an extraordinary
circumstance attending this curious dissertation. Oldys having completed
this elaborate introduction, "the penurious publisher insisted on
leaving out one third part, which happened to be the best matter in it,
because he would have it contracted into _one sheet_!" Poor Oldys never
could forget the fate of this elaborate Dissertation on all the
collections of English poetry; I am confident that I have seen some
volume which was formerly Oldys's, and afterwards Thomas Warton's, in
the possession of my intelligent friend Mr. Douce, in the fly-leaf of
which Oldys has expressed himself in these words:--"In my historical and
critical review of all the collections of this kind, it would have made
a sheet and a half or two sheets; but they for sordid gain, and to save
a little expense in print and paper, got Mr. John Campbell _to cross it
and cramp it, and play the devil with it, till they squeezed it into
less compass than a sheet_." This is a loss which we may never recover.
The curious book-knowledge of this singular man of letters, those stores
of which he was the fond treasurer, as he says with such tenderness for
his pursuits, were always ready to be cast into the forms of a
dissertation or an introduction; and when Morgan published his
Collection of Rare Tracts, the friendly hand of Oldys furnished "A
Dissertation upon Pamphlets, in a Letter to a Nobleman;" probably the
Earl of Oxford, a great literary curiosity; and in the Harleian
Collection he has given a _Catalogue raisonne_ of six hundred. When Mrs.
Cooper attempted "The Muse's Library," the first essay which influenced
the national taste to return to our deserted poets in our most poetical
age, it was Oldys who only could have enabled this lady to perform that
task so well.[352] When Curll, the publisher, to help out one of his
hasty compilations, a "History of the Stage," repaired, like all the
world, to Oldys, whose kindness could not resist the importunity of
this busy publisher, he gave him a life of Nell Gwynn; while at the same
moment Oldys could not avoid noticing, in one of his usual entries, an
intended work on the stage, which we seem never to have had, "_Dick
Leveridge's History of the Stage and Actors in his own Time_, for these
forty or fifty years past, as he told me he had composed, is likely to
prove, whenever it shall appear, a more perfect work." I might proceed
with many similar gratuitous contributions with which he assisted his