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His name was mentioned and some interest in his writings was awakened at the close of the next century by Winstanley and by Langbaine, but Oldys, the celebrated antiquary, was the first person who seriously endeavoured to trace the incidents of his life. Dr.
"'Why, dear Mrs. Maple, why didn't you tell me before that you wanted me to help you to find it? said my Mary. 'No, never mind telling me why it was: let us come at once and look for it. They hastened off together. I could hear Mrs. Maple beginning an explanation which, I doubt not, lasted into the furthest recesses of the housekeeper's department. Uncle Oldys and I were left alone.
I daresay a hundred years in that very house, and could put their hand on any tomb or yet grave in all the yard and give you name and age. And his account of that young man, Mr. Simpkins's I mean to say well! She compressed her lips and nodded several times. 'Tell us, Mrs. Maple, said Mary. 'Go on, said Uncle Oldys.
He will find him, of course, in Biographical Dictionaries, Directories of the City of the Great Dead, which only tell you where men lived, and what they did to deserve a place in the volume; but as to a life of him, strictly speaking, there is none. Oldys and Cobbett tried to flay him alive in pamphlets; Sherwin and Clio Rickman were prejudiced friends and published only panegyrics.
Samuel Buck of Rotherham, 'who could not read one of those records any more than his lordship'; but he feared that they might contain legal secrets or disclose flaws in a title or, as Oldys said, 'that something or other might be found out one time or other by somebody or other. Richard Gascoyne, he adds, possessed a vast and most valuable collection of deeds, evidences, and ancient records, which after his death, about the time of the Restoration, came to the family of the first Earl of Strafford.
Next to Harley's library in importance was that of John Moore, Bishop of Ely, of which Burnet said that it was a treasure beyond what one would think the life and labour of a man could compass. Oldys has described it in his notes upon London libraries, which it is fair to remember were based on Bagford's labours, as regards the earlier entries.
Maple, and her invariable opening, "Oh, Miss, could I speak to you a minute?" A letter from Miss Oldys to a friend in Lichfield, begun a day or two before, is the next source for this story. It is not devoid of traces of the influence of that leader of female thought in her day, Miss Anna Seward, known to some as the Swan of Lichfield.
He knew, as no one else at that time knew, the value of the plays and pamphlets that encumbered the stalls; he had no competitor to fear 'clad in the invulnerable mail of the purse. Oldys was born in 1696; he became involved, while quite a young man, in the disaster of the South Sea Bubble; and in 1724 he was obliged to leave London for a residence of some years in Yorkshire.
Oldys the antiquary distinctly stated that these 'were the remnants of the King of Hungary'; 'they afterwards fell into the hands of Bilibald Pirckheimer. The Senator of Nuremberg made the books his own in a very emphatic way: 'there is to be seen his head graved by Albert Dürer, one of the first examples of sticking or pasting of heads, arms, or cyphers into volumes. Pirckheimer died in 1530, three years after the sack of Buda, and had the opportunity of getting some of the books.
'The Earl, says Oldys, 'invited me to show him my collections of manuscripts, historical and political, which had been the Earl of Clarendon's, my collections of Royal Letters and other papers of State, together with a very large collection of English heads in sculpture. Mr.
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