Note 345 — LIFE AND HABITS OF A LITERARY ANTIQUARY.—OLDYS AND HIS MANUSCRIPTS.

Gibbon once meditated a life of Rawleigh, and for that purpose began some researches in that “memorable era of our English annals.” After reading Oldys’s, he relinquished his design, from a conviction that “he could add nothing new to the subject, except the uncertain merit of style and sentiment.”