Volume Iii Part 43 (2/2)
[326] First collected and published in 1661, and afterwards reprinted in two small vols. 1731.
[327] The first collection ever formed of these political satires was printed in 1660, with the quaint t.i.tle of ”Ratts rhimed to Death; or, the Rump-parliament hang'd up in the Shambles.”
[328] In one of the popular political songs of the day, ”The Rump”
is aptly compared to
”The foxes of Samson, that carried a brand In their tails, to destroy and to burn up the land.”
[329] Clement Walker's History of Independency, part II. p. 130.
Confirmed by Barwick in his Life, p. 163.
[330] The Rev. Mark n.o.ble's Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell, i. 405.
[331] Clement Walker's History of Independency, Part II. 173.
[332] Ib., Part I. 160.
[333] Mercurius Rusticus, xii. 115. Barwick's Life, p. 42.
[334] This actor was a comedian named Robinson, of the Blackfriars Theatre; the performers there being termed ”the king's servants.” In the civil wars most of the young actors, deprived of living by their profession, all theatres being closed by order of the Parliament, went into the king's army. Robinson was fighting at the siege of Basing House, in Hamps.h.i.+re, October, 1645, when after an obstinate defence his party was defeated, he laid down his arms, suing for quarter, but was shot through the head by Colonel Harrison, as he repeated the words quoted above.
[335] The following account is drawn from Sir William Dugdale's interleaved Pocket-book for 1648.--”Aug. 17. The Scotch army, under the command of Duke Hamilton, defeated at Preston in Lancas.h.i.+re.
24th. The Moorlanders rose upon the Scots and stript some of them.
The Scotch prisoners miserably used; exposed to eat cabbage-leaves in Ridgley (Staffords.h.i.+re), and carrot-tops in Coles.h.i.+ll (Warwicks.h.i.+re). The soldiers who guarded them sold the victuals which were brought in for them from the country.”
[336] Desodoard's Histoire Philosophique de la Revolution de France, iv. 5. When Lyons was captured in 1793, the revolutionary army nearly reduced this fine city to a heap of ruins, in obedience to the decree of the Montagne, who had ordered its name to be effaced, that it should henceforth be termed, ”Commune affranchie,” and upon its ruins a column erected and inscribed, ”Lyon fit la guerre a la liberte; Lyon n'est plus.”
[337] The _Moderate_, from Tuesday, July 31, to August 7, 1649.
LIFE AND HABITS OF A LITERARY ANTIQUARY.--OLDYS AND HIS Ma.n.u.sCRIPTS.
Such a picture may be furnished by some unexpected materials which my inquiries have obtained of Oldys. This is a sort of personage little known to the wits, who write more than they read, and to their volatile votaries, who only read what the wits write. It is time to vindicate the honours of the few whose laborious days enrich the stores of national literature, not by the duplicates but the supplements of knowledge. A literary antiquary is that idler whose life is pa.s.sed in a perpetual _voyage autour de ma chambre_; fervent in sagacious diligence, instinct with the enthusiasm of curious inquiry, critical as well as erudite; he has to arbitrate between contending opinions, to resolve the doubtful, to clear up the obscure, and to grasp at the remote; so busied with other times, and so interested for other persons than those about him, that he becomes the inhabitant of the visionary world of books. He counts only his days by his acquisitions, and may be said by his original discoveries to be the CREATOR OF FACTS; often exciting the grat.i.tude of the literary world, while the very name of the benefactor has not always descended with the inestimable labours.
Such is the man whom we often find leaving, when he dies, his favourite volumes only an incomplete project! and few of this cla.s.s of literary men have escaped the fate reserved for most of their brothers.
Voluminous works have been usually left unfinished by the death of the authors; and it is with them as with the planting of trees, of which Johnson has forcibly observed, ”There is a frightful interval between the seed and timber.” And he admirably remarks, what I cannot forbear applying to the labours I am now to describe: ”He that calculates the growth of trees has the remembrance of the shortness of life driven hard upon him. He knows that he is doing what will never benefit himself; and where he rejoices to see the stem rise, is disposed to repine that another shall cut it down.” The days of the patriotic Count Mazzuch.e.l.li were freely given to his national literature; and six invaluable folios attest the gigantic force of his immense erudition; yet these only carry us through the letters A and B: and though Mazzuch.e.l.li had finished for the press other volumes, the torpor of his descendants has defrauded Europe of her claims.[338] The Abbe Goujet, who had designed a cla.s.sified history of his national literature, in the eighteen volumes we possess, could only conclude that of the translators, and commence that of the poets; two other volumes in ma.n.u.script have perished. That great enterprise of the Benedictines, the ”Histoire Literaire de la France,” now consists of twelve large quartos, and the industry of its successive writers has only been able to carry it to the twelfth century. David Clement designed the most extensive bibliography which had ever appeared; but the diligent life of the writer could only proceed as far as H. The alphabetical order, which so many writers of this cla.s.s have adopted, has proved a mortifying memento of human life!
Tiraboschi was so fortunate as to complete his great national history of Italian literature. But, unhappily for us, Thomas Warton, after feeling his way through the darker ages of our poetry, in planning 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 ma.n.u.scripts. Oldys's ma.n.u.scripts, 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 sc.r.a.p-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 companions.h.i.+p over too social a gla.s.s, sends him down to posterity in a grotesque att.i.tude; 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 n.o.ble 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.s.sociates 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.” Companions.h.i.+p 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 cus.h.i.+on, to the great scandal of his brethren,”--a circ.u.mstance 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 a.s.serted that he was the author of the well-known song--
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