ry, and recording in it every day all the events that
occurred, and all his engagements, and the employment of his time. I
have seen piles of these books, but know not what became of them." The
existence of such _diaries_ is confirmed by a sale catalogue of Thomas
Davies, the literary bookseller, who sold many of the books and _some
manuscripts of Oldys_, which appear to have been dispersed in various
libraries. I find Lot "3627, Mr. Oldys's Diary, containing several
observations relating to books, characters, &c.;" a single volume, which
appears to have separated from the "piles" which Mr. Taylor once
witnessed. The literary diary of Oldys could have exhibited the mode of
his pursuits, and the results of his discoveries. One of these volumes I
have fortunately discovered, and a singularity in this writer's feelings
throws a new interest over such diurnal records. Oldys was apt to give
utterance with his pen to his most secret emotions. Querulous or
indignant, his honest simplicity confided to the paper before him such
extemporaneous soliloquies, and I have found him hiding in the very
corners of his manuscripts his "secret sorrows."

A few of these slight memorials of his feelings will exhibit a sort of
_Silhouette_ likeness traced by his own hand, when at times the pensive
man seems to have contemplated his own shadow. Oldys would throw down in
verses, whose humility or quaintness indicates their origin, or by some
pithy adage, or apt quotation, or recording anecdote, his self-advice,
or his self-regrets!

Oppressed by a sense of tasks so unprofitable to himself, while his days
were often passed in trouble and in prison, he breathes a self-reproach
in one of these profound reflections of melancholy which so often
startle the man of study, who truly discovers that life is too limited
to acquire real knowledge, with the ambition of dispensing it to the
world:--

I say, who too long in these cobwebs lurks,
Is always whetting tools, but never works.

In one of the corners of his note-books I find this curious but sad
reflection:--

Alas! this is but the apron of a fig-leaf--but the curtain of a cobweb.

Sometimes he seems to have anticipated the fate of that obscure
diligence which was pursuing discoveries reserved for others to use:--

He heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.

Fond treasurer of these stores, behold thy fate
In Psalm the thirty-ninth, 6, 7, and 8.

Sometimes he