Note 435 — The Alcove.

Numerous are the instances of the peculiar use and value of copies of this kind; especially to those who are engaged in publications of a similar nature. Oldys's interleaved Langbaine (of Mr. Reed's transcript of which a copy is in the possession of Mr. Heber) is re-echoed in almost every recent work connected with the belles-lettres of our country. Oldys himself was unrivalled in this method of illustration; if, exclusively of Langbaine, his copy of Fuller's Worthies [once Mr. Steevens', now Mr. Malone's. See Bibl. Steevens, no. 1799] be alone considered! This Oldys was the oddest mortal that ever wrote. Grose, in his Olio, gives an amusing account of his having "a number of small parchment bags inscribed with the names of the persons whose lives he intended to write; into which he put every circumstance and anecdote he could collect, and from thence drew up his history." See Noble's College of Arms, p. 420. Thus far the first edition of this work; p. 64. It remains to add that, whatever were the singularities and capriciousness of Oldys, his talents were far beyond mediocrity; as his publication of the Harleian Miscellany, and Raleigh's History of the World, abundantly prove. To the latter, a life of Raleigh is prefixed; and the number of pithy, pleasant, and profitable notes subjoined shew that Oldys's bibliographical talents were not eclipsed by those of any contemporary. His British Librarian has been more than once noticed in the preceding pages: vide p. 51, 468. There is a portrait of him, in a full-dressed suit and bag-wig, in one of the numbers of the European Magazine; which has the complete air of a fine gentleman. Let me just observe, in elucidation of what Lysander above means by this latter mode of illustrating copies, that in the Bodleian library there is a copy of Kuster's edition of Suidas filled, from beginning to end, with MS. notes and excerpts of various kinds, by the famous D'Orville, tending to illustrate the ancient lexicographer.