Note 348 — LIFE AND HABITS OF A LITERARY ANTIQUARY.—OLDYS AND HIS MANUSCRIPTS.

At the Bodleian Library, I learnt by a letter with which I am favoured by the Rev. Dr. Bliss, that there is an interleaved “Gildon’s Lives and Characters of the Dramatic Poets,” with corrections, which once belonged to Coxeter, who appears to have intended a new edition. Whether Coxeter transcribed into his Gildon the notes of Oldys’s first “Langbaine,” is worth inquiry. Coxeter’s conduct, though he had purchased Oldys’s first “Langbaine,” was that of an ungenerous miser, who will quarrel with a brother rather than share in any acquisition he can get into his own hands. To Coxeter we also owe much; he suggested Dodsley’s Collection of Old Plays, and the first tolerable edition of Massinger.