their famous self-denying ordinances, appropriated among themselves sums of money, offices, and lands, for services done or to be done.' The most innocent of this new government of the Majesty of the People,' were those whose talents had been limited by Nature to peddle and purloin; puny mechanics, who had suddenly dropped their needles, their hammers, and their lasts, and slunk out from behind their shop-counters; those who had never aspired beyond the constable of their parish, were now seated in the council of state; where, as Milton describes them, they fell to huckster the commonwealth: there they met a more ra The Moderate, from Tuesday, July 31, to August 7, 1649. in manuscript have perished. That great enterprise of the Benedictines, the 'Histoire Litteraire de la France,' now consists of twelve large quartos, and the industry of its successive writers have 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 0. 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 way-side, too many have drawn their waters in silence. Oldys is chiefly known by the caricature of the facetious Grose, a great humorist, 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 confidenial friend, to enjoy together a secret laugh at their literary intimates. His eager executor, who happened to be his book-seller, served up the poignant hash to the public as 'Grose's Olio! 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, and the utter simplicity of his heart was guileless as a child's—ever open to the designing. The noble spirit of the 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 Oldvs in the Herald's College as Norroy King of Arms.* But Oldvs, 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 a princess, as the coronet is carried by Clarencieux, and not by Norrcy. 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! * Mr John Taylor, the son of Oldya's intimate friend, has furnished me with this interesting anecdote. Oldys, as my father informed me, was many years in quiet obscurity in the Fleet-prison, but at last was spirited up to make his situation known to the Duke of Norfolk of that time, who received Oldys's letter while he was at dinner with some friends. The duke immediately communicated the contents to the company, observing that he had long been anxious to know what had become of an old, though an humble friend, and was happy by that letter to find that he was alive. He then called for his gentleman (a kind of humble friend whom noblemen used to retain under that name in those days,) and desired him to go immediately to the Fleet, to take money for the immediate need of Oldys, to procure an account of his debts and discharge them. Oldys was, soon after, either by the duke's gift or interest, appointed Norroy King at Arms; and I remember that his official regalia came into my father's hands at his death.' In the Life of Oldys, by Mr A. Chalmers, the date of this promotion is not found. My accomplished friend the Rev J. Dallaway has obligingly examined the records of the college, by which it appears that Oldys had been Norfolk herald ex traordinary, but not belonging to the college, was appointed per saltum Norroy King of Arms by patent, May 5th, 1755. 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 col. lections 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 Ay drinking out of his cup of ale;'-the accustomed potion of poor Oldys !* Grose, however, though a great joker on the pecularities of Oldys, was far from insensible to the extraordinary ac quisitions 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. 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 nes ther road nor pathway, Oldys fortunately placed in the li brary 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 genus might return. To know, and to admire only, the literature and the tastes of our own age, is a species of elegant barbarism.† Spenser was considered nearly as obsolete as Chaucer; Milton was veiled by oblivion, and Shakespeare'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 al ways 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 collections 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 Shakespeare himself is so rarely cited in my collection.' The best English poets were consider ed to be the modern; a taste which is always obstinate! All this was nothing to Oldys; his literary curiosity an ticipated 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 pass port of fame was yet delayed in its way; or disinterring *The beautiful simplicity of this Anacreontic has met the unusual fate of entirely losing its character, by an additional and incongruous stanza in the modern editions, by a gentleman who has put into practice the unallowable liberty of altering the poetical and dramatic compositions of acknowledged genius to his own notion of what he deems morality; but in works of genius whatever is dull ceases to be moral. Fly' of Oldys may stand by The Fly' of Gray for melancholy tenderness of thought; it consisted only of these two stanzas: 1 Busy, curious, thirsty fly! Drink with me, and drink as I! Freely welcome to my cup, Couldst thou sip and sip it up; Make the most of life you may; Life is short and wears away! 2 Both alike are mine and thine, Threescore summers when they're gone, The We have been taught to enjoy the two ages of Genius and of Taste. The literary public are deeply indebted to the edi. torial care, the taste and the enthusiasm of Mr Singer, for exquisite reprints of some valuable writers. 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 unfeit! ical 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 coudiment for its title- Of London Libraries; with Anecdotes of Collectors of Books; Remarks The life of a literary antiquary partakes of the nature on Booksellers; and on the first Publishers of Catalogues?" of those who, having no concerns of their own, busy them- Oldys left ample annotations on Fuller's Worthies,' and selves with those of others. Oldys lived in the back-ages Winstanley's Lives of the Poets,' and on Langbaine's of England; he had crept among the dark passages of Dramatic Poets.' The late Mr Boswell showed me a Fuller in the Malone collection, with Steevens's transcripTime, till, like an old gentleman-usher, he seemed to be reporting the secret history of the courts which he had tion of Oldy's notes, which Malone purchased for 431 at lived in. He had been charmed among their masques and Steevens's sale; but where is the original copy of Oldys? revels, had eyed with astonishment their cumbrous mag- The Winstanley,' I think, also reposes in the same nificence, when knights and ladies carried on their mantles collection. The Langbaine' is far famed, and is preservand their cloth of gold ten thousand pounds' worth of ropes ed in the British Museum, the gift of Dr Birch; it has been of pearls, and buttons of diamonds; or, descending to the considered so precious, that several of our eminent writers gay court of the second Charles, he tattled merry tales, as have cheerfully passed through the labour of a minute tranIn the history of the fate in that of the first he had painfully watched, like a patriot scription of its numberless notes. or a loyalist, a distempered era. He had lived so conand fortune of books, that of Oldys' Langbaine is too custantly with these people of another age, and had so deep-rious to omit. Oldys may tell his own story, which I find ly interested himself in their affairs, and so loved the wit in the Museum copy, p. 339, and which copy appears to and the learning which are often bright under the rust of be a second attempt; for of the first Langbaine we have 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 juxta-position of the most remote knowledge; to judge by its fulness of narrative, it would seem rather to have been the work of a contemporary.* It was an advantage in this primeval 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.† 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 every thing for his purposes. We gather fruit from our 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 setthing a date, or classifying a title-page, were enjoyments to his incessant pen. Every thing 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. 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 histor Gibbon once meditated a life of Rawleigh, and for thet purpose began some researches in that memorable era of our English annals After reading Oldys's, he relinquished his design, from a conviction that he could add nothing new to the subject, except the uncertain merit of style and sentiment,' I is greatly to be lamented that the BritishMuseum is extremely deficient in our National Literature. 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.'* 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 distinguish Coxeter's aud 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.† Such was the value attached to these original researches concerning our poets, and of which, At the Bodleian library, I learn by a letter with which I am favoured by the Rev Dr Bliss, that there is an interleaved Gildon's Lives and Characters of the Dramatic Poets,' with corrections, which once belonged to Coxeter. who appears to have intended a new edition. Whether Coxeter transcribed into his Gildon the notes of Oldys's first Langbaine, is worth inquiry. Coxeter's conduct, though he had purchased Oldys's first Langhaine, was that of an ungenerous miser, who will quarrel with a brother, rather than share in any acquisition he can get into his own hands. To Coxeter we also owe much; he suggested Dodsley's Collection of Old Plays, and the first tolerable edition of Massinger. He There is a remarkable word in Oldys's rote above. could not have been employed in Lord Oxford's library, as Mr Chalmers conjectures, about 1726; for here he mentions that he was in Yorkshire from 1724 to 1730. This period is a remarkable blank in Oldys's life. If he really went to Yorkshire, he departed in sudden haste, for he left all his books at his lodgings; and six years of rustication must have been an intolerable state for a lover of old books. It has sometimes occurred to me, that for Yorkshire we must understand the Fleet. There we know he was; but the circumstance perhaps was so hateful to record, that he preferred to veil it, while writing, for the second time, his Notes on Langbaine; he confesses on his return to his lodgings, that he found that he had lost every thing which he had left there. This copy was lent by Dr Birch to the late bishop of Dromore, who with his own hand carefully transcribed the notes into an interleaved copy of Langbaine, divided into four vo lumes, which, as I am informed, narrowly escaped the flames, and was injured by the water, at a fire at NorthumberlandHouse. His lordship, when he went to Ireland left this copy with Mr Nichols, for the use of the projected editions of the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian, with notes and ilJustrations; of which I think the Tatler only has appeared, and to which his lordship contributed some valuable communications. |