ngland; 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.[345]

It was an advantage in this primaeval era of literary curiosity, that
those volumes which are now not even to be found in our national
library, where certainly they are perpetually wanted, and which are now
so excessively appreciated, were exposed on stalls, through the reigns
of Anne and the two Georges.[346] Oldys encountered no competitor, cased
in the invulnerable mail of his purse, to dispute his possession of the
rarest volume. On the other hand, our early collector did not possess
our advantages; he could not fly for instant aid to a "Biographia
Britannica," he had no history of our poetry, nor even of our drama.
Oldys could tread in no man's path, for every soil about him was
unbroken ground. He had to create everything for his own purposes. We
gather fruit from trees which others have planted, and too often we but
"pluck and eat."

_Nulla dies sine linea_, was his sole hope while he was accumulating
masses of notes; and as Oldys never used his pen from the weak passion
of scribbling, but from the urgency of preserving some substantial
knowledge, or planning some future inquiry, he amassed nothing but what
he wished to remember. Even the minuter pleasures of settling a date, or
classifying a title-page, were enjoyments to