ssociates 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 princess, as the coronet is
carried by Clarencieux, and not by Norroy. 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!

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 collections 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 _fly_ drinking out of his _cup of
ale_;"--the accustomed potion of poor Oldys![342]

Grose, however, though a great joker on the peculiarities of Oldys, was
far from insensible to the extraordinary acquisitions 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.[343] 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 neither road nor pathway, Oldys,
fortunately placed in the library of the Earl of Oxford, yielded up his
entire days to researches concerning the books and the me