William Oldys, (1696–1761), bibliographer, natural son of Dr. Oldys, Chancellor of Lincoln. For about ten years Oldys was librarian to the Earl of Oxford, whose valuable collection of books and MSS. he arranged and catalogued, and by the Duke of Norfolk he was appointed Norroy King-of-arms. His chief works are a “Life of Sir Walter Raleigh,” prefixed to Raleigh’s “History of the World” (1736); “The British Librarian” (1737); “The Harleian Miscellany” (1753), besides many miscellaneous literary and bibliographical articles.

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.”

  Nothing, I firmly believe, would ever have biassed him to insert any fact in his writings he did not believe, or to suppress 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.

  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.

  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 slips of paper, which he afterwards classified and deposited in parchment bags suspended 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.

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.

  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!

  Well versed in English antiquities, a correct writer, and a good historian.

  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.

  Oldys’s interleaved Langbaine is re-echoed 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.”

  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.