nning 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 a