r '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. Among the books that he abandoned was the first
of his annotated copies of _Langbaine_, which he found afterwards in the
hands of a miserly fellow, begrudging him even a sight of the notes.
'When I returned,' he writes, 'I understood that my books had been
dispersed; and afterwards, becoming acquainted with Mr. Thomas Coxeter, I
found that he had bought my _Langbaine_ of a bookseller who was a great
collector of plays and poetical books.' His autobiography shows that he
soon restored his literary losses. His patron, Lord Oxford, for whom he
afterwards worked as librarian, was anxious to buy everything that was
rare. '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.
Thoms quotes a note from the _Langbaine_ to show that Oldys had bought
two hundred volumes 'at the auction of the Earl of Stamford's library at
St. Paul's Coffee-house, where formerly most of the celebrated libraries
were sold.' It was while Oldys was living in Yorkshire, under the
patronage of Lord Malton, that he saw the end of the library of State
Papers collected by Richard Gascoyne the antiquary. The noble owner of
the MSS. had been advised to destroy the papers by a lawyer, Mr. 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. They were kept in the stone tower at Wentworth Woodhouse until
1728, when Lord Malton 'burnt them all wilfully in one morning.' 'I saw
the lamentable fire,' says Oldys, 'feed upon six or seven great chests
full of the said deeds, some of them as old as the Conquest, and even the
ignorant servants repining.... I did prevail