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There was no end to his aids and contributions to every author or bookseller who applied to him; yet he had reason to complain of both while they were using his invaluable but not valued knowledge. Here is one of these diurnal entries:–

I lent the tragical lives and deaths of the famous pirates, Ward and Dansiker, 4to, London, 1612, by Robt. Daborn, alias Dabourne, to Mr. T. Lediard, when he was writing his Naval History, and he never returned it. See Howell’s Letters of them.

In another, when his friend T. Hayward was collecting, for his “British Muse,” the most exquisite commonplaces of our old English dramatists, a compilation which must not be confounded with ordinary ones, Oldys not only assisted in the labour, but drew up a curious introduction with a knowledge and love of the subject which none but himself possessed. But so little were these researches then understood, that we find Oldys, in a moment of vexatious recollection, and in a corner of one of the margins of his Langbaine, accidentally preserving 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.[15] 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 contemporaries. Oldys should have been constituted the reader for the nation. His Comptes Rendus of books and manuscripts are still held precious; but his useful and curious talent had sought the public patronage in vain! From one of his “Diaries,” which has escaped destruction, I transcribe some interesting passages ad verbum.