HENRY BRADSHAW
 
 OF 
 
 HENRY BRADS 
 
 FELLOW OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, 
 AND UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN 
 
 G. W. PROTHERO 
 
 FELLOW AND TUTOR OF 
 
 KING'S COLLEGE, 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 LONDON 
 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., i, PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 1888
 
 ami <>/ >
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE subject of this memoir was in no sense, except in so 
 far as was inseparable from his official position, a public 
 man. During life he rather courted obscurity, and his 
 name is but little known, except to scholars, beyond the 
 precincts of his own university. He never led a party, he 
 founded no school, he never wrote a book. His life was 
 spent in quiet study and self-denying labour, sweetened not 
 by fame, but by the companionship of friends and the con- 
 sciousness of many-sided utility. Under such circumstances 
 his influence could not be very widely felt, but within his 
 own circle it was deep and permanent. Over those with 
 whom he came much in contact, over many whose hand he 
 touched but once or twice, his intense individuality, with 
 its strange blending of strength and tenderness, of frankness 
 and sensibility, of human affection and scientific enthusiasm, 
 exercised an irresistible fascination. Nor was his example 
 as a scholar less attractive than his character as a man. 
 The width and exactitude of his knowledge, the thorough- 
 ness of his research, his elevation of science above all 
 thought of self, his respect for genuine study in all branches 
 however remote from his own, gave to many students a 
 new ideal and a stimulus all the more potent because it was 
 suggested rather than enforced. It is this rare and admir- 
 
 a 3
 
 vi PREFACE. 
 
 able combination of qualities which it has been my prin- 
 cipal object to portray. The life of such a man may, it is 
 hoped, be interesting, not only to his friends, but to students 
 of character and lovers of learning to whom he was per- 
 sonally unknown. 
 
 Of his literary work I speak with great diffidence. The 
 quantity and quality of that work are but little known, 
 partly because of its abstruseness, but chiefly because so 
 much of it lies half concealed in books which others have 
 given to the world. The help which he so ungrudgingly 
 gave is acknowledged in many grateful prefaces and recorded 
 in many learned notes, but such indications attract little 
 attention, and the original worker is easily forgotten or 
 ignored. It is due to Henry Bradshaw's memory that the 
 abundance of his self-sacrifice in this respect should be 
 fully recorded. I have not attempted to criticise his con- 
 clusions and discoveries, or to estimate his position as a 
 man of letters and science, for to do so would require a 
 fund of special knowledge to which I can make no pretence. 
 I have only endeavoured to give some account of the results 
 which he attained, of the methods which he employed, and 
 of the spirit in which he worked. 
 
 I cannot but be conscious how imperfectly I have dis- 
 charged my task. Those who felt the charm of Henry 
 Bradshaw's personal presence will most easily understand 
 the difficulty of presenting to those who did not know him 
 an adequate portrait of his character. Those who are 
 nearest him in learning will most readily condone my 
 inability to follow him through the intricacies of the many 
 subjects which he made his own. To his friends, who have 
 helped me in the production of this book, I tender my 
 hearty thanks. Such as it is, it could not have been pro-
 
 PREFACE. VII 
 
 duced without their aid. They are too numerous to be 
 mentioned here by name ; they will, I trust, recognise 
 their own impressions in many of the following pages. I 
 must, however, acknowledge my special indebtedness to 
 the Rev. H. R. Luard, D.D., who read over and corrected 
 the earlier chapters ; to the Rev. Christopher Wordsworth, 
 who did a similar service for Chapter IX ; to Professx>r 
 Herkomer, for the portrait which forms the frontispiece 
 to this book ; to Mr G. I. F. Tupper, for the facsimile of 
 a letter ; and to Mr Alfred Rogers, assistant in the Uni- 
 versity Library, who gave me much help in various ways. 
 
 I have only to add that I should have incorporated 
 more of Henry Bradshaw's letters and unpublished work in 
 this memoir, but for two reasons. In the first place, such 
 an addition would have enlarged the volume to an excessive 
 bulk ; and, in the second, a collective edition of his pub- 
 lished papers will shortly be issued, to which it is hoped 
 that a volume of his letters on scientific and literary subjects 
 may subsequently be added. 
 
 G. W. PROTHERO. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, 
 
 November I, 1 888.
 
 C O N T E NTS. 
 
 I. BOYHOOD (1831-50) ... ... ... ... ... i 
 
 II. UNDERGRADUATE LIFE (1850-54) ... 19 
 
 III. ST. COLUMBA'S (1854-56) ... ... ... ... 45 
 
 IV. LIFE AND WORK AT CAMBRIDGE (1856-63) ... 60 
 V. LIFE AND WORK AT CAMBRIDGE (1863-67) ... ... 106 
 
 VI. LlBRARIANSHIP (1867-75) '55 
 
 VII. LITERARY WORK (1867-75) ... ... ... ... 196 
 
 VIII. LlBRARIANSHIP (1875-82) ... ... ... 226 
 
 IX. LITERARY WORK (1878-86) ... 264 
 
 X. LlBRARIANSHIP (1882-86) ... ... ... 288 
 
 XI. SURVEY OF LITERARY WORK ... ... . 323 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ... ... ... ... 326 
 
 MANUSCRIPTS .. ... ... 330 
 
 CELTIC ANTIQUITIES, ETC. ... 338 
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL ANTIQUITIES .. ... 342 
 
 CHAUCER, F.TC. ... ... 346 
 
 EARLY PRINTING ... .. ... .. ... 359 
 
 HERALDRY ... ... ... ... ... 371 
 
 XII. SURVEY OF LIFE AND CHARACTER ... ... ... 372 
 
 APPENDIX I. NOTE ON MEDI.F.VAL SERVICE-BOOKS ... 423 
 
 ,, II. LETTER ON CATHEDRAL ORGANIZATION ... ... 427 
 
 ,, III. PUBLISHED WORK OF HENRY BRADSHAW ... 433 
 
 INDEX ... 439 
 
 PORTRAIT... ... ... To face till 
 
 F-VSIMILE .. pn.y 360
 
 ADDENDUM. 
 
 SINCE the sheets on which I have given an account of the discovery 
 of the Barbour fragments (pp. 134-139) were printed off, I have learnt, 
 through the kindness of Dr Furnivall, that the poems in question.are 
 no longer regarded by scholars as Barbour's. So late as two years ago, 
 Dr Horstmann, who edited these fragments, appears to have enter- 
 tained no doubt that they were by the " Father of Scotch poetry." 
 But within the last few months, two German scholars, Dr Emil Koppel 
 (" Englische Studien," x. 373) and Mr P. Buss (" Anglia," ix. 493), have 
 decided, on the ground of internal evidence and language, against the 
 authorship of Barbour. Their conclusions are supported by Professor 
 Skeat in his forthcoming preface to the edition of the " Brus," pub- 
 lished by the Early English Text Society. Had Bradshaw studied 
 these poems as minutely as he studied those of Chaucer, it is possible 
 that he might have anticipated these results ; but he does not appear 
 to have gone beyond the initial examination, which pointed to Bar- 
 bour as the author. A new edition of the " Legends of the Saints " is 
 being prepared for the Scottish Text Society by the Rev. W. W. 
 Metcalfe, and the last word about the authorship of the poems is 
 perhaps not yet said. It need hardly be remarked that, even if the 
 authorship of Barbour be disproved, the discovery of so large a mass 
 of mediaeval poetry loses little of its importance.
 
 HENRY BRADSHAW. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 SOME- of Henry Bradshaw's most remarkable qualities 
 may perhaps be traced to his Puritan and Roundhead 
 ancestors, his Quaker connections, and the mixed Eng- 
 lish and Irish blood which ran in his veins. He belonged 
 to an old Lancashire family, which took its name from 
 Bradshaigh, or Bradshaw, a manor near Bolton-le-Moors. 
 Members of this family represented their county in the 
 Parliaments of Edward II and Edward III, as well as in 
 those of the seventeenth century. The elder branch, which 
 had migrated to Haigh Hall, near Wigan, in the Tudor 
 times, and had taken the king's side in the civil wars, 
 became extinct towards the end of the last century. Haigh 
 Hall passed by marriage to the sixth Earl of Balcarres, 
 in whose family it still remains. Early in the fifteenth 
 century a younger branch of the Bradshaws established 
 itself in Derbyshire, at Bradshaw Hall, near Chapel-le- 
 Frith. A member of this branch, named Henry, settled, 
 in 1606, at Marple, near Chester, and founded a third line, 
 to which the subject of this memoir belonged. 
 
 Henry Bradshaw, of Marple, grandson of the before- 
 named Henry, sided with the Parliament in the civil wars, 
 and headed a petition from the county of Cheshire for 
 
 B
 
 2 BOYHOOD. 
 
 the establishment of Presbyterian ism. He afterwards 
 joined Cromwell, became colonel of a regiment of foot, 
 and fought at Worcester. His younger brother was the 
 John Bradshaw known to history as president of the court 
 which tried and condemned Charles I. These two Round- 
 heads were not, however, the first of their stock who had 
 shown Puritanical tendencies. A generation or so before the 
 civil war, one William Bradshaw, a member of the Cheshire 
 branch, was disinherited by his father for holding heterodox 
 opinions. William's elder son, Richard, was the Protector's 
 minister at the Hague ; another son, James, served in Crom- 
 well's army, distinguished himself at Drogheda and else- 
 where, and settled at Milecross, County Down. 
 
 James Bradshaw's descendants joined the Society of 
 Friends. His great-grandson, Thomas, married, in 1777, a 
 daughter of Mr Samuel Hoare, banker, of London. Their 
 eldest son, Robert, who lived on his father's estate at 
 Milecross, was regarded in the neighbourhood as a remark- 
 able man. Among other marks of that originality which 
 cropped out elsewhere in the family, it may be mentioned 
 that he used to drive into Belfast on market-days in a 
 closed carriage of his own construction, with a stove inside, 
 the smoke and sparks from which excited in winter time 
 the wonder and admiration of the neighbourhood. A 
 younger son, Joseph Hoare Bradshaw, married, in 1823, 
 Catherine, daughter of Mr Richard Stewart, of Ballintoy, 
 County Antrim. Henry Bradshaw was the third son and 
 fifth child of this marriage. He was born on February 2, 
 1831, at 2 Artillery Place, Finsbury Square, where his 
 father then resided. 
 
 Mr J. H. Bradshaw had been in his early life much 
 devoted to field sports. He was a healthy, robust man, 
 over six feet in height, and possessed of unusual physical 
 strength. His son Henry could recollect standing, as a 
 small child, on the outstretched palm of his father's hand.
 
 HOME AND FAMILY. 3 
 
 While still young, Mr Bradshaw settled in London, and 
 became a member of the firm of Barnett, Hoare and Co., 
 Bankers, Lombard Street, with which his mother was 
 connected. He was a man of scrupulous integrity, out- 
 spoken truthfulness, guileless and unworldly, but possessed 
 of considerable practical sense and capacity for business. 
 He was peculiarly quiet in manner, devoted to his wife 
 and children, and a great reader. He had a large library, 
 and made a valuable collection of Irish books. These he 
 bequeathed to his son Henry, who owed to them the 
 foundation of his bibliographical studies. Mr J. H. Brad- 
 shaw was no bookworm, but he loved his books, and pre- 
 ferred the best editions. Like his son Henry, who inherited 
 and developed his tastes, he had a horror of a dog's-eared 
 page, or of a book carelessly cut. He had many literary 
 friends, and was fond of conversing on literary and biblio- 
 graphical subjects. 
 
 While keeping up an amicable connection with the 
 community to which he had belonged, he practically ceased, 
 on his marriage, to be a member of the Society of Friends, 
 and his children were brought up members of the Church 
 of England. Mrs Bradshaw was the youngest but one 
 of fifteen brothers and sisters, and not the least handsome 
 of a handsome family. Her sisters-in-law, Miss Sarah 
 and Miss Lucy Bradshaw, used to enjoy describing the 
 excitement which was caused by her first appearance in 
 their quiet Quaker circle. These ladies, who after their 
 father's death lived for the most part in Dublin, devoted 
 themselves to charitable works, and died members of the 
 Society of Friends. Miss Lucy Bradshaw was very fond 
 of Henry, and eventually left him a little property at 
 Lindfield, in Sussex, which she had inherited from the 
 well-known philanthropist, William Allen. Henry Brad- 
 shaw himself never lost sight of the Quaker connection, 
 and treated any Friends whom he came across as in some
 
 4 BOYHOOD. 
 
 sort relatives of his own. Of his ancestors he seldom 
 spoke, though he knew all the details of his pedigree. 
 He had no objection to acknowledging that he was related 
 to John Bradshaw, the regicide. One day, while he was 
 a boy at Eton, some one asked him half in jest if he was 
 connected with the Bradshaw who tried Charles I. " Yes," 
 he replied ; " but my mother was a Stewart." 
 
 Soon after Henry Bradshaw's birth, the family moved 
 to Hornsey, and here he passed the first eight years of his 
 life. In the thirties of this century, Hornsey was still a 
 country village, with fields and shady lanes, where the 
 boy may well have learnt that love of natural objects, 
 especially of flowers, which was so strong a feature in his 
 character. The traditions of childhood are not always 
 trustworthy or important, but one or two traits may be 
 mentioned as indicating tendencies which were clearly 
 innate. An old friend of the family tells me that she 
 remembers Henry, then a child three or four years old, 
 lying at full length on the drawing-room floor, absorbed 
 in the study of a genealogical map of the kings of Eng- 
 land, with their portraits and the dates of their reigns. 
 In a short time he committed this map to memory, and 
 could repeat it word for word in imperfect baby-speech. 
 The floor seems to have been his favourite place of study, 
 for another friend frequently observed him lying under 
 the table with a sheet of the Times open before him, by 
 the aid of which he was learning to read. He was a quiet 
 grave child, happy enough so long as he could follow his 
 own devices, but with no superabundance of animal spirits. 
 When people asked him what he was going to be, his 
 invariable reply was, " A scholar." 
 
 When he was about eight years old he went to school 
 at Temple Grove, East Sheen. This school, afterwards 
 presided over by Mr Waterfield, one of Henry Bradshaw's 
 oldest friends, was then kept by a Mr Thompson, whose
 
 TEMPLE GROVE AND ETON. 5 
 
 wife, the daughter of an old Waterloo officer, was a first 
 cousin of Mrs Bradshaw. The house is a fine eighteenth- 
 century building, on the site of one inhabited by Sir 
 William Temple hence the name with large grounds 
 adorned by those noble cedars which it was so much the 
 fashion to plant a hundred and fifty years ago. Here 
 Henry got his schooling for about four years. Not long 
 after his arrival, Mr Thompson wrote to his mother as 
 follows : " Harry gains the first prize of the lower school, 
 and with truth I never examined a little fellow with a 
 sounder head or better memory. He is a boy of the 
 greatest promise, so zealous and steady, and unswerving 
 from his point, that I will back him against any that have 
 yet gone through my hands. He has made deep inroads 
 upon his Latin grammar, and has done in one quarter 
 what costs the toil of four or five to most children." 
 
 In 1843 Henry left Temple Grove for Eton. The school 
 was then hardly two-thirds as numerous as it is now. The 
 number of masters was insufficient, and the school divisions 
 were unmanageably large. Dr Hawtrey was head master, 
 and Dr Okes, the present Provost of King's, was lower 
 master. Dr Goodford, late Provost of Eton, and Bishop 
 Abraham were among the assistants. Bradshaw entered 
 the school as an oppidan, and boarded at Angelo's, whose 
 house was a tall, red-brick building, standing in its own 
 grounds, some way down the lane which now leads to 
 the gas-works, on the right-hand side. His tutor was the 
 Rev. W. G. Cookesley, a man of considerable reading and 
 literary taste, not very learned, but interested in learning, 
 quick-witted and sympathetic. 
 
 One of Bradshaw's contemporaries, well qualified to 
 judge, writes of Cookesley as follows: "He was no 
 accurate scholar ; he was erratic, and a bad disciplinarian. 
 But he was altogether a stimulating teacher, and, at the 
 time I was at Eton, almost the only man of the whole
 
 6 BOYHOOD. 
 
 lot of masters, except Goodford, who knew what literature 
 meant. On him first of any at Eton dawned the idea 
 that there was a science of philology, and though his 
 excursions into that field were wild and wonderful, he 
 excited in us the liveliest interest and curiosity. He 
 generally came into school at least a quarter of an hour 
 late, but his short lesson was of really inestimable value. 
 Altogether he remains on my mind as the chief intellectual 
 element among the masters of his day." 
 
 Such a man may well have encouraged his pupil in 
 his multifarious reading, and fostered his nascent love of 
 literature. Bradshaw seldom spoke of him in later years. 
 When he did so it was with affection, though not with 
 reverence. When Cookesley took a living and left Eton, 
 some of his old pupils got up a subscription towards 
 furnishing their tutor's parsonage. This was mentioned 
 to Bradshaw in the Combination Room at King's, where- 
 upon he silently passed a five-pound note behind another 
 man's back to the collector of the subscription. He was 
 anything but well off at the time. 
 
 When Bradshaw had been two years at Eton, a great 
 change in his fortunes took place. In the summer of 1845 
 his father suddenly died. Mrs Bradshaw was left a widow, 
 with three sons under twenty-one. The eldest, Thomas, 
 was at Oxford, and was intended for the bar. He after- 
 wards became a county court judge at Durham, and died 
 in 1884. The second, Richard, had just entered the navy, 
 in which profession he afterwards rose to be an admiral, 
 and earned distinction during the Zulu war as commander 
 of the Shah. Though Mr J. H. Bradshaw had been in 
 receipt of a good income, he was prevented, by the failure 
 of investments supposed to be perfectly secure, from making 
 any large provision for his family. Henry could no longer 
 afford to remain an oppidan, and accordingly passed for 
 college at Election, 1845.
 
 ETON IN OLD DAYS. 7 
 
 When he went into college, the barbarous system of 
 earlier days was giving way to a more civilized regime. 
 Hitherto almost all the foundation scholars had been 
 packed into Long Chamber, an enormous room, where 
 they were left to do pretty much as they pleased. From 
 lock-up to early school, a period of twelve or fourteen 
 hours in winter-time, not a soul came near them. At rare 
 intervals they were disturbed, perhaps in the midst of an 
 unlicensed supper, by the vision of Dr Hawtrey, pre- 
 ceded by an aged domestic with a lantern, emerging from 
 a door at the end of the room. Everybody was in bed 
 in a twinkling, and the doctor, having gone through the 
 form of calling absence, retired. Other supervision there 
 was none. Strange stories are told of the orgies that went 
 on, of the quantities of beer surreptitiously introduced in 
 the capacious pockets of the heavy cloth gowns, of the 
 animals kept on the leads above, of fagging and bullying 
 unknown in these milder days. Person used to say that 
 his only pleasant recollections of Eton were the rat-hunts 
 in Long Chamber. The floor of that apartment was 
 occasionally polished by a method probably unique, which 
 went by the name of "rug-riding." The process was as 
 follows. Several "orders" of tallow candles, the only light 
 of those dim days, were first smeared along the floor. A 
 small boy, generally an oppidan, if he could be caught, 
 was then tied up in a rug, and hauled rapidly up and 
 down the room by three or four others until the boards 
 were in a satisfactory condition. The diet was whole- 
 some, but monotonous mutton almost every day, with 
 the addition now and then of tough suet dumplings. 
 Baths were unknown. The bigger boys could escape 
 during day-time from the pandemonium of Long Chamber 
 to studies "up town," but the mass of collegers had no 
 other home but their dormitory. 
 
 Such was the state of things when Bradshaw went to
 
 s BOYHOOD, 
 
 Eton, but when he entered college it was undergoing a 
 rapid change. The " New Buildings " had just been erected, 
 and he was one of the first occupants. Every boy, except 
 a few of the youngest, now enjoyed the luxury of a separate 
 room. A still more important change was the appoint- 
 ment of a " Master in College." Mr Abraham, afterwards 
 Bishop Selwyn's right hand in New Zealand, gave up his 
 house to take the new and responsible post. Bishop 
 Abraham tells me that Bradshaw was one of the first with 
 whom he made friends in college. " In his room," says 
 the bishop, " I always found a welcome, and he was always 
 ready to talk. He was of a gregarious temperament, and 
 I could be sure of finding a leve'e of boys in his room, 
 ready to talk on books, politics, etc. ; and so he smoothed 
 the way for me more than any other person or thing 
 could do." 
 
 This gregariousness was, however, a comparatively late 
 development. At first Bradshaw was but little known. 
 His quiet, bookish ways and his distaste for games were 
 enough to account for this. He was not bullied ; his 
 physical strength and a certain dignity, which was already 
 apparent, and which boys are quick to recognize, pre- 
 vented this ; but he was regarded as rather a " muff," and 
 quietly ignored. In dress he was scrupulously neat, but 
 carefully avoided anything like show. He read much, 
 but in a desultory way, and was apt to neglect his school- 
 work. His tutor complained of his "want of energy." 
 He got " pcenas " for not knowing his lessons, and, with 
 that mingled dilatoriness and perversity which amused 
 and sometimes irritated his friends, he often failed to show 
 up his punishments in time, and once at least had to 
 undergo the extreme severity of the law. Naturally, he 
 was at this time not on the best of terms with the masters. 
 It is said that Dr Hawtrey, who used sometimes in his 
 allocutions to the school at the end of the half to mention
 
 EARLY LOVE OF BOOKS. g 
 
 names for praise or blame, on one occasion held up Brad- 
 shaw to universal reprobation as an idle boy, from whom 
 it was impossible to extract a "pcena." The invective was 
 heard by one who knew that the reproof was hardly 
 merited, and who, in sympathy for the reprobate, estab- 
 lished a friendship with him which lasted for life. This 
 was comparatively early in his school-life. Dr Hawtrey 
 afterwards came to know him better, and admitted him 
 to great intimacy. He had begun to learn Italian, and 
 in 1846 got the second Prince Consort's prize for that 
 language. He also touched on Spanish. This taste for 
 modern languages was enough in itself to attract Dr 
 Hawtrey. 
 
 Bradshaw was already a lover of books, and possessed 
 an extensive library. He had carried off a considerable 
 number of his late father's books, and had had a book- 
 plate struck for them. In several of the books which 
 were still on his shelves at the time of his death was to 
 be found a book-plate with " E libris Henrici Bradshaw 
 Reg : Coll : Eton : Alurnn. MDCCCXLVI. " inscribed on it. 
 Among the books which belonged to him at this time are 
 many not often found in a boy's library. One of them is 
 an " Officium Beatae Marise," printed at Antwerp in 1564; 
 another is a Bede, printed at Cologne in 1501. In a copy 
 of Bond's edition of Horace's " Odes," printed at Amster- 
 dam in 1686, is an inscription in his neat, boyish hand : 
 "From the library of the late William Allen, Esq., at 
 Stoke Newington. John Bond was a celebrated commen- 
 tator and grammarian, born in Somersetshire in 1550; 
 died at Taunton in 1612. N.B. This is the best edition." 
 He had already begun to feel his way about libraries. 
 Some forty years later, in 1883, he says in a letter to 
 a friend about Bishop Cosin's library at Durham, " I so 
 well remember going over from Darlington, as a boy of 
 fourteen, and being locked in there all day, working at
 
 io BOYHOOD. 
 
 Strabo or any books I could find bearing on the geography 
 of the Crimea, which happened to be a pet subject with 
 another Eton boy and myself at that time." Not many 
 boys of fourteen indicate their future pursuits so clearly. 
 
 In 1847, when he was sixteen, Bradshaw suddenly 
 emerged from his chrysalis state into comparative notoriety. 
 Collegers were in those days superannuated in their twen- 
 tieth year ; that is, if they had not " got King's " on the 
 election Saturday (the last Saturday in July) next after 
 their nineteenth birthday, they had to leave the school. 
 During their last three years they could sit for a scholar- 
 ship at King's, but in election trials their places were 
 seldom changed. In their seventeenth year they entered 
 for an examination called " Intermediates," by which their 
 places in their year, and therefore their chances of getting 
 a scholarship, were practically determined. In this ex- 
 amination Bradshaw, who, having entered the school late, 
 had hitherto been at the bottom of his year, suddenly 
 leapt to the top, to the surprise, not unmixed with indig- 
 nation, of his contemporaries. He wrote at once to inform 
 his mother. 
 
 "Eton College, July 23, 1847. Friday afternoon. 
 
 " MY DEAR MAMMA, 
 
 " I'm captain of my year in trials ! ! ! ! ! Did 
 you ever hear anything like that ? I hadn't the most 
 remote notion of anything of the kind. Instead of being 
 simply put up into my year, which I hardly expected to 
 do, I have taken thirteen places. ... I can hardly now 
 believe it. ... Pickering told me this morning that if 
 I had done my exercises some of them rather better, 
 I should have been sent up ; but he was glad to see 
 me taking such pains in schoolwork. Good-bye, and 
 believe me, 
 
 " Ever your affectionate son, 
 
 11 PIENRY BRADSHAW."
 
 FIRST SUCCESSES. 1 1 
 
 It was certainly a surprising promotion, but it did not 
 the least throw him off his balance. He wore his laurels 
 with so conciliating a mien, that his competitors could not 
 but submit with a good grace. Stacey, hitherto captain 
 of the year, a boy made for popularity, frank, generous, 
 athletic, and a fair scholar, shook hands with him cordially, 
 and bore him no grudge. Bradshaw never forgot the 
 kindness, often spoke of it in later years, and remained 
 Stacey's friend as long as he lived. Stacey followed him 
 to King's, and not long before his death, in 1885, saw the 
 wish of his heart accomplished in the gift of the stained 
 glass which now fills the great west window of the chapel. 
 One of the last things in which Bradshaw was engaged 
 was the drawing up of an inscription for a tablet to be 
 placed in the chapel in memory of his old friend. 
 
 Once in his proper place, at the head of his year, Brad- 
 shaw began to be known, and to make friends whom he 
 never lost. Not that he made very many, for he was 
 fastidious and not easy of access. When on the defensive 
 he could make cutting remarks, but he never attacked 
 any one wantonly. His comrades began to perceive that 
 the shy, unobtrusive lad had something unusual about 
 him. One of his contemporaries writes, " There was always 
 a thoughtfulness and a gentleness that attracted me to 
 him, not unmixed with a slight vein of sarcasm or raillery 
 that made me a little afraid of him at times. I was struck 
 by the appearance of indolence, and yet I always felt that 
 under it lay a reserve of power." Another says of him, 
 " He was often extremely odd, often humorous and 
 ironical, and rather fond of paradoxical propositions. He 
 showed the same delicate perception and discrimination 
 of externals, the same penetration, the same rapid recog- 
 nition of realities, logical acuteness, and immoveable fair- 
 ness and charity which his friends found in him as a man. 
 His refinement, good breeding and delicacy gave him an
 
 12 BOYHOOD. 
 
 air of distinction which was by no means common, and 
 which was directly due to his home education." 
 
 It was to his character entirely that he owed what 
 influence he possessed, for he was not distinguished at 
 this time for scholarship, and, though healthy, well-made, 
 and strong enough, he was no athlete. Nor, until he was 
 captain of the school, when he felt it his duty to exert 
 influence, did he ever try to put himself forward. He 
 abstained from games, except football now and then by 
 way of exercise. He learnt to swim, but never rowed, 
 though he was fond of being rowed about by a companion. 
 His friend Waterfield used to take him up the back- 
 waters of the Thames on botanical expeditions, and they 
 explored the rich meadows on its banks for water-plants 
 and flowers. His old friend Mr Allen had left him a 
 collection of dried specimens, gathered towards the close 
 of the last century in the course of morning walks before 
 office hours into the country from Lombard Street. This 
 collection was the foundation of Bradshaw's botanical 
 knowledge, and at this time it was as great a joy to him 
 to find a rare plant as in later days to discover a new 
 Caxton. 
 
 He not un frequently fought little battles with the 
 masters, in which he never lost his head, and sometimes 
 came off victorious. On one occasion he was caught 
 wearing a straw hat in Weston's Yard, tall hats being in 
 those days the only recognised headgear. He was ob- 
 served by one of the masters, who made him give up his 
 hat, saying he might have it back at the end of the half. 
 Bradshaw did not forget the promise. On the last day 
 of the half he lay in wait for Mr X., and, meeting him 
 as he passed through the school-yard, asked him if he 
 might have his hat. Mr X. had forgotten all about it. 
 Bradshaw reminded him of the circumstance and of his 
 promise. The master thought the hat could not have been
 
 LOVE OF LITERATURE. 13 
 
 taken to his house. "That can hardly be, sir," rejoined 
 Bradshaw, with perfect politeness and gravity, " for it was 
 only yesterday that I saw your foot-boy wearing it." 
 These little skirmishes did not, however, hinder him from 
 being, during the latter part of his Eton career, on ex- 
 cellent terms with those in authority, especially with Dr 
 Hawtrey and his relatives, John and Stephen, two of the 
 assistant-masters, and with Mr Abraham. 
 
 The boys' library, often called Hawtrey's Library, one 
 of the most delightful reading-rooms in the world, was 
 his favourite haunt. There he spent the greater part of 
 his playtime. Bibliographical questions already interested 
 him, as well as the history of language : he studied Dibdin 
 and Ducange. The great dictionary " Mediae et infifnae 
 Latinitatis " " middling or infamous Latin," as he jokingly 
 translated it always reminded him, he used to say, of 
 Cookesley's scholarship. In connection with the library, a 
 story is told of him which illustrates the power he already 
 possessed of saying the unexpected. He was one day 
 carrying off from the library to his room two or three 
 massive folios, when he was hailed from a window above 
 with the question, " Hullo, Bradshaw ! whose books have 
 you got there ? " " Yours," was the terse reply ; for the 
 books, being library books, belonged to the questioner and 
 the questioned alike. He thought about philology, and 
 doubted the then received derivation of bonJieur and mallieur 
 from bona and mala hora. " I can't believe that is right," 
 he said ; " they would never have altered the gender." He 
 worked at divinity too, filled the margins of his Bible with 
 careful references, and studied the contents and history 
 of the Prayer-book. Of the beauties of the latter he used 
 often to talk to one of his sisters. " He was the first 
 person," she says, "who taught me to know and love the 
 Prayer-book, and that while he was a boy at Eton." But 
 English literature was his chief study. In one year he and
 
 14 BOYHOOD. 
 
 his friend Waterfield read through all the standard poets, 
 including the whole of Spenser not reading together, but 
 simultaneously, and talking the subject over afterwards. 
 Chaucer already attracted him. He read 'the moderns 
 too, and delighted in Tennyson, then in the zenith of his 
 powers. Whenever a new volume of Tennyson came out, 
 he would take it home with him for his holidays, and read 
 it aloud to his sisters. 
 
 In 1848 he moved into a room in the upper passage 
 of New Buildings, where there was more space for his 
 library. This room was the large one on the right-hand 
 side of the passage, with an iron pillar in it supporting the 
 ceiling. He writes home on Whitsunday, 1848 : 
 
 " I have at last got all my books in order, and my room 
 perfectly neat, and in consequence of being a large room 
 it looks dreadfully bare ; but if it had a few things in it, 
 I could make it look perfect. ... I have, according to 
 request and desire, got a few flowers for my window, which 
 cost me hardly anything ; and, indeed, I can't afford to 
 spend much, as I haven't got the means. . . . Tell Sarah 
 that I have a Cape jasmine which has more than twenty 
 buds, all in different stages, some of which will be out in 
 a day or two, and it will keep on flowering till near the 
 end of July. Won't that be delicious ? " The same love 
 of flowers comes out in another letter, dated May 27, 1849, 
 in which he speaks of giving some flowers to Mrs John 
 Hawtrey, on the occasion of a christening. " I went to 
 Slough and got some cut flowers, about three shillings' 
 worth, and brought them to John Hawtrey's. Certainly 
 they were most exquisite flowers, and even now they scent 
 the house whenever I go in there, which is very often. . . . 
 I presume there was no harm in making an offering of 
 that kind. When you see Sarah, would you give her the 
 enclosed firstfruits (so to speak) of my lilies of the valley, 
 which she asked for, and which I am only too glad to
 
 SCHOLARSHIP. 1 5 
 
 give ? " He always kept flowers in his rooms, if possible ; 
 and when his friend Stacey went down to play in a cricket- 
 match, Bradshaw always had a flower ready for him to 
 put in his button-hole. 
 
 During all this time he was making progress in scholar- 
 ship, in his own way. But it was not a way likely to lead 
 to much immediate result in the winning of prizes and 
 school distinctions. He liked to prepare his lessons in 
 the library, where there were dictionaries and commen- 
 taries in plenty. If a passage of Homer were to be " got 
 up," he would seize on some unusual form or word, and 
 pursue it and all its relatives up and down the lexicon, 
 into byways and recesses unknown to any but the most 
 curious scholars. " Dear me ! " he would say, " this is very 
 odd. I must look it out ; " and the exploration would open 
 up half a dozen others. A single line would occupy all 
 the time during which he should have been preparing 
 sixty or seventy, and then he would go into school and 
 contentedly get punished for not knowing his lesson. He 
 was not what is called an accomplished scholar, but knew 
 what he knew thoroughly, and never made blunders. He 
 was in the select for the Newcastle Scholarship in 1849, 
 and might have distinguished himself still more next year, 
 had he not left before the examination. Composition was 
 not his strong point ; he always composed with difficulty. 
 He was nevertheless "sent up for good" three or four 
 times before he got into the head master's division, and there 
 is a story told of him which sounds apocryphal, but which 
 shows that he had the reputation of being able to do good 
 verses. Being in for election trials in 1849, he showed 
 up only three Greek iambics. When the examiners were 
 looking over the exercises, Dr Hawtrey produced a copy 
 which he had himself written, to serve as a standard. 
 Rowland Williams, one of the "Posers," glanced at the 
 copy, and, holding up Bradshaw's verses, remarked curtly,
 
 i r> BOYHOOD. 
 
 " Excuse me, T)r Hawtrcy, but these three lines are worth 
 the whole lot." 
 
 During the Easter holidays, 1849, he went as private 
 tutor to the family of Mr Wicksted, at Shakenhurst, in 
 Worcestershire. He appears to have been happy there, 
 though he did not repeat the experience. He used to talk 
 of it as " the time when I wore plush." At Shakenhurst 
 he met Mrs Severne, sister of Mrs Wicksted, and of Mrs 
 Clive, the authoress of " Paul Ferroll." Mrs Severne was 
 a charming and accomplished person, and took a great 
 fancy to Bradshaw. She divined in him what most people 
 failed to perceive, and probably, as my informant writes, 
 " rescued him for a time from the cloud of listless diffidence 
 which a lad of lymphatic constitution carries about him 
 while living among lads of high spirit, by whom he is more 
 or less misunderstood." 
 
 That he was already becoming known as a bibliophile 
 is shown by the following story, which I give on the 
 authority of Mr Kershaw, librarian at Lambeth. One 
 day Bradshaw entered Pickering's shop in Piccadilly. The 
 Earl of Lincoln was in the shop, and an assistant named 
 Craven was serving the customers. When Bradshaw left 
 the shop, Craven said, " Do you know that young Etonian ? 
 He is a great book-hunter even at his age." To which 
 Lord Lincoln replied, " I wanted to see him, but he's 
 gone." * 
 
 Some little time before Election, 1849, Bradshaw became 
 captain of the school. In this position he displayed 
 to the full the moral courage which distinguished him 
 through life. He had little or nothing to do with the 
 general discipline of the school, but the position of captain 
 of college was at that time a very responsible one. Quite 
 as much, probably, depended on him as on the master in 
 
 * The story was told to Mr Kershaw in 1 866, and related by him in a 
 letter to Mr Bradshaw himself.
 
 CAPTAIN OF ETON. 17 
 
 college. For petty breaches of discipline, the captain could 
 inflict punishments in the shape of lines or "epigrams ;" 
 more serious offences entailed a thrashing or " working-off" 
 at sixth-form table. Bradshaw's discipline was severe ; he 
 put down card-playing and smoking to the best of his 
 ability, and remonstrated with those who were guilty of 
 worse things in a way in which not one boy in a hundred 
 has courage to speak to another. Towards the end of 1849, 
 he writes to his mother as follows : " This school-time 
 has passed away like a dream. I feel changed, and, indeed, 
 I know not how ; I hope, however, for the better. My 
 captaincy is fast departing, and it is a comfort to think 
 that I have done some good in college ; indeed, I hope it 
 will be lasting. Dr Hawtrey has always looked to us 
 (my year) to do some good, and I hope it will be realized. 
 I have seen more of him, and been drawn nearer to him, 
 than ever this school-time ; and, indeed, I hardly know 
 what I shall do without Hawtrey, Abraham, and Procter 
 when I go to King's." 
 
 Soon after leaving Eton, he writes to tell his mother that 
 the fruits of his work were already visible. " Notwithstand- 
 ing the severity, as you thought it, of my discipline at Eton, 
 it has, I am thankful to say, made me some of the best 
 friends I have, who at the time were most violent against 
 it, and yet now write and send me beautiful books, thanking 
 me for having opened their eyes, and saying how beneficial 
 my captaincy has been to college. It is enough to make 
 one proud. I only trust it may not." 
 
 What was thought of him at Eton may be gathered 
 from a letter of introduction to Professor Sedgwick, written 
 by one of his Eton friends, Charles Evans, a boy of his own 
 age, in January, 1850. " I should not have troubled you at 
 present, but for this reason. A very dear friend of mine, 
 Henry Bradshaw by name, is going up to King's from 
 hence in a few days. He knows hardly any one in the 
 
 c
 
 1 8 BOYHOOD. 
 
 university out of that college. . . . Bradshaw has been 
 captain of the school for the last three months, and stands 
 very high in the opinion of the masters and every one else. 
 We look to him to do something towards a reformation at 
 King's, which I dare say you know is a good deal needed. 
 He is a boy of very high abilities and attainments, and 
 I think you will like him." 
 
 Towards the end of the year 1849, the news arrived at 
 Eton of an impending vacancy* at King's. At that time 
 vacancies were filled up as soon as they occurred, the head 
 boy at Eton going at once to King's, where, after three 
 years of probation, he became, without further trouble, a 
 Fellow for life. It was Bradshaw's turn, as head of the 
 school, to go, and he quitted the microcosm of Eton for the 
 larger world of Cambridge early in the year 1850. 
 
 * The vacancy was caused by the marriage of Mr (now Bishop) Abraham.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ON February I, 1850, Henry Bradshaw became a member 
 of King's College, Cambridge. In a letter to his mother, 
 dated on that day, he writes 
 
 " I have just this instant come from the Vice-Provost, 
 having been admitted a scholar of King's College. . . . 
 You see by the date that I am admitted at the age of 
 eighteen, and I shall enter upon college life on my nine- 
 teenth birthday (February 2), and on Founder's Day, being 
 the Feast of the Purification of the blessed Virgin Mary. 
 Altogether I could not enter King's College under happier 
 auspices, and I look forward to it as the commencement of 
 a new life, and trust and pray that I may gain possession 
 of that energy of mind which I have for so many years 
 totally disregarded. I feel it to be such a blessing to begin 
 every day with chapel service, at half-after seven in the 
 winter, and seven in the summer ; to think that one is 
 strengthened for the work of the day, by beginning every 
 day with prayer. Little as the work at King's seems to 
 be, it is, nevertheless, much harder than at Eton, and there 
 is much more to be done, odd as it may seem." 
 
 He goes on to draw an elaborate comparison between 
 the school-hours, or half-hours, at Eton, and the lectures at 
 King's, which gives a somewhat unexpected result The 
 hours of work at Eton amounted to eight and a half in 
 the week, those at King's to eleven. This is, of course, 
 exclusive of time devoted to preparation, and at Eton
 
 20 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 of " private " work, or " construing," done with the tutor. 
 " Then it is to be remembered," he continues, " that there 
 are two services in the chapel every day, and that the work 
 altogether is much harder stuff than at Eton. Now, all this 
 gives me a far better idea of King's than I before enter- 
 tained, and I trust that I shall not fall into the habit of 
 doing things in a slovenly manner." 
 
 At the time when Bradshaw entered the college, it was 
 not in all respects what might have been desired. It was a 
 great disadvantage that it was confined to those who had 
 been on the foundation of Eton College, and that its 
 members were excluded from competition for university 
 honours. Bishop Abraham, writing to Bradshaw in 1851, 
 says, " No man can doubt that it was a bad thing for us 
 being excluded from the university society and honours. It 
 narrowed and dwarfed our moral and intellectual growth ; 
 we became exclusive and bumptious about nothing but 
 our supposed privileges, which were really evils." Good 
 scholars and excellent men there were, of course, but the 
 college contained more than the usual proportion of black 
 sheep. It was, generally speaking, idle, and had been at 
 times disreputable. The following epigram by one of the 
 society on his fellows is perhaps a little severe, but is 
 probably not far from the truth, as it was during the 
 second quarter of the present century : 
 
 TldvTaiv ir\})v 'liririav aSorj^oi/ts eVre KVV>V re, 
 Kairot y' o&ff 'l-jriraiv eiSdres oil-re KVVWV. 
 
 It was englished thus by another Fellow 
 
 " To be knowing in horses and dogs 
 Is all we pretend in our college, 
 And even in dogs and in horses 
 
 We are only pretenders to knowledge." 
 
 There had for some time been a party among the 
 fellows anxious for reform, but Provost Thackeray opposed 
 it, and during his life nothing could be done. On his
 
 KING'S IN 1850. 21 
 
 death in 1850, the present Provost, Dr Okes, was elected. 
 His first step was to throw all his influence on the side of 
 those who were anxious to give up the obnoxious privileges, 
 and to place the college on a healthy level with the rest of 
 the university. The result was a resolution passed by the 
 governing body of the college in May, 1851, which gave up 
 " the present practice of claiming for the undergraduates 
 of the college the degree of B.A. without passing the 
 examinations required by the university." This was the 
 beginning of an era of reform, with which Bradshaw was 
 in hearty sympathy. 
 
 But though the party of reform was victorious, it was 
 only natural that the results should take time to display 
 themselves, and much of the exclusiveness which had 
 characterised Kingsmen in earlier days was still apparent. 
 Bradshaw was by no means inclined to give way to this. 
 He had naturally many friends in King's, but from the first 
 he sought acquaintances elsewhere, and many, perhaps 
 most, of those who knew him intimately in his under- 
 graduate days were members of other colleges. One of 
 these, Arthur Gordon,* gives the following account of their 
 first acquaintance. He had been asked by some common 
 friends to call on Bradshaw on his arrival at King's. " I 
 did as I was asked," he says, " and, calling one raw 
 February evening, I found Bradshaw alone and engaged 
 in preparing the tea, which, in those days of early dining,^ 
 we were accustomed to drink before setting to work for the 
 evening. He invited me to remain with him, and I did so. 
 On the table lay a book, handsomely bound, and lettered 
 on the front with the strange motto, " Morituro mortuus." 
 My new acquaintance told me its history. It was the gift 
 of an old Etonian and a great friend, a son of Vice-Chan- 
 
 * Now the Hon. Sir Arthur Gordon, Governor of Ceylon, 
 t The hour of hall at King's was five o'clock, which was then thought very 
 late. Oilier colleges dined at three or four.
 
 22 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 cellor Shadvvell, who, having himself quitted Eton, intended 
 the book as a present to Bradshaw, when he too, in his 
 turn, was on the eve of leaving Eton for King's. It was to 
 this cessation of Eton life, and to this only, that Shadwell 
 had intended the motto to refer. But before the binding 
 was completed he was really dead drowned in a ditch 
 running out of the Thames. The incident naturally made 
 a deep impression on Bradshaw's mind, and the peculiar 
 way, full of simplicity and feeling, in which he told the 
 story to me, a stranger, gave me a strong interest in him, 
 and made me soon seek him out again." 
 
 The attraction was mutual. Writing home shortly 
 after this, Bradshaw says, " I am delighted with Gordon, . . . 
 and, to tell you the truth, I could hardly have found a man 
 more thoroughly to my mind. . . . His friend M. said of 
 him, ' If you go to tea with Gordon, you will have plenty 
 of intellectual and good conversation, but not very much 
 to eat and drink.' " This defect does not appear to have 
 hindered the speedy formation of a close friendship, which 
 lasted unbroken to the end of Bradshaw's life. The intro- 
 duction to Trinity which his intimacy with Gordon gave 
 him was of the greatest advantage, and principally by its 
 means he was launched into the wider world of university 
 life, with which many Kingsmen of his day were almost 
 entirely unacquainted. A little later he writes home, " I 
 am most comfortable and happy here. I should like you 
 just to see me. All the out-college men that I know as 
 yet are Trinity men they amount to five or six ; but they 
 are remarkably nice men, and, what is better, none of them 
 Eton men except one, who has just taken his degree." 
 
 An attractive peculiarity of which his friends will need 
 no reminder had already been remarked I mean his 
 intimate and unexpected acquaintance with the relation- 
 ships of those with whom he came in contact. When he 
 had been about a month at Cambridge, he wrote to one
 
 FRIENDS AND BOOKS. 23 
 
 of his sisters, " I am accused of knowing everybody, and 
 never meeting any one without knowing something of him. 
 It was always a subject of great amusement at Eton, and 
 it has not stopped here. You have heard me speak of 
 George Williams. I was at breakfast there a short time 
 ago, and there happened to be a clergyman there, stopping 
 at Cambridge, on his way from Ely to London. Of course, 
 Williams did not think it necessary to introduce me to 
 him, or mention his name to me. However, he was evi- 
 dently an Irishman and from the North. The conversa- 
 tion turned, of course, upon Ireland and upon the state of 
 the Church there, and it came out accidentally that the 
 name of his parish was Holywood, in the County Down.* 
 You may imagine how I was amused ! ... It amused 
 George Williams highly; he said he had often heard of 
 my peculiarity of that kind, but had never witnessed it 
 before." 
 
 His letters about this time are full of good resolutions, 
 and show a strong conviction that desultoriness and indo- 
 lence were likely to be his besetting sins. Few who knew 
 him only in his later years, when he was busy almost every 
 minute of the day, had a chance of seeing any trace of the 
 natural indolence which lay deep down in his character, 
 and which nothing but a high sense of duty and the intense 
 interest which he took in his favourite studies enabled him 
 to overcome. As at Eton, so at the university, he read 
 eagerly but discursively, poetry, novels, anything that came 
 in his way, without apparent method. His friend Hort, 
 now Lady Margaret Professor, introduced him to Kingsley's 
 works, He read "Alton Locke," "Yeast," and "Two 
 Years Ago " with enthusiasm. He revelled in Tennyson. 
 He studied Chaucer and read him aloud to one of his 
 friends, showing as he did so that he had found out already 
 how to read him and how to pronounce his rhyme-endings. 
 
 * Close to Milecross, the birthplace of Bradshaw's father.
 
 24 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 Meanwhile, he did not altogether neglect his classics. 
 Tacitus had a special attraction for him. He read Plato, 
 too, and Homer, and other classical writers, widely but 
 without much persistence. 
 
 'His friends thought he was wasting his time, and losing 
 his chance of distinction. Had he applied himself to classi- 
 cal scholarship, there can be little doubt that he would 
 have taken a high degree ; but he had no ambition that 
 way, or indeed any way. He read, or dreamed, or talked, 
 as the humour was on him, and his desultory general read- 
 ing was perhaps, after all, the best preparation he could 
 have had for the work he was to do. His memory was 
 like a vice, and never relaxed its hold of what it had once 
 fastened on. But he always maintained that it was not to 
 be forced ; he could remember nothing that did not interest 
 him. To read the books that every well-educated person 
 is supposed to have read, to read a book in order to be 
 able to talk of it, or because people in general are talking 
 of it these were ideas and motives entirely foreign to his 
 character. Consequently he was, to the end of his life, 
 ignorant of some things which most ordinary people know, 
 while he knew many things with which few or none were 
 acquainted. A friend, somewhat his senior, whose own 
 reading was wide as well as orthodox, writes of him at this 
 time, " I well remember Bradshaw saying to me, with a 
 sigh, that he felt he had never read any useful, instructive 
 books, meaning Ranke, Macaulay, Adam Smith, and the 
 like, the sort of things he heard other people refer to. Of 
 course, I used to feel the refreshing originality of the man 
 who had no taste for such things." It was not so much 
 that Bradshaw had no taste for such reading, for he read 
 many such books when he came across them, but he 
 adopted no system of reading or self-cultivation. If he 
 read a classic, it was because he liked it, not because it was 
 a classic.
 
 FRIENDS AND BOOKS. 2$ 
 
 He brought up with him from Eton a library which 
 both in size and character was unusual for a young man of 
 his age. Among his papers I have found a complete cata- 
 logue of it, written out carefully in his neat, small hand. 
 It numbered nearly five hundred volumes. About one- 
 fifth of these were Latin and Greek books, or books con- 
 nected with classical history and literature. Divinity, 
 ecclesiastical history, and devotional works made up 
 another fifth. The greater portion of the library consisted 
 of English literature. All the best poets were in his 
 collection, and a good many of the historians. Forty or 
 fifty Irish books appear in the list, a selection apparently 
 from his father's legacy. Natural science was not unrepre- 
 sented. The books are catalogued as they stood on the 
 shelves, the shelves being marked by the letters of the 
 alphabet, and the sizes of the books, folio, octavo, etc., are 
 noted throughout. Books being the only possessions that 
 he cared about, it was natural that he should keep a record 
 of borrowers, and what they borrowed ; and, as he had 
 probably already acquired the habit of keeping books 
 belonging to other people for an unconscionable time, he 
 also noted down his own borrowings. But this system was 
 too methodical for him, and was soon dropped. 
 
 Philosophy and philosophical discussion had no little 
 charm for him. Ridler, a member of his own college and 
 an excellent scholar, who died too soon for fame, said one 
 day in a large company, that he believed there were only 
 two people in the room, Bradshaw and Waterfield, who 
 really knew what was meant by induction and deduction. 
 He and a friend read Miss Martineau's translation of 
 Comte together. For Positivism he always felt and 
 showed a certain liking, not as a religion or rule of life, 
 but because there was something in Comte's view of know- 
 ledge akin to his own mental habit. In his own researches 
 nothing but the most vigorous scientific proof would satisfy
 
 26 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 him, and he would trust no authority but the evidence of 
 his own senses. Many years later, an undergraduate, who 
 once ventured to say in his presence that Comte's system 
 ought perhaps rather to be called Negativism than Posi- 
 tivism, was promptly told that he had better hold his 
 tongue till he knew more of the subject. In his early days 
 his friends often debated, in undergraduate fashion, the 
 standing problems of philosophy. He was fond of listen- 
 ing to such discussions, but seldom took a very active part 
 in them. Every now and then he would throw in an acute 
 remark, showing that he fully grasped what was going on, 
 and he took especial pleasure in making mischievous 
 allusions which he knew would set his friends by the ears. 
 
 More or less connected with these interests was an 
 inquiry into supernatural or, as people now prefer to call 
 them, psychical phenomena, which was made about the 
 year 1851. A paper, inviting the communication of any 
 experiences of this nature, was drawn up by a sort of 
 committee, including among its members a good many 
 friends of Bradshaw's, now well known in the university 
 and in the world at large. Bradshaw had nothing to do 
 with the starting of this inquiry, but he was sufficiently 
 in sympathy with its objects to undertake the distribution 
 of the papers and the collection of information. The 
 paper contained a preamble explaining and justifying 
 the inquiry, followed by an elaborate classification of 
 supernatural phenomena, under the heads of appearances 
 of angels, spectral appearances, dreams, feelings, and 
 so forth. This curious anticipation of the " Psychical 
 Society " of our own day called itself the " Ghostly 
 Guild;" scoffers nicknamed it the "Cock and Bull 
 Club." It does not seem to have obtained very satis- 
 factory results ; at all events, its originators did not go 
 beyond the preliminary inquiry. Sir Arthur Gordon 
 informs me that they came to a conclusion very similar
 
 RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES. 27 
 
 to that which the modern Psychical Society has arrived 
 at namely, that, while for the ordinary run of ghost-stories 
 there is nothing in the nature of trustworthy evidence, an 
 exception must be made in favour of phantasms of the 
 living, or appearances of persons at the point of death. 
 
 The religious turn of mind which was characteristic of 
 Bradshaw was very evident to the friends of his under- 
 graduate days. He never had a taste for dogmatic theo- 
 logy, and even at this time avoided formulating his beliefs, 
 or reducing them to a rigorous system. " His religious 
 views," says Sir Arthur Gordon, " were at that time those 
 of what would then have been called a moderate High 
 Churchman. He had no doubts or misgivings, and fully 
 intended to take orders." He believed in the Church, and 
 nourished a warm love and admiration for the institution 
 itself, its history, and its external manifestations. He had 
 no liking for ceremonies in general, but he considered the 
 fasts and festivals of the Church as indispensable aids to 
 faith, and as encouraging a devotional and reverential 
 habit of mind. He was not a Ritualist, though he numbered 
 among his friends men who set great store by ritual. His 
 own interest in ritual was, it may be inferred, mainly of an 
 historical kind. He occupied himself already in tracing 
 the origin and development of liturgies, and laid the 
 foundation of his vast liturgical knowledge. He was also 
 much interested in ecclesiastical architecture, made draw- 
 ings of window-mouldings and tracery, and belonged to an 
 architectural society. He regularly attended the university 
 sermons, without regard to the question who was preaching. 
 In later days I have heard him strongly reprehend the 
 practice of going only when a popular preacher was to be 
 heard. He was much influenced by the preaching of 
 Frederick Denison Maurice. On one occasion, when 
 Maurice had taken for his text the Lord's Prayer, he 
 remarked to a friend, on leaving the church, " It never
 
 23 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 struck me before that all Maurice's teaching is contained 
 in it." Another preacher of whom he speaks with great 
 approval was Mr Elliott, of Brighton. He used generally 
 to go to his own parish church of St Edward's in the 
 evening, where he much enjoyed the practical preaching of 
 Mr Harvey Goodwin, now Bishop of Carlisle. For some 
 time he also went regularly to the weekly communion, 
 then a rare institution, at St Giles'. Mr George Williams, 
 a Fellow of King's College, a man considerably his senior, 
 and of marked High Church tendencies, rapidly acquired 
 much influence with him as much, that is, as it was possible 
 for any one to exercise over an independent and original 
 mind. Still more influence was exercised over him, Sir 
 Arthur Gordon tells me, by the preaching of Dr Mill, 
 who was then often resident in Cambridge. " His strong 
 personality, his unfaltering dogmatic teaching, his vast 
 stores of learning, and the modesty and simplicity with 
 which he made use of them, exercised over some minds 
 a strong fascination. Bradshaw was one of those who were 
 thus attracted." 
 
 From the time when he was a freshman, he belonged 
 to a little coterie of earnest Churchmen, differing consider- 
 ably in university standing and in age, who used to meet 
 in each other's rooms by turns and spend the Sunday 
 evening together. George Williams ; C. T. Procter, Vicar 
 of Richmond ; G. M. Gorham, Vicar of Masham ; A. T. Lee, 
 afterwards secretary of the Church Defence Institution, 
 and editor of the National Church; A. H. Gordon; A. 
 D. Coleridge, and several others, were members of this 
 society. Bradshaw was the youngest member of it. He 
 and his friends generally attended certain services together. 
 The evening gatherings were of an informal, social nature. 
 The society had no propaganda, and undertook no action 
 beyond its own limits. It displayed no spirit of religious 
 partisanship, and had no very serious object or stringent
 
 RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES. 29 
 
 organization. It was known by contemporaries as the 
 "clique," and furnished a butt for some of the wits of the 
 college, but such light shafts as were aimed at it fell harm- 
 less. " We used," writes one of its members, " to enjoy our 
 quiet fun as we made merry (not, I hope, ill-naturedly) at 
 the expense of the frothy declaimers of our day; the 
 sophists, philosophers, and politicians of the Union ; the 
 ' Apostles,' et hoc genus omne." 
 
 There were other clubs of more or less similar nature 
 in the university at the time ; the " Church Reading 
 Society," * for instance, nicknamed " The Chrysostoms," 
 of which several of Bradshaw's friends were members. It 
 may be doubted, perhaps, if there was much more religious 
 feeling among the undergraduates of that day than there 
 is at present, but there was unquestionably a more open 
 expression of it. "Men," writes a contemporary, "con- 
 versed freely, as a matter of course, on purely theological 
 topics, from the discussion of which they would now usually 
 shrink. The famous Gorham judgment was pronounced 
 during Bradshaw's first term at Cambridge. It was not 
 the less hotly discussed by undergraduates for being but 
 imperfectly understood by them, and contentions as to 
 4 prevenient grace ' were to be heard in hall, at wine-parties, 
 on the river, and elsewhere, mingled most incongruously, 
 as we should now think, with secular topics." Such was 
 the atmosphere in which Bradshaw passed much of the 
 time in which a man is most susceptible to impressions, 
 his first years at the university. 
 
 Meanwhile, in these conversations and meetings and 
 saunterings by the banks of the Cam, he was learning the 
 art which he carried to such unique perfection the art of 
 making and keeping friends. He was doubtless regarded 
 by many as unsociable, for he cared nothing for company 
 
 * This club was afterwards reconstituted on a wider basis, as the " Theo- 
 logical Society."
 
 30 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 in which he had no choice. The society of his own college 
 was very limited in those days, the number of under- 
 graduates being seldom more than twelve or fifteen. It 
 was the custom for the resident graduates to drink wine 
 together every evening after hall, and the undergraduates 
 followed suit, meeting in each other's rooms by turns. 
 Bradshaw had no taste for these carouses, which wasted 
 time and money, if they did not lead to worse results, and 
 from the first refused to take part in them. Among his 
 friends, besides those I have already mentioned as members 
 of the religious society to which he belonged, were E. W. 
 Benson, now Archbishop of Canterbury ; J. B. Lightfoot, 
 now Bishop of Durham ; H. M. Butler, now Master of 
 Trinity; F.J.A. Hort; B.F.Westcott; H.R. Luard,and other 
 well-known names. Over many of his contemporaries he 
 exercised the same strange fascination, and with the same 
 absence of apparent effort, as over his friends of later days. 
 With several he exchanged favourite books, the " Imita- 
 tion," or the " Lyra Apostolica," or the " Christian Year ; " 
 for others he would write out favourite pieces of poetry, 
 which have been carefully preserved. 
 
 The recollections of a generation ago are naturally dim, 
 and one peculiarity of Bradshaw's friendship was that, 
 however strong an impression it left, it was extremely 
 difficult to analyze or to put it into words. One friend 
 remembers nothing but quiet walks and intimate conversa- 
 tion. Another writes of him, " His quiet humour and 
 gentle winning ways were highly appreciated, and, hardly 
 less so, sundry quaint characteristics which almost amounted 
 to eccentricities. He had, among other oddities, a group 
 of door and cupboard keys all welded together and 
 radiating from a common centre. All the stray pamphlets 
 he then possessed were bound into a single volume, the 
 back of which was of portentous width. He would do odd 
 things, too, but, as far as I can remember them, they were
 
 DAILY HABITS. 31 
 
 always remarkable for their singular unselfishness ; and 
 his determination it was impossible to gainsay or resist. 
 Never shall I forget his sisterly sweetness and attention 
 in my long illness. . . . There was in all his bearing a 
 simplicity and unrestrained kindliness which made his 
 friends as much at ease with him as schoolboys." 
 
 Sir Arthur Gordon says of him, " In many respects 
 Bradshaw was in taste, habits, and character much the 
 same in 1850 as he was thirty years later. He had at 
 no time any liking for athletic amusements. His hardest 
 exercise consisted in long walks, which he took not in- 
 frequently, and ordinary constitutionals, taken almost every 
 day. He was usually an early riser, but if by chance he 
 did not get up at his regular hour, he would sleep on half 
 the day, and repel all efforts to rouse him. His manner 
 was then just what it was to the last. There was the same 
 caressing sweetness, the same irony, which left his interlo- 
 cutor in doubt whether he was in jest or earnest, the same 
 delicate suggestion of doubt or negation by a word or 
 question. The ordinary tenour of his life was monotonous 
 and uniform, emphatically that of a student, though not 
 always that of an industrious student. He usually worked 
 steadily at lectures and in his own rooms till two, but had 
 occasional fits of singularly torpid indolence. At two he 
 went out for a walk, always with a companion, returning 
 at four for chapel. After hall he usually passed some time 
 in the company of others, either at their rooms or his own. 
 He was fond of poetry, of which he read a good deal. 
 Shelley and Tennyson were his favourites among modern 
 poets. But he had a special affection for the quaint 
 conceits of the seventeenth-century religious poets, and 
 was thoroughly familiar with George Herbert, Quarles, 
 Crashaw, and their fellows. He had a fondness for the 
 lives of obscure people, and especially for obscure religious 
 lives. Of such books as Maitland's 'Dark Ages,' and
 
 32 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE, 
 
 ' Essays on the Reformation ' he was an eager reader and 
 ardent admirer. But of all the characteristics of Bradshaw's 
 undergraduate days, he will be best remembered, by those 
 who then knew him, for the warmth and number of his 
 friendships." 
 
 Towards the beginning of his first Long Vacation he 
 went northwards, and met his friend Gordon at Glenalmond 
 College, where he made a short stay. He was much 
 impressed by the reality of the religious life of the place. 
 He writes in a diary which he kept for a short while about 
 this time, " I ought indeed to be thankful to God for 
 bringing me to such a place as this, where one sees so 
 much devoted energy. There seems to be every tempta- 
 tion to work hard in such a place, though an indolent mind 
 can find food for itself almost anywhere. I hope I may 
 at least make some progress before I leave this. . . . The 
 fasts of the Church are, of course, here observed, and one 
 feels the blessing of being reminded of the days of old. 
 I never before remember having felt the reality of these 
 things that they are really a commemoration of things, 
 and not an empty ceremony. . . . The beauty of the 
 country grows upon me daily, and everything is so new 
 and different from what I have been most accustomed 
 to in the way of scenery. . . . Really I must not give 
 so much to one day again. I must learn to abridge." 
 Here the diary unfortunately breaks off, and no attempt 
 to continue it on an " abridged " scale seems to have been 
 made for several years. 
 
 His first Long Vacation was almost entirely spent in 
 visits to friends. He walked with Arthur Gordon from 
 Glenalmond to Torland, a distance of about a hundred 
 miles. This tour ended with a visit to his friend's home, 
 Haddo House. " The library there," says Sir Arthur 
 Gordon, "contained a good many books of some rarity and 
 interest, which were generally shown to visitors. Bradshaw
 
 VA CA TION RAMBLES. 3 3 
 
 did not neglect these, but when they had received their 
 due share of attention, he pounced upon and lugged out 
 from its place a by no means specially conspicuous volume, 
 a Spanish edition of 'Sallust,' and on the arrival of my 
 father [the late Lord Aberdeen], questioned him about it. 
 My father was much struck by the bibliographical instinct 
 shown by the selection of this book, and during the 
 remainder of Bradshaw's visit treated him with marked 
 attention." " I can't tell you," he writes to a friend, " how 
 I enjoyed being in Scotland for the first time in my life ; 
 everything was so entirely new to me. Our longest walk 
 was from Blair Athol. to Braemar, about six and thirty 
 miles. I never saw anything like the view from the top 
 of Lochnagar, and the precipice on one side, going straight 
 down fourteen hundred feet. . . . Good-bye, my dear 
 Gorham, and believe me to remain always, I hope I 
 may say, 
 
 "Your most faithful friend, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 His letters about this time often ended in this cautious 
 way. 
 
 From Scotland he went to stay with some Quaker 
 friends at Darlington ; thence to Methley, where he passed 
 a few days with Mr George Williams. When the latter 
 departed to resume his charge at St Columba's, Bradshaw 
 spent a day or two in the clergy-house at St Saviour's, 
 Leeds. Here he was again brought in contact with 
 advanced High-Church observances, and was entertained 
 by hosts who were, as it turned out, on the eve of going 
 over to Rome. He writes to a sister about this visit as 
 follows (August 24, 1850): "I had tea there (at St 
 Saviour's), and spent almost pleasant evening, and, as the 
 vicar was away for his health, I had his room and chair- 
 bed. They live as simply as you could wish, and though 
 
 D
 
 34 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 I have no great fancy for Church principles carried to 
 their full extent, yet there one lost sight of the forms in 
 the solid reality of the undertaking. I never saw a place 
 where they seem used so purely as a means and not as the 
 end of religion. When one knows the vast amount of good 
 they did there in the cholera time, and sees the earnestness 
 and real life of the whole thing, it is a great comfort." 
 
 October found him again at Cambridge. On October 
 9, 1850, he writes to his mother, "I hope and trust I may 
 be able to be a little more regular in every way now that 
 I have come here. I look upon this, which is the beginning 
 of the academical year, as the beginning of my university 
 career ; so now I have a fair start." These good resolu- 
 tions were, however, doomed to be disappointed, to some 
 extent at least. The habit of not answering letters, which 
 one of his oldest friends describes as " the only foible he 
 had," was growing upon him. On November 30, 1350, he 
 writes to his mother a very repentant letter. " I am 
 afraid you are too much accustomed to my excessive and 
 painful dilatoriness in writing home to be much astonished 
 at my not having written to you long ago ; and though 
 it is but comparatively little use saying how sorry one 
 must feel for it, I must say I always am stung with a sense 
 of the sinfulness of it for it is nothing short of that as 
 soon as ever I am brought to my senses. You will be 
 aware, from the fact of my not writing for it is a sure 
 clue that I am not, or rather, I hope I may say, have not 
 been going on so well. I have felt as if a sort of spell was 
 over me. . . . Few men that I know have had such ample 
 opportunities of being good and earnest in life as myself, 
 and the natural consequence has followed, that few men 
 have used those opportunities so sparingly. I know how 
 bitterly I have often grieved you, and doubly so by your 
 seeing so many, many good resolutions on paper, and then 
 seeing them so systematically broken. However, I do not
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL TENDENCIES. 35 
 
 yet despair, and I trust that by earnest prayer I may yet 
 be able to seek and keep to the right path. . . . You will 
 not mind my saying all this, for of course I have no one 
 else at home to whom I can open out my heart in a way 
 that one can to a mother." From this time forward for 
 two or three years there is hardly a letter home which 
 does not begin with an apology for dilatoriness in writing 
 or in answering communications, and with fruitless promises 
 of amendment. " If I don't write," he says on another 
 occasion, " I can seldom work much ; and if I don't work 
 much I can't write." Gradually both he and his corre- 
 spondents seem to have acquiesced in the irresistible. 
 The complaints and apologies ceased, but the habit was 
 unreformed. 
 
 When he had been a short while at Cambridge, Brad- 
 shaw's ecclesiastical tendencies led him seriously to con- 
 template taking orders. When the idea first dawned upon 
 him I cannot say. In the spring of 1851 he was much 
 interested in the results of the Tractarian movement. On 
 April 9, 1851, he writes home, "I am very sorry to hear 
 of Mr. J. It ought to open people's eyes to the fact 
 that when they pretend to attack Tractarianism they 
 really attack the whole Church system. ... I see Arch- 
 deacon Manning has at last gone over. You have seen 
 also, I suppose, the secession of seven of the Leeds clergy, 
 the late and present vicar, and three of the curates who 
 were so kind to me in the summer." 
 
 In connection with this phase of feeling, I may mention 
 an anecdote communicated to me by Sir A. Gordon. 
 Towards the end of 1850 great excitement was caused by 
 the so-called " Papal aggression." The pope, influenced by 
 the sporadic conversions to Rome, and considering the time 
 ripe for a great stroke, had set up a new Roman Catholic 
 hierarchy in England, conferring on Cardinal Wiseman 
 the title of Archbishop of Westminster. All England was
 
 36 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 in arms at once. The University of Cambridge, like other 
 public bodies, addressed the queen on the subject. Some 
 of the hotter heads among the undergraduates, anxious not 
 to be behind their seniors, determined to get up a meeting 
 of those in statu pupillari to denounce the pope and the 
 Puseyites. Sir William Harcourt and Mr Llewellyn 
 Davies, then a scholar of Trinity, were the chief promoters 
 of this movement. Some of the unpopular High Church 
 party were not unwilling to face the storm, and to figure 
 as martyrs ; but the cooler members, perceiving the mischief 
 and bitterness likely to be engendered by such a meeting 
 as was proposed, resolved to put a stop to it. A deputa- 
 tion accordingly waited on the Vice-Chancellor, Dr Corrie 
 of Jesus, and requested him to forbid the meeting. Brad- 
 shaw, along with his friends Hort and Westcott, was 
 among those most active in organizing this opposition, 
 which was successful, and the meeting was stopped. 
 
 On May 20, 1851, Bradshaw writes to his mother, "I 
 have been often thinking over what we talked about before 
 I left you, and I see more than ever the absolute necessity 
 of turning one's mind to some definite purpose and aim of 
 life not to let the time all pass away, though it is very 
 difficult to know what to do. I suppose it must be that 
 my mind has been turned only to Orders, from the very 
 nature and circumstances of one's life and position here. 
 I cannot say my whole thoughts have been turned that 
 way, but only, if you can understand, they have seen that 
 view without ever definitely making an aim at any line. 
 I have never thought of anything else latterly ; and then 
 comes the question, if I think of this, it must be soon and 
 definitely, and [I must] make it have more influence on 
 my life. . . ." 
 
 A fortnight later : " I can assure you I have thought 
 very much over our last conversation, and it brings before 
 me the utter state of thoughtlessness I have been living
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL TENDENCIES. 37 
 
 in ; by which I mean, not perhaps what you would call 
 thoughtlessness, but an utter absence of thinking what is 
 to become of me, and what I am to do when set at liberty 
 in a year and a half or two years from this time. One 
 thing, of course, is plain if I have any idea of remaining 
 a Fellow of King's, I must take Orders, as I have pledged 
 myself to do ; and then comes the thought, How am I fit ? 
 How am I prepared for such a life ? and how am I living 
 as if such were to be my destined course of life ? I very 
 much fear I can give but a very unsatisfactory answer to 
 every one of these questions ; and I find a weight, an 
 accumulated weight, of listlessness in the action of mind, 
 heart, and body. ... I have now completed exactly half 
 of the appointed time of my scholarship here, and I can- 
 not but feel, and I say it to my shame, that though I hope 
 I have gone on in some things, yet that in many things I 
 seem, if anything, to have gone backwards." 
 
 Bradshaw's life as an undergraduate was uneventful. 
 His last two years seem to have passed much in the same 
 way as the first two, but unfortunately there are hardly 
 any letters to illustrate it. In the Michaelmas Term, 1851, 
 he attended Professor Blunt's lectures on the Liturgy. 
 In the Lent Term, 1852, he attended the lectures of Pro- 
 fessor Jeremie. He was clearly preparing in earnest for 
 the Church. 
 
 The religious tone of his mind, as well as his charitable 
 instincts, may be illustrated by a trifle. During the acade- 
 mical year 1851-2, he kept an account-book in which 
 every item is carefully noted down. This account-book is 
 arranged in three divisions. At the head of the first 
 division, that for receipts, is written the text, "Take no 
 thought, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink," 
 etc. (Matt. vi. 25). The second division is in two parts, 
 the one for ordinary expenditure, the other for "the Lord's 
 rent," that is, charity. At the head of the first section is
 
 38 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 the text, " Owe no man anything, but to love one another," 
 etc. (Rom. xiii. 8) ; at the head of the second, the texts, 
 " He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord " 
 (Prov. xix. 17), and "The poor shall never cease out of 
 the land" (Deut. xv. n). That this division was no mere 
 form is shown by the fact that out of his total expenses 
 for the year, amounting to about 1 1 5, he spent over 1 1 
 in charity. The proportion, it will be observed, is almost 
 exactly a tithe. 
 
 During the whole of his undergraduate career, Brad- 
 shaw read much in the University Library, and in the 
 libraries of his own and other colleges. That he was 
 already engaged in making a personal acquaintance with 
 their antiquarian contents is clear, but the subjects of his 
 researches can only be guessed at. A contemporary note- 
 book contains hints of this occupation extracts from 
 Panzer's Annals, and notes on manuscripts and on Irish 
 books in various libraries. It is probable, from several 
 indications, that Irish literature was, during this part of 
 his life, his chief subject of study. 
 
 In the autumn of 1852 he spent a fortnight with his 
 friend Booth among the English lakes. He fell in love 
 with the country, and it was ever afterwards his favourite 
 haunt for a summer ramble. The pocket-book in which 
 he noted a few facts of this tour, and between the leaves 
 of which he dried flowers picked in his favourite spots, 
 contains also, characteristically enough, an elaborate 
 bibliographical note on the various editions of Camden's 
 works. The following scrap from a letter dated October 12, 
 1852, to Arthur Gordon, is of interest: "Gorham is down 
 at Brighton now, reading ; from him I heard the delightful 
 news of Hort's Fellowship. . . . You will be glad to hear 
 that I had a very pleasant walk with Waterfield and Hort 
 yesterday ; as also that, after all, Benson did go in for a 
 Fellowship this year, and beat everybody but Lightfoot in
 
 EXTRACTS FROM DIARY. 39 
 
 classics, and, had he been in the second year, would 
 certainly have got a Fellowship this time. This is com- 
 fortable intelligence." 
 
 The following fragment of a diary, kept assiduously 
 for just one week, gives a glimpse of his daily life towards 
 the end of his second year : 
 
 "Advent Sunday, November 28, 1852. After sitting up 
 late, or rather lying awake very late to finish the first 
 volume of 'Alton Locke,' I was up only just in time for 
 chapel. I made a determination, on Matthias' example, 
 and I suppose somewhat stirred up by some expressions 
 of the young tailor-poet, to set about reading ' Paradise 
 Lost,' at any rate, as Sunday reading, and was charmed 
 with the first two books and part of the third, which we're 
 all quite new to me, except the merest scraps of quotations 
 of a few lines here and there. A pleasant evening with 
 Witts, to meet Gorham, Arthur [Gordon], and Wayte. 
 The conversation was very desultory, on the Crystal 
 Palace, the duke's funeral, and such topics. Boudier came 
 in at the last, and was less Etonian than usual. By the 
 way, I must try and remember Arthur's practical resolu- 
 tion of not discussing any book with me until three months 
 after I have read it. There is too much cause for it, I 
 suppose, resulting from my having read really so very little, 
 and having no fundamental ideas to start with. I must 
 see what more cultivation in the way of reading will do. 
 
 " Monday, November 29. I finished the third book of 
 'Paradise Lost' before going to bed last night. ... I sat 
 down to my Plato between eleven and twelve, and 
 enjoyed the Phaedrus until it was time for me to walk with 
 Wayte. It was bitterly cold, and we had a profitless, argu- 
 mentative talk on Kingsley in ' Alton Locke,' and theories 
 of the creation. I read more of ' Alton Locke ' after 
 dinner, and then went to Booth's, intending to stay a short 
 time ; but Waterfield came in, and we discussed Lewes and
 
 40 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 absolute truth and metaphysics and religion until after 
 
 tea, when I again sat down to my Plato, until 
 
 appeared, and I had an unpleasant argumentation on 
 definitions of time and possible conceptions, which ended 
 about one. 
 
 "St. Andrew, Tuesday, November 30. I made some 
 progress in the Phaedrus, every now and then feeling 
 inclined to lay it down for a short time, when some fresh 
 beauty gave me a fresh stimulus. The want of my walk 
 made me dull and uncomfortable in the evening, when 
 Arthur appeared. He took me to the Union, to hear 
 Vernon-Harcourt speak on the present ministry. He did 
 not, however, appear. . . . On coming back to my rooms, 
 I read a little more of ' Alton Locke,' which grows more 
 and more intensely interesting, though I don't know what 
 to make of the principles. Sandy Mackaye is certainly a 
 glorious character. 
 
 " Wednesday, December l. Not much read in the way of 
 classics. I finished 'Alton Locke,' much to my satisfac- 
 tion, and enjoyed a walk to Hauxton with Rolleston, who 
 is revelling in Kingsley, and seems to believe in him fully, 
 more so, possibly, than Kingsley intends any one to believe. 
 ... I borrowed 'Yeast' from Hort, and began it before 
 I went to bed. 
 
 " Thursday, December 2. Read ' Yeast ' until nine, 
 and between the lectures, and I fear my Phaedrus did not 
 proceed much in consequence of the absorbing influence of 
 Kingsley. . . . After chapel I read 'Yeast' until it was 
 time to go to Trinity, and at half-past six I went to a 
 Fellowship dinner with Hort, and spent a very pleasant 
 evening. We met in his rooms, and dined in Freshfield's, 
 used Scott's as a drawing-room, and Clark's (those who 
 wished) as a smoking-room. There was hardly a face 
 that I did not know, and, fortunately, I was quite on 
 speaking terms with many. Howard of Sidney was the
 
 EXTRACTS FROM DIARY. 41 
 
 only extra-Trinity man except myself; the Scotts, Brim- 
 ley, Clark, Vansittart, Rowe, Yool, Watson, Schreiber, 
 Williams, Lightfoot, Gorham, Butler, Pottar, Freshfield, 
 Hawkins. I had a discussion with E. A. Scott and 
 Hawkins on the merits of Arnold, and the meaning of the 
 ' Strayed Reveller,' and I am glad to see that, whatever it 
 does mean, it is something more than a mere picture, 
 which is what Hort was inclined to think. The ' Em- 
 
 pedocles ' seemed liked, from what I could gather. 
 
 seems to have a pious horror of Kingsley, and seemed 
 shocked at my wasting my time over his books. I am 
 afraid, however, his advice was to no purpose, for I have 
 sat up till three to finish ' Yeast,' and am delighted with 
 it. I cannot yet see where the fallacies are, but I am 
 quite convinced of the main truths, and that the truth in 
 him compensates for the bad. The chief fault of his I 
 have been able to extract from people, seems to be the 
 rejection of asceticism, and his ' God's-Earth ' versus 
 ' World-and-Devil-and-human-corruption' theories, as well 
 as the bad "effect upon ' the masses ' who will carry out his 
 principles further than he intended. . . . But the ' godli- 
 ness ' of the books is the most striking feature to me. . . . 
 
 " Saturday, December 4. I managed to read a little 
 more of the Phaedrus, though not to my satisfaction. . . . 
 After hall ... I went to see Hort, and made him tell me 
 something about Kingsley and his political and theological 
 tendencies. Then we went on to Maurice, and he [i.e. 
 Hort] read me some parts of Maurice's sermon on the 
 Temptation, and made me bring away the book ; and 
 then he took down his ' Kingdom of Christ,' and went 
 through the Analytical Index with me, and made me long 
 to read it. The immense fund of thought, and materials 
 for thinking upon in every page, are wonderful. Maurice, 
 it seems, first taught Dr Hook that a man could do good 
 without belonging to a ' party.' After leaving him, I came
 
 42 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 home and went up to see Moody, and had some discussion 
 with him and Ridler, and came down and read some of 
 Charles Tennyson's sonnets, which I like more and more. 
 
 came in, and we had an unpleasant discussion on 
 
 Scott, etc., till nearly three." 
 
 Twenty years after this, writing to thank a friend for a 
 birthday present of the collected edition of Kingsley's 
 poems, he wrote, " I am indeed pleased, more than pleased, 
 to have from you a volume of such things, ' a box where 
 sweets compacted lie,' and, above everything, to find at the 
 beginning a comfortable edition of my pet ' Saint's 
 Tragedy,' which I devoured during all my undergraduate 
 Mays with fresh pleasure each time." 
 
 On February I, 1853, Henry Bradshaw, having satis- 
 factorily passed through his three years of probation, 
 which was all that was necessary for obtaining a Fellow- 
 ship at King's in those days, was elected a Fellow of the 
 college. In the summer of the same year he began 
 seriously to prepare for his degree. At that time Kings- 
 men still possessed the privilege of obtaining the B.A. 
 degree without examination. They were allowed to enter 
 for a Tripos if they wished to do so, but it was not till 
 1856 that an examination became compulsory. Bradshaw 
 declined to avail himself of the so-called privilege. He 
 was not the first, but one of the first to do so. With the 
 object of showing his approval of the new system, rather 
 than with the expectation of gaining distinction by taking 
 a high place, which he must have known was at least 
 doubtful, he resolved to enter for the Classical Tripos. 
 As a preliminary to this, it was necessary either to take 
 honours in the Mathematical Tripos, or else to obtain a 
 first class in the examination for an ordinary degree. He 
 chose the latter alternative. During the Michaelmas Term, 
 1853, he read with Barnard Smith, the leading "poll- 
 coach" of the day. In January, 1854, his name appeared
 
 PREPARATION FOR DEGREE. 43 
 
 in the first class of 6t TroAAot, as being qualified for the 
 ordinary degree. 
 
 For the Tripos he read, during the Long Vacation, 1853, 
 with H. J. Roby, of St John's College, the well-known 
 author of the Latin Grammar. Opinions in King's were 
 divided as to the probability of his success. He does not 
 appear to have distinguished himself in the examinations 
 for the University Scholarships, for which he entered at 
 least once. In his own college he obtained prizes for 
 Divinity and Classics, but from such data little could be 
 deduced. His contemporary Ridler, who, with one other 
 Kingsman, Charles Evans, entered for the same Tripos, 
 remarked to a friend just before the examination, " What a 
 dark horse Bradshaw is ! I wonder what he will do ? " 
 Mr Roby thought well of his chances. He wrote to him, 
 apparently during the examination, " I am sorry to find 
 you are so despondent about your place. I thought, and 
 still think, that you will get a first class, though your 
 slowness, as I think you told me, in composition may 
 possibly put you in the second." Ill-health had prevented 
 Bradshaw from getting as much help as he might have 
 obtained from Mr Roby during the time when he was 
 reading with him, and want of funds made a continuance 
 of "coaching" impossible. What money he had to spend 
 he spent upon books, and a year or two later he told his 
 mother that he had spent a great deal in this way. It was 
 the only extravagance which he allowed himself. His 
 friends more than once asked him to go abroad with them, 
 but, fond as he was of travelling, he was obliged to 
 decline. From other allusions in his letters, it is clear 
 that, though he managed to pay his way, he had no money 
 to spare for a luxury like private tuition. It was, how- 
 ever, a luxury which in those days hardly any one who 
 aimed at distinction in the Tripos could forego. 
 
 When the list came out, his name appeared bracketed
 
 44 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. 
 
 tenth in the second class. What his own feelings on the 
 subject were does not appear. Mr Rdby writes to him 
 (March 29, 1854) as follows : " I was sorry to find you had 
 been endowed with a gift of prescience as to your own 
 fate, . . . but I think even now that your failure is to be 
 attributed rather to lack of reading than of scholarship. I 
 certainly thought you had more notion of this latter qualifi- 
 cation than many others." Almost immediately after 
 taking his degree he went as assistant-master to St 
 Columba's College, near Dublin, to serve under his friend 
 the Rev. George Williams.
 
 ( 45 ) 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ST COLUMBA'S COLLEGE, near Dublin, was the outcome of 
 the High-Church movement combined with Irish patriotism. 
 It was founded in 1843, by the efforts of the primate, Lord 
 J. G. Beresford ; the Earl of Dunraven ; Viscount Adare ; 
 the well-known antiquary Dr Todd ; the Rev. William 
 Sewell, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, after- 
 wards founder of Radley, and other gentlemen. Their 
 scheme was originally a wide one, and embraced a college 
 and a school. In the college, a body of clergy were to 
 be educated in divinity, and trained to speak and preach 
 in the Irish tongue, with the object of winning to the 
 Church the great masses of the Irish-speaking population. 
 The school was to be on the same system as the great 
 English public schools, and to provide the children of the 
 upper classes in Ireland with a place of education which 
 should obviate the necessity of going over to England for 
 the purpose. It was natural and appropriate to call the 
 institution after the name of St Columba, the great 
 missionary-saint of the early Irish Church. The scheme 
 began well, but after about five years' trial want of funds 
 compelled the governors to modify their plan. The first 
 part of the original programme was allowed to drop, and 
 the school alone was maintained. After a temporary 
 residence at Stackallan, on the Boyne, the governors 
 bought a site on the spur of the hills near Howth, over- 
 looking Dublin Bay, and in this beautiful spot the college
 
 46 ST COLUMBA'S. 
 
 took up its permanent abode. Under the statutes given 
 it by the primate in 1852, it was governed by a warden 
 and fifteen honorary Fellows. When Bradshaw joined it 
 there were five assistant masters, appointed by the warden, 
 and some thirty-five boys. 
 
 In the spring of 1854, Mr George Williams had been 
 in charge of St Columba's for three or four years. His 
 health was failing from the pressure of school work and 
 anxiety, for the financial position of the school was then 
 far from satisfactory, and about the middle of March he 
 asked Bradshaw to come to his assistance. A few days 
 later Bradshaw arrived at St Columba's, and at once got 
 into harness. To a man of his somewhat desultory and 
 irregular habits, the discipline and responsibility of the 
 teacher's life must have been a great change, and a whole- 
 some if not always agreeable tonic. 
 
 Mr Tuckwell, one of his colleagues, now Rector of 
 Stockton, says of him, " I well remember Bradshaw's first 
 appearance, and how he startled our Oxford primness by 
 shaking hands with us all round. We were slow to 
 appreciate him at first." His manner seemed repellent ; 
 he seemed to have no enthusiasm. But he soon made 
 his way ; boys and masters alike grew fond of him. Mr 
 Tuckwell was doing more than his share of work, "but 
 no one found it out," he says, "till Bradshaw came one 
 day to remonstrate, and succeeded in carrying off a pile 
 of exercises, and in arranging to relieve me periodically 
 in future." 
 
 Ten days after his arrival he writes to his mother, 
 " I felt that I was only going for a short time to relieve 
 Williams and to make the best of it, though I fancied it 
 would be uncongenial work. And I confess I had some 
 prejudices against the place. However, once here, I feel 
 differently. The place is as different as day from night 
 from what I expected to' find it. ... My respect and
 
 FfRST lAfPRESSIO.VS. 47 
 
 admiration for Williams have increased tenfold. I was 
 half afraid of a system of confession and absolution, or 
 some approach to it ; but I find there is not a shadow 
 of anything of the kind. Nor, indeed, does there seem 
 any room for it ; for I never saw a place where things 
 were so practical and so utterly devoid of any morbid 
 tendency. The boys are the freshest and most honest 
 set I ever knew. I must say this that Williams seem 
 to have eradicated the propensity (which in English schools 
 is the rule} of lying to a master and thinking it no harm ; 
 and if it is in any way the bane of the Irish as a nation, 
 as is so often said, I am convinced that when once eradi- 
 cated, the superiority of the character comes out. It 
 amuses me immensely to see the way they scorn to give 
 a shuffling excuse." 
 
 " I have had no time for theorising," he continues, 
 " and I find no one here who is inclined that way. My 
 hands are full from morning to night with either positive 
 school work or verses to look over, or helping the boys 
 to do their exercises, etc. ; but with this, indeed on ac- 
 count of this, I make a point of always getting my regular 
 exercise, and yesterday I had a regular good three hours' 
 run over the mountains. ... It seems a direct call to me 
 to active work, and I have every reason to be most thank- 
 ful for it. And as far as I can see, it may influence my 
 future course considerably, and I may continue here for 
 some time." 
 
 He seems to have been really happy for some time. 
 He threw himself into his duties with good will and even 
 enthusiasm. His intercourse with the boys was by no 
 means confined to school-hours, but was almost continuous 
 throughout the day. " At dinner," he writes, " we all sit 
 at the head and foot of the several tables I, at least, at 
 the warden's left hand, carving for him. You will be 
 amused to hear that, after avoiding the office of carver
 
 48 ST COLUMBAS. 
 
 regularly at Eton and at home, as well as at King's, I 
 have fallen into a place where I have to practise my hand 
 regularly every day. There are no symptoms of fasting 
 to be seen of men." 
 
 When the summer half came to an end, he had 
 made up his mind to go back in the autumn. In July, 
 
 1854, he writes to his friend Edwin Freshfield, "When 
 I had been a few weeks there (at St Columba's), I was 
 doubly glad I had gone. I found it a plain, ordinary 
 school, somewhat better managed than most schools ; . . . 
 no ecclesiastical nonsense of any description, and, what 
 relieved me most thanks to Tuckwell of New College 
 no ecclesiastical small talk among the tutors, at the break- 
 fast-table and elsewhere. I soon fell into it, and took to 
 the work kindly enough ; and, contrary to all my views 
 when I went there, I shall probably go back in the 
 second week in August, and very likely stay working 
 there till I am ordained, which will not be very far hence. 
 Of course, one great attraction to me is having so many 
 old friends, besides perpetual aunts and cousins (whom I 
 do like), in or near Dublin and in the north of Ireland." 
 
 August found him again at St Columba's. But his 
 letters begin to show signs that the work was not so con- 
 genial as it had seemed. The experience of this term 
 seems to have driven him to the conclusion that school- 
 mastering was not to be his trade, though he was fated 
 to continue it for more than a year longer. In January, 
 
 1855, he writes to a sister, "I have not, for fourteen 
 years or more, had such an utterly miserable leaving home 
 as I have had this time. It is, of course, the last time 
 I shall ever leave under the circumstances of going back 
 to school, and it seems as if all the happiness there had 
 been in former times in going back to school had given 
 way to this feeling of going back now." When he was 
 once at work again, his spirits partially revived, but mean-
 
 INTENTION TO TAKE ORDERS. 49 
 
 while the chief motive for remaining at St Columbia's was 
 removed by the departure of its head. Towards the end 
 of 1854, Mr George Williams had been elected Vice- 
 Provost of King's, a post which involved his almost con- 
 tinuous presence at Cambridge. This was a serious loss 
 to Bradshaw, and eventually determined him to leave the 
 place. 
 
 It will be remembered that in the summer of 1854 he 
 was looking forward to being ordained in a short time. 
 But he had grave doubts as to whether he could con- 
 scientiously enter the service of the Church. On February 
 7, 1855, he writes to his mother, his constant and sympa- 
 thetic counsellor, as follows : " Thanks very much for your 
 letter ; thanks for every part of it. I hope I shall not soon 
 or easily forget what you say. With reference to want of 
 energy making me shrink from taking Orders, I cannot 
 allow myself to make this any ground ; for my conscience 
 tells me very plainly that, once conscious of a want of 
 energy, you are bound to shake it off, as a Christian and 
 a man, in any position whatever, and all I wish is to be 
 honest with myself. My real fault has been my tendency 
 has been, certainly not to too much fine-drawn speculation 
 on the matter, and troublesome argument with myself, but 
 rather to an absence of sufficient thought upon the matter 
 at all, an unwillingness to give my thoughts to it. And 
 this was curiously corroborated at Cambridge the other 
 day, by a fact which may amuse you, if you are fond of 
 drawing inferences as I am from such things. I was look- 
 ing over all my divinity books. Some were from the Hyde 
 Park Street library [left him by his father]. A great number 
 eighty or a hundred, maybe more were presents from 
 people who were supposed to know my tastes ; whereas of 
 what I bought at Cambridge (and here I must say that I 
 have spent a considerable sum on books in the last five 
 years much more than I ought) of these, I say, not one 
 
 E
 
 BO Sr COLUMBUS. 
 
 in forty or fifty was theological, and, with the exception 
 of a few of those books of Mr Maurice which you have at 
 Brighton, they did not amount to more than half a dozen 
 certainly not a dozen. It is a curious fact, as I said, and 
 one that I was not at all aware of. I have continually 
 made men show me on their shelves what books they have 
 bought at the university, with a view to judging somewhat 
 of their character and tastes, but never dreamt of applying 
 this test to myself." 
 
 It is remarkable that, in the list of the books which he 
 took to Ireland, hardly any theological works are to be 
 found. Those which his friends gave him were for the 
 most part, as far as could be judged from the volumes on 
 his shelves at the time of his death, not, strictly speaking, 
 theological. They consisted, for the most part, of devotional 
 works, religious poetry, ecclesiastical history, and biography. 
 It seems that, though he was on the one hand deeply 
 religious, and on the other warmly interested in eccle- 
 siastical history and antiquities, as well as in the problems 
 of Church government, dogmatic theology seldom formed 
 a subject of his thought or conversation. Whether this 
 consideration had much effect or not, is impossible to say. 
 It is more probable that he gradually relinquished the idea 
 of taking Orders, from a conviction that for the ordinary 
 duties of a clergyman he had no special inclination, and 
 that the ecclesiastical studies in which he delighted might 
 be at least as profitably pursued if his connection with the 
 Church remained that of a devout layman. 
 
 The line which he would have taken, at any rate at 
 first, may be gathered from much that has been said already. 
 It may be illustrated by the following extracts from a letter 
 which he received in the autumn of 1855 from one of his 
 most intimate friends, who happened to be staying at 
 Oxford at the time: "All Oxford is ringing with two 
 sermons from Dr Pusey, just preached before the univer-
 
 LITERARY INTERESTS. 51 
 
 sity. They consisted in an onslaught on the infidelity of 
 the day, crashing down upon Jowett, Maurice, Frank New- 
 man, and a host of writers, whose degrees of aberration are 
 as you will guess from these instances very remote. 
 The sermons were wonderfully eloquent, stocked with 
 exquisite illustrations, and sparkling with patristic anti- 
 thesis. Men came away, from the last especially, as the 
 Hipponese might have come away from hearing St 
 Augustine. ... I was shocked to see this morning that 
 there is a rule granted for a mandamus to compel the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury to proceed in the Denison case. 
 What can come of it, humanly speaking, but misery and 
 mischief? ... It is a comfort that at this juncture the 
 Bishop of Oxford has just enunciated the doctrine of the 
 Real Presence very distinctly from the university pulpit." 
 It need not, of course, be supposed that Bradshaw was 
 ready to endorse all the opinions implied in this letter, but 
 it could not have been written for a totally unsympathetic 
 eye. 
 
 His interest in English literature was as vivid as ever 
 during this period. He often wrote to his sisters to send 
 him books. He read " Westward Ho," then just published, 
 with avidity. His love of giving and receiving appropriate 
 presents of books was observed by Mr Tuckwell. Brad- 
 shaw writes to him early in 1856, "I don't know anything 
 so pleasant as presents that are really acceptable, and how 
 rarely they are so ! The ' Excursion,' which came on 
 Friday last, and your letter of this day week, have both 
 been treasures to me during the last few days. I ought to 
 have acknowledged it by return of post, but that would have 
 been thanks (i) for your thoughtfulness in choosing whole- 
 some food for me, and (2) for the beauty of the binding, but 
 no thanks for the book, which I had never read. But I 
 have been reading it now, and have read three books, parts 
 of them over and over again, and am charmed with them
 
 52 Sr COLUMBA'S. 
 
 beyond what I can tell you. I have often wondered when 
 the time would come for me to read and love Wordsworth, 
 and, as I said about Dr Pusey to you before, I am delighted 
 to think that you have been the first person in both cases 
 to make me read them. I am longing to get on to the 
 fourth and following books, and by the next time I write 
 I shall probably have finished the poem, and be more pre- 
 pared to dive deeper into it by reading a great deal over 
 and over again. The charm to me about all his things is 
 so much more that of familiarity than of novelty, just as 
 with good music. . . . Was ever anything like 'The 
 Brothers'?" 
 
 The severe "Crimean" winter of 1854-5 caused him 
 much discomfort, and inflicted on him a variety of ailments. 
 On February 9, 1855, he writes to Mr Hort, "I am 
 enjoying my second day of influenza, and wondering what 
 will come next. The plagues have been sweeping clean 
 through me, as regular as the clock : a week's inflammation, 
 a week's face-ache, a week's incessant headache morning 
 and night, and a week's sore throat, which has now made 
 way for a combination of almost all. I hope this may be 
 final, for it is a bar to work, and I can get no regular 
 exercise." All his energies were taxed in amusing the 
 boys, who soon grew tired of snowballing, and, like explorers 
 in an Arctic winter, became discontented and troublesome. 
 The sub-warden, Mr Walford, was absent, and Bradshaw 
 for a time had triple work on his hands. Nevertheless, or 
 perhaps on this very account, he found time to write many 
 letters home. " I feel it is such a blessing," he says to one 
 of his sisters, " being able to write more, for it was so dis- 
 mal dismal enough for me so seldom hearing from any 
 one, and ten times worse for you never hearing at all." And 
 again, " If letters make you half as happy as- they make 
 me, whether writing or receiving them, you ought to be 
 happy enough."
 
 H OLID. A YS 53 
 
 It is, perhaps, a little surprising that his letters during 
 this period allude so seldom to the great events then taking 
 place in the East. Some remarks, however, on the death 
 of the Emperor Nicolas, in a letter to his youngest sister 
 (March 29, 1855), deserve quotation. "I must say I agree 
 with mamma that I cannot see the slightest cause for exulta- 
 tion at his death, any more than in any other person's, 
 particularly as it seems very uncertain that the result is 
 likely to be a peace. If it results in a peace, there is every 
 reason to be thankful ; but it is precisely the fact of his 
 sudden death being the cause that prevents the great 
 exultation there would otherwise be. The natural thing to 
 exult in is the man's pride being well taken down, and this 
 his sudden death prevented, so that you should be rather 
 disappointed than not. But I don't want to give you a 
 sermon, especially as there are much more shocking things 
 which might bring one on." 
 
 His short Easter holidays this year were spent in an 
 excursion through County Wicklow. The following letter 
 was written to a sister just after his return : 
 
 " April 17, 1855. 
 
 " What a heavenly day ! This and yesterday have been 
 our first spring days. I have just been up to the top of one 
 of our ranges of hills, sitting among the ruins of a great 
 Danish fort, about fifteen or sixteen hundred feet above 
 the sea, reading your and mamma's letters. . . . We had 
 such a happy week last week, from Monday to Thursday, 
 fifteen of us : to Bray the first day ; then on to Arklow, the 
 southernmost part of Wicklow, through the vale of Avoca. 
 The rock scenery was very grand. Of course, the vale is 
 only at its beauty in summer, but as we came back and 
 went through the Devil's Glen and the Seven Churches 
 in Glendalough, it was worth anything. . . . Altogether I 
 have great reason to be ten times happier this year than 
 last, so do not, dearest K., think me unhappy."
 
 54 Sr COLUMBA'S. 
 
 Part of his summer holidays were spent in a tour 
 through the north of France with his friend Gordon. He 
 visited Paris, Rouen, Rheims, and other places, and wrote 
 an enthusiastic letter to one of his sisters about the 
 beauties of Soissons by moonlight, and the view from 
 the terraced ramparts of Laon. 
 
 The October term at St Columba's found him sustain- 
 ing, with very insufficient aid, the greater part of the 
 business of the school. The warden was again absent 
 at Cambridge, and one of the most energetic of his 
 assistants took a post at Eton. " His going away so 
 suddenly," writes Bradshaw on October 9, 1855, "has 
 thrown a good deal of extra work on my hands, and, as 
 the warden went on Monday, I have all the college 
 accounts to keep, calves to sell, and pigs to buy, potatoes 
 to see brought in, and oats carted, etc., besides servants' 
 wages to pay." This seems to have been the last straw, 
 and in the autumn he resolved to resign. 
 
 He spent the Christmas vacation, lonely and depressed, 
 in the empty house at St Columba's, his solitude inter- 
 rupted only now and then by visits to his friends Dr Todd 
 or Dr Lee in Dublin, and somewhat solaced, we may 
 hope, by reading Wordsworth. Early in 1856 he was 
 preparing to leave the school. On January 3 he writes 
 to one of his brothers, "We are all here in the midst of 
 confusion, caused by giving up house and home, packing 
 books, etc. ; we all leave this to-morrow morning." How- 
 ever, as the warden had been compelled finally to give up 
 his connection with the college, Bradshaw consented to fill 
 his place as, indeed, he had been practically doing for 
 some time past till another warden could be appointed. 
 For some months he had the whole charge of the school on 
 his hands, and only one assistant to help him. The work 
 was heavy, and the responsibility, to a man of his tempera- 
 ment, very trying. The details of management, in addition
 
 SCHOLASTIC MISERIES. 55 
 
 to the tedious routine of school work, were almost more 
 than he could bear. At length he was able to shake off the 
 load, and on April 5, 1856, he wrote, "The matter is now 
 not settling, but settled, and I leave the place on Tuesday 
 afternoon, with feelings of nothing but the most unmitigated 
 disgust." 
 
 So ended an episode in Henry Bradshaw's life, on 
 which he never looked back with much satisfaction. The 
 discipline through which he had passed was doubtless 
 beneficial. He learnt, among other things, what he was 
 not fit for, but it may be regretted that two valuable years 
 were spent in making this discovery. It was no natural 
 attraction, but a chivalrous devotion to a friend, which 
 led him originally to take up the work, and so long 
 hindered him from laying it down. It is difficult to gather 
 how far he was successful as a schoolmaster. He did 
 what he had to do energetically and conscientiously, 
 but it is clear that he was not in his element. 
 
 Whenever he could, he escaped into the library of 
 the college. It was a good library, and during his 
 residence he made a catalogue of the books which it 
 contained. A colleague, Mr Beck, now Rector of Rother- 
 hithe, tells me that "it was his happiness to spend what 
 few hours he had of leisure time in the library. Irish 
 antiquities were a special study with him at that time, 
 and I remember with what pleasure and enthusiasm he 
 would talk with the learned and genial Dr Todd on these 
 topics." But it was not much time that he could spend 
 in his favourite pursuit, especially during the latter part 
 of his time at the school. When Dr Gwynne accepted 
 the post of warden, early in 1855, he found Bradshaw 
 utterly worn out. I cannot do better than quote Dr 
 Gwynne's remarks on his position during the autumn 
 of 1855 and the beginning of 1856. "The work was 
 uncongenial to him, and teaching was a mere trial of
 
 56 Sr COLUMBAS. 
 
 his patience. But so long as George Williams was present 
 to direct it, I have no doubt that Bradshaw was fairly 
 happy. Then came the change. Williams was absent ; 
 other tutors one by one dropped off; their places were 
 filled by strangers, temporarily engaged ; the school was 
 dwindling rapidly. Nothing could be more dreary than 
 the position, or more unpromising than the prospect. Up 
 to the close of 1855 he had at least the satisfaction of 
 feeling that he was working for his friend, but after 
 Williams' resignation his steadfastness was still the same ; 
 so long as the school held together, he was ready to stand 
 by it. It may have been partly a feeling that the work 
 which George Williams had carried on for five years 
 must not be let drop, partly a desire to help Dr Todd 
 to save the school from final collapse ; but I believe it 
 was mainly a strong sense of duty that held him to 
 his post a feeling of loyal obligation, binding him to 
 hold on till he should be relieved of his charge by some 
 one who would undertake the office of warden." 
 
 His temper suffered. He left on Dr Gwynne " the 
 impression that he was a man of gloomy, almost morbid 
 temperament. He was pale and meagre, with the worn 
 look of a man who neither ate nor slept enough, as if 
 the anxieties of his life fretted him all day and kept 
 him awake half the night, and left their lines upon his 
 face." " One of the most lively images," says Dr Gwynne, 
 "which I retain of him is as I found him sitting over 
 a handful of sixth-form verses the sixth being at a 
 low ebb in numbers and in scholarship alike. The passage 
 he had set them to translate began with the line 
 
 " ' Yes, Earth shall lead destruction ; she shall end.' 
 
 I well remember the unhappy first line of the copy sent 
 up by the captain of the school, the despair and disgust 
 with which Bradshaw showed it to me :
 
 SCHOLASTIC MISERIES. 57 
 
 " ' Dux erit exitii tellus : immo ilia finibit.' 
 
 I can recall no more ; this sample will suffice. 
 
 " Then there were the accounts. How he worried his 
 soul over them ! Day after day I found him labouring at 
 them. But at last, before he left, he handed them all over 
 to me school accounts, house accounts, farm accounts 
 all made out with perfect neatness and clearness, and 
 calculated literally to the last farthing. And so with 
 everything that had been committed to his keeping. He 
 had labelled every key, arranged the contents of every 
 drawer and pigeon-hole, and classified all letters and 
 papers, before he gave them into my hands. 
 
 "But what I think impressed me most was his solici- 
 tude about what I may call the minor morals of the school, 
 the maintenance of all the observances and proprieties 
 which George Williams, who was a punctilious man, had 
 laid down as rules. Any laxity about the regulations as 
 to dress, any disregard of the boundaries which divided 
 the region where caps might be worn from the region 
 where caps must be taken off, distressed him sorely. 
 I hardly think this strictness in regard to petty rules 
 was of his own nature ; I suspect that it was rather part 
 of his desire to keep everything as George Williams had 
 left it." 
 
 Even his liking and admiration for the boys seem to 
 have given way to very different feelings. " To individual 
 boys," says Dr Gwynne, " he was strongly attached, but 
 boys as a class had no special interest for him. Except 
 a few, he spoke of them with distrust I may say, disgust, 
 for I well remember the word he very often used in sum- 
 ming up his ill opinion of some boy whom he disliked 
 ' loathsome boy ' ! " The disappointments of which every 
 schoolmaster's life is full must have soured him for the 
 time, and it is evident that during these latter days at 
 St Columba's he was not himself.
 
 58 Sr COLUMBAS. 
 
 Nevertheless, Mr Walford tells me that " his influence 
 with the boys was great, and exerted in a gentle way. 
 He could insinuate good advice or reproof by the simplest 
 words, combined with a manner which told of a truly 
 loving heart." Many boys thought him odd ; some found 
 him "shy and dreamy;" but he was certainly attracted 
 by others, and attracted them in turn. In his discipline he 
 was severe, as he had been while captain at Eton. Letters 
 have been preserved in which he refused, courteously but 
 firmly, in spite of reiterated requests from parents or 
 friends, to allow pupils to stay away a minute longer than 
 the rules of the college permitted. He says himself, in 
 a letter to a near relative, " I have put a ban entirely on 
 my boys saying ' I had no time to do it.' There are few 
 greater mistakes than to allow yourself to suppose that 
 you have not time for anything you really want to do." 
 Still, a former pupil says of him, " He was, I think, fairly 
 popular ; always kind and just ; not severe in his punish- 
 ments, but always down upon anything which was not 
 honest and straightforward." Another pupil writes, " My 
 happiest recollections of school-life are associated with 
 Mr Bradshaw, whom I learnt to regard more as a friend 
 than a master. His love of books, even at that time, 
 impressed me much ; and to this day I never see an uncut 
 book without its reminding me of him and his instruction 
 how it should be cut and its back ' broken,' so as to open 
 flat without starting the leaves." 
 
 That he continued to take interest in the school is 
 evident from the numerous letters which he received for 
 some time after he left, from Dr Todd, Dr Gwynne, and 
 others. He preserved till his death a large number of 
 these, many of them covering eight or ten pages, and full 
 of minute details about the school, which could not have 
 been communicated to anyone unable to reciprocate the 
 vivid interest and sympathy which they evince. But his
 
 DEPARTURE FROM THE SCHOOL. 59 
 
 direct connection with St Columba's, once broken off, was 
 never renewed. He was now to be transferred to a more 
 congenial sphere of action. Shortly after leaving St 
 Columba's, he settled down in the University Library at 
 Cambridge.
 
 60 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 WHEN Henry Bradshaw first accepted a post in the 
 University Library, that institution was in a comparatively 
 backward condition. The Library Syndicate, in its re- 
 modelled form, had only been in existence some three 
 years. Its labours were far from being so arduous as they 
 are now. Its principal business appears to have been to 
 decide what books should be bought for the library. The 
 amount of time at its disposal may be guessed from the 
 fact that each book to be bought was discussed by the 
 whole Syndicate and voted on separately. The Syndics 
 were not always conversant with the books on whose 
 merits they debated. A story is told that on one occa- 
 sion, when some works on Romance literature were under 
 discussion, the chairman objected to their purchase on the 
 ground that there were "novels enough in the library 
 already." There was little communication between the 
 executive and the governing body, for the librarian was 
 not present at the meetings of the Syndicate. The attend- 
 ance of the librarian did not, in fact, become customary 
 till Bradshaw himself held the office. There was not 
 too much supervision, and the rules for admission and for 
 taking out books were frequently violated. Bradshaw 
 himself, in the early days of his appointment as library 
 assistant, once came upon two ladies busy in exploring
 
 . THE LIBRARY IN 1856. 61 
 
 the treasures of the novel-room. When asked if they had 
 any tickets of admission, they replied, " No, but papa has ; " 
 and upon further inquiry it turned out that for a long time 
 past they had acted on the assumption that the paternal 
 rights were transferable. 
 
 To manage so large an institution as the University 
 Library under the conditions of free admission, which 
 make it unique among the great libraries of the world, 
 must always be difficult ; to do so with the staff then at 
 the service of the librarian was well-nigh impossible. The 
 staff consisted of one principal assistant and four assistants. 
 The first of these offices had only been created in 1853, 
 with a salary of 120, and was held by a foreigner, 
 Mr Heun, who had previously been secretary to the 
 librarian. There were no assistant-librarians, and Mr 
 Heun was not a member of the university. The libra- 
 rian's salary was 210 a year. It was hardly to be won- 
 dered at if his attention was not exclusively devoted to 
 the library. The catalogue of books was entirely in 
 manuscript, and the system of writing the titles on slips 
 and pasting them in was not yet in use. Not that the 
 University Library was behind other libraries in this re- 
 spect : on the contrary, it was the first to adopt (in 1861) 
 the system of printing the slips. The present catalogue 
 of manuscripts had just been begun, and the first volume, 
 containing many errors, was published in 1856; but for 
 the greater part of the manuscripts there was as yet only 
 the defective list made by Nasmith in 1796. Little 
 care had been taken to secure the contents of the library 
 from loss or damage. Precious books frequently disap- 
 peared, or came back mutilated, docked of engravings or 
 other matter which gave them peculiar interest or value. 
 Priceless volumes were stowed away in inaccessible places, 
 a prey to dust or damp, while others were left where the 
 hand of every passer-by could touch them. Others, again,
 
 62 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1856-63. 
 
 had been altogether lost sight of ; no one knew where they 
 were, or even that they had ever been in the library. 
 
 The illness and consequent resignation of Mr Heun, 
 in October, 1856, gave Bradshaw an opening for which, 
 during the greater part of his life, he had been uncon- 
 sciously preparing. His previous studies those, at least, 
 which he had pursued with interest pointed to a library 
 as his natural home. He had been conversant with books 
 from childhood. At Eton, at Cambridge, at St Columba's, 
 his friends had observed his propensities and recognized 
 his learning. But there is nothing to show that he had 
 haunted libraries and passed his time among books with 
 a view to professional employment as a librarian. Indeed, 
 as we have seen, he had quite other notions of a profession. 
 He simply studied books because they interested him more 
 than anything else. 
 
 A great part of his undergraduate leisure had been 
 spent in the University Library, and many of its most 
 valuable contents were already familiar to him. While at 
 St Columba's, he wrote to Mr Heun for an account of 
 certain early printed books. His letter, written in 1854, 
 concludes with the words, " I forget, by-the-by, whether you 
 know my name. At any rate, you will easily recollect me 
 as the B.A. of King's College who gave you so much 
 trouble about the Irish books in the library." Another 
 letter to Mr Heun shows that he was already well ac- 
 quainted with the scene of his future labours, and that this 
 acquaintance had been gained, apparently, in the pursuit 
 of Irish books, at this time his chief subject of research. 
 " It would be a charity," he says, " to rescue from the dust 
 in which it lies buried a copy of Wynkyn de Worde's 
 ' Nova Legenda Anglie.' Fol. Lond. : 1516. It by rights 
 belongs to K*. 10. 38 ; but it is lying (or was when I left) 
 on the top of the bookcase next the staircase leading up 
 to your room, so that, when I wanted it, I could not find
 
 FIRST APPOINTMENT IN THE LIBRARY. 63 
 
 it for some time. ... I have been looking carefully right 
 through the first two volumes of Mr Grenville's catalogue 
 for Irish books, but I am disappointed, for the two 
 volumes only contain half a dozen, certainly not a dozen, 
 books which I did not know of before, on that subject. 
 Of those which I know well the account given is so very 
 bad generally that I have no faith in the way in which 
 those are entered which I have not had a sight of; but it is 
 specially disappointing, because that is always held out as 
 the finest private collection, and that catalogue as a model 
 of what such books should be. I see there is nothing for 
 it but to examine every single book with my own eyes and 
 hands, and to take nothing second-hand." 
 
 Mr Heun resigned his post towards the end of October, 
 1856, and Bradshaw at once made application for the place. 
 It had not been held previously by a member of the 
 university. He was appointed early in November, 1856. 
 It had been his wish that the title of the post should be 
 altered from " principal assistant" to "assistant-librarian." 
 This may appear a trivial matter, but Bradshaw probably 
 felt that the change in title would confer some increase of 
 authority, and would also make it easier in future for a 
 member of the university to accept the post. It was, how- 
 ever, thought better on this occasion not to make the 
 change. Some time later his wish was carried into effect. 
 
 Almost the only record of the two next years which I 
 have been able to find, consists of a few notes on a journey 
 to France in the summer of 1857. This fragment of a 
 diary possesses no particular interest, but it contains one 
 little incident which illustrates the writer's practical 
 sagacity. I will let him tell it in his own words. " July 27, 
 1857. Left Cambridge by mail ; reached Shoreditch [then 
 the terminus of the Great Eastern Railway] at 4.30 a.m., 
 and walked over to London Bridge. Having intimated 
 to S. the possibility of our starting from Brighton this
 
 64 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1856-63. 
 
 morning, and not having told Waterfield the contrary, I 
 was most anxious to see him, for fear he should start for 
 Newhaven, and then not find us. So, by an Edgar Poe 
 process of analysis, I inquired at Burrell's [hotel], and, not 
 finding the name, I was reduced to inquiring how many 
 had arrived the previous night, and of these how many 
 were to be called very early, by which the number was 
 reduced to three ; and an inspection of the boots led me to 
 the right room. Without much delay, Waterfield was up, 
 and we had breakfasted and were off by the six train to 
 Brighton." In the course of the short expedition that 
 followed, he revisited some of the spots in Normandy 
 Rouen, for instance, which had delighted him as an Eton 
 boy, when staying there with his sisters ten years before. 
 But the diary records hardly any impressions ; and at 
 Grenoble, where he thought " the fountains perhaps the 
 prettiest things in the place," it abruptly breaks off. 
 
 Bradshaw held the post of principal assistant for some- 
 what more than two years. The reasons which induced 
 him to resign the post do not appear, but may, perhaps, 
 be surmised. His object in entering the library was not 
 simply to obtain employment among books, but to get an 
 opportunity for research under favourable conditions. He 
 doubtless found that his occupations were such as to leave 
 him too little leisure for study. He was engaged for seven 
 hours of the day in routine work, and was practically 
 responsible for the general management of the library. 
 The vacations which others enjoyed were not for him. He 
 wrote home in April, 1857, regretting that he had been 
 unable to visit his mother that Easter, though he had 
 "long looked forward to it as his first real holiday." 
 These things told upon his health. He grew depressed 
 and discontented with his position. In the early part of 
 the year 1858, his friend, George Williams, remonstrated 
 with him on his " continued absence " from the library,
 
 RESIGNATION OF FIRST APPOINTMENT. 65 
 
 and Bradshaw replied that he intended to resign. Mr 
 Williams endeavoured to dissuade him from a step 
 which he regarded as suicidal, but in vain. In June, 
 1858, Bradshaw sent in his resignation. "I have wished," 
 he says, "to give notice thus early, in order that the 
 Syndics and the library generally may not be put to any 
 inconvenience from difficulty in finding a member of the 
 university to fill the place. I cannot forget the honour 
 which the Syndics paid me in first making the appointment, 
 much less the uniform kindness which I have received from 
 every member of that body during my term of office." In 
 a subsequent letter he informed the vice-chancellor that 
 the state of his health would not allow him to retain the 
 post. His resignation was accepted in October, 1858. At 
 the request of the Syndicate, he continued to act as principal 
 assistant till the end of the Michaelmas Term, when he was 
 finally released from what had clearly become an intolerable 
 burden. So ended the first phase of his connection with 
 the library. 
 
 It must have been in the interval between his first and 
 second appointments that, as Professor Mayor informs me, 
 he made inquiries about a post in the British Museum. 
 The limit of age had, however, been fixed only a year 
 before at twenty-five, and his application was therefore 
 unsuccessful. Meanwhile he was able to work unencum- 
 bered in the University Library. In exploring its hidden 
 recesses, and making himself acquainted with every 
 valuable book which it contained, Bradshaw was doing a 
 work equally beneficial to the library and to himself. His 
 friends were anxious that an office should be created in 
 which he could prosecute his researches without risk of 
 interruption, and with the sanction of the university. All 
 that he wanted was the permission to work, and the oppor- 
 tunity of showing that he could work to some purpose. 
 
 Accordingly Dr Luard, who was then engaged with 
 
 F
 
 66 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 others in drawing up the catalogue of manuscripts, addressed 
 a letter to the Library Syndicate, which was laid before that 
 body by Mr George Williams, and eventually led to 
 Bradshaw's appointment. Some passages in this letter 
 deserve quotation, as showing the state of the manuscripts 
 before Mr Bradshaw took them in hand. "The manu- 
 scripts," says Dr Luard, "have in all probability not been 
 dusted for centuries, certainly not since George I gave 
 them to the university. In many instances the dust has 
 got into the leaves and seriously injured them. The bind- 
 ings of the greater portion of the manuscripts are in a most 
 disgraceful condition. . . . Many leaves are often misplaced 
 by the carelessness of the binder, and parts of the same 
 treatise are sometimes bound in two separate volumes, and 
 placed on separate shelves. As to lettering, a volume 
 might be written on the absurd mistakes in this respect. A 
 well-known manuscript of Chaucer's ' Canterbury Tales ' is 
 lettered ' Piers Plowman.' A fine York Manual is lettered 
 ' Ritule (sic) vetustum.' Our well-known Winchester 
 Pontifical has ' Missalia ' on the back." Dr Luard 
 recommended, among other things, that a careful and 
 thorough examination of the manuscripts should at once 
 be made, and that all such as required binding should be 
 bound under proper supervision. 
 
 Acting on these suggestions, the Syndicate, of which 
 Dr Lightfoot, Dr Philpot, Dr Guest, and Professor Mayor 
 were members, reported to the Senate that, in their opinion, 
 the department of manuscripts and early printed books 
 stood in need of a thorough overhauling ; that the bindings 
 of the manuscripts should be properly repaired and re- 
 lettered, and the manuscripts themselves rearranged 
 They proposed " that authority be given to Mr Bradshaw, 
 of King's College, to carry into effect the above-mentioned 
 suggestions, under the direction of the Library Syndicate, 
 and to perform similar duties in regard to rare and early
 
 WORK IN THE LIBRARY. 67 
 
 printed books ; and also that the Syndicate be authorized 
 to pay to Mr Bradshaw, from the Library Subscription 
 Fund, the sum of twenty pounds a year so long as he 
 continues to be engaged in the discharge of these duties." 
 The report was confirmed in June, 1859, and Bradshaw at 
 once entered on his duties. His appointment, in the first 
 instance, was for two years. 
 
 The nine years that followed were, in some respects, 
 the happiest period of his life. He was engaged on work 
 of which every detail was a pleasure. He was constantly 
 adding to his store of information ; he was exploring 
 untrodden ground, unravelling secrets of which no one else 
 held the clue, bringing to light new facts, establishing new 
 conclusions, rebuilding and illuminating the past. His 
 reputation as a scholar was constantly increasing, but on 
 this he never appeared to set great value. It was a truer 
 satisfaction to him to feel that his services were more and 
 more appreciated in the university, to whose interests he 
 was so assiduously devoting himself. 
 
 The task which he had undertaken was no light one. 
 He had, in the first place, to teach himself to read manu- 
 scripts of all dates and countries, and this he did apparently 
 without any extraneous assistance. But this was only the 
 first step. To understand, describe, and classify them 
 correctly required intellectual powers and moral qualities 
 of a high order. The work of dating and arranging the 
 early printed books, devoid as they often are of any direct 
 indication of time or place of publication, was equally 
 difficult. In both departments, especially perhaps in the 
 latter, Bradshaw had to find his own way, to make his own 
 rules, and create his science as he went. 
 
 The mere physical labour involved was considerable. 
 He would stand at the top of a long ladder for hours 
 together, taking down one book after another from the 
 shelves. To determine the date or authorship of a manu-
 
 6g CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858 63. 
 
 script, to settle the question whether an early printed book 
 was perfect or not, whether it was a unique copy or a 
 specimen of some well-known edition, were problems the 
 solution of which might entail hours or even days of labour. 
 For the purpose of his researches he frequently visited 
 Oxford, Dublin, and many other places both in England 
 and on the Continent. He thought little of making a long 
 journey to see a single book or settle one knotty point. 
 For instance, in January, 1866, after jotting down in his 
 note-book the results of a day's work in the British 
 Museum, spent mostly on a famous early edition of 
 Tibullus and other poets, he concludes, " What does the 
 Paris copy want? On to Paris by the 8.30 train." And 
 to Paris he went. Once there, he spent several days in 
 the National Library, and visited Canterbury for the sake 
 of seeing some other books on his way back. 
 
 The sum which he received from the university was at 
 first merely nominal. It was hardly sufficient to pay his 
 postage, much less to cover the expenses of the journeys 
 he made in the fulfilment of his task. But it must be 
 remembered that the general scale of payments to univer- 
 sity officials was far smaller then than now, that the 
 appointment was confessedly experimental, and that before 
 long the stipend, if such it may be called, was raised to 
 a respectable figure. Bradshaw himself was wont to speak 
 of the assistance which he received from the university at 
 this time as a genuine instance of the endowment of 
 research. To some this may seem ironical, but it was not 
 so intended. In later years he always looked back on 
 this period of his life with gratitude and pleasure. " My 
 happy time," he told Dr Furnivall long afterwards, "was 
 when I was looking through the manuscripts, free to come 
 and go, and to cut up books as much as I pleased, for 
 twenty pounds a year." 
 
 During this period Henry Bradshaw's labours were,
 
 DISCOVERY OF THE BOOK OF DEER. 69 
 
 of course, mainly confined to examining, restoring, and 
 arranging books and manuscripts already known. But at 
 intervals he brought to light hidden treasures, both in 
 Cambridge and elsewhere, the discovery of which deserves 
 special mention. While acting as principal assistant, he 
 had already made himself remarkable in this way. Some 
 time before March, 1857, he unearthed a valuable manu- 
 script which had once belonged to Trinity College, Dublin. 
 This was a copy of the Apocrypha in Irish. It had been 
 deposited in the Trinity College library, says Dr Todd 
 in a letter to Bradshaw, by Archbishop Marsh. Before 
 the archbishop was dead, it had disappeared. Dr Todd 
 thought that it was probably brought to England by 
 Provost Huntington, when he fled from his own country 
 in the disturbed times of James II. It was in the course 
 of his researches in Irish literature that Bradshaw came 
 upon this manuscript. The same researches led shortly 
 afterwards to a more important discovery. 
 
 In the autumn of 1857, he found in the University 
 Library the manuscript containing a copy of the Gospels, 
 with Gaelic charters inscribed, known as the " Book of 
 Deer." It will be well to put together here all that need 
 be said about the discovery and publication of this remark- 
 able manuscript. " Books on Irish affairs," writes Brad- 
 shaw in May, 1858, "in the widest acceptation of the term, 
 are my speciality, having inherited from my father almost 
 the most considerable private library of the kind in the 
 United Kingdom, and having since nearly doubled its 
 value by my own exertions. It was this circumstance that 
 led Mr Hardwick to draw my attention to the volume, as 
 containing the Gospels in ' handwriting Anglo-Saxon not 
 later than the tenth century,' with some notes apparently 
 in the old Irish language. This was last autumn, and 
 I at once set to work and was happy enough from these 
 ' notes ' to discover the real nature of the book." Brad-
 
 /o CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 shaw at once communicated the fact to the well-known 
 Scotch antiquary, Mr John Stuart. He describes the 
 manuscript himself as follows : " It is an unfinished manu- 
 script of the Vulgate version of the four Gospels, with the 
 Apostles' Creed, written by a scribe whose vernacular 
 language was Gaelic, in which the subscription at the close 
 is written. The first three Gospels are unfinished, not 
 mutilated ; St John is complete. The cursive character, 
 the size of the volume, and the portion of the Visitation 
 Office (in a slightly later hand) corresponding almost 
 verbatim with that in the Book of Dim ma, lead one to 
 believe that its original use was to be carried about the 
 person, not used in the choir ; while the transcripts of 
 documents and lists of possessions inserted in the blank 
 spaces at the beginning, etc., as in the Book of Kells, 
 show that it was venerated as a relic and so used, as a 
 depository for these documents, and as the book, apparently, 
 on which they swore in claiming their lands." It is in 
 these insertions that the principal value of the manuscript 
 consists. Mr Stuart writes to Bradshaw on May 6, 1858, 
 " The discovery of the Deer manuscript is to me most inte- 
 resting, and I think its importance to our early history and 
 philology will prove to be great. Already from your tran- 
 script I get glimpses into old Celtic times and offices, 
 regarding which we have hitherto nothing but vague tra- 
 dition. ... I must congratulate you on having brought 
 to light this curious and to us most interesting volume." 
 
 Mr Stuart proposed that the Spalding Club should print 
 the book, and suggested an editor. Bradshaw, however, 
 at first intended to edit it himself. He had, as he says, 
 gone far towards collecting the materials necessary for its 
 illustration, but a few points remained on which he desired 
 further information. He transcribed the Gaelic charters, 
 which constitute the chief value of the book, and also other 
 portions of it, and had facsimiles made of the illuminations.
 
 DISCOVERY OF THE BOOK OF DEER. 71 
 
 Unfortunately, as in so many cases, other subjects of 
 interest attracted his attention, the doubtful points were 
 not cleared up, and the book remained unpublished. In 
 1860, three years after its discovery, Mr John Stuart was 
 again negotiating with him for its publication. His friends 
 urged him to do the work by instalments if he could not 
 bring it all out at once. " The discerning antiquaries of 
 Scotland," writes Dr Reeves, " are looking out most 
 earnestly for the book, not so much in its Biblical character, 
 as in its accidental qualities of a revealer of ecclesiastical 
 secrets, and the oldest specimen of their native language." 
 Thus stimulated, Bradshaw took up again the thread of 
 his researches in connection with the manuscript, and early 
 in 1 86 1 was on the point of printing his results. His 
 intention, apparently, was to publish a portion of the manu- 
 script separately at first, and to make this publication one 
 of a series. The title was to run as follows : " Cambridge 
 literary remains. Miscellaneous pieces, published from 
 the originals now remaining at Cambridge, with brief 
 notices by Henry Bradshaw." Something, however, again 
 interfered, and in 1863 he reluctantly came to the con- 
 clusion that it was better to hand over the work to some 
 one with more leisure than he possessed. Mr Joseph 
 Robertson undertook the task, on behalf of the Spalding 
 Club, but died before it was completed. Mr John Stuart 
 then took it up, and gave it to the world in 1869. 
 
 I have mentioned these details in connection with the 
 editing of the Book of Deer because they are only too 
 good an example of the procrastination which was, unfor- 
 tunately, characteristic of Henry Bradshaw. The delay 
 in this case, as in others, was due to his reluctance to 
 publish anything so long as any point, however minute, 
 remained to be explained, and to the difficulty which he 
 always laboured under of concentrating himself on one 
 subject for any length of time. The learned world was,
 
 72 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 no doubt, put to inconvenience by the delay, but after all 
 Bradshaw himself was the chief sufferer, for he had 
 to see others enjoying the pleasure and credit of pub- 
 lishing what he had brought to light. It is certain that 
 all his unselfishness did not prevent him from feeling a 
 good deal of annoyance and disappointment on these 
 occasions. It may be of some interest to add that this 
 same Book of Deer was produced in the Mar Peerage 
 case before the House of Lords in 1870. The charters in 
 it, "the only Gaelic charters in existence," as Bradshaw 
 calls them, were in some cases witnessed by the " Mar- 
 maor of Mar," and therefore contained the earliest docu- 
 mentary evidence on the question at issue. Bradshaw was 
 called upon to attend at the trial, and related the history 
 of the book, and the way in which it had come into the 
 possession of the university. 
 
 Another discovery made about the same time as that 
 of the Book of Deer, and also contributing new materials 
 for the study of Celtic languages, was that of the Irish 
 glosses and poems in the manuscript of Juvencus, in the 
 University Library. Bradshaw was already acting as a sort 
 of " purveyor " of materials to Mr Whitley Stokes, the well- 
 known Celtic scholar, to whom he at once communicated 
 his find. These Juvencus glosses appear to have been the 
 first of a long series of similar discoveries, by means of 
 which many difficulties of Celtic philology were cleared up, 
 and the distinctions between early Breton, Welsh, and other 
 branches of the Celtic family placed upon a firmer basis. 
 
 It is not surprising that these and other successes 
 attracted considerable attention among antiquaries and 
 bibliographers. In a letter dated December 24, 1859, Mr 
 Winter Jones, of the British Museum, writes to Bradshaw, 
 " Skill, knowledge, and opportunity do wonders, and I have 
 no doubt that you will yet make many interesting dis- 
 coveries." The prophecy was amply fulfilled.
 
 WORK ON TYPOGRAPHY. 73 
 
 Irish literature and antiquities probably- occupied at 
 this time the first place in Bradshaw's mind. Dr Reeves, 
 now Bishop of Down and Connor, writing in April, 1861, 
 to thank him for copies of some documents concerning 
 the district which twenty-five years later was to be his 
 diocese, concludes his letter with the words, " I am glad 
 to be able to regard you as a semi-Hibernian by blood, 
 having long since known of you as Hibernicissimus in 
 sympathies and studies." But he by no means confined 
 himself to Ireland. Other departments of study already 
 engrossed much of his attention, and gradually usurped 
 the first place, though to the end of his life he never 
 ceased to keep the subject of Irish antiquities before him. 
 His range of interests corresponded with that of the books 
 and manuscripts committed to his charge. There are 
 many indications, in his correspondence and elsewhere, that 
 he was pursuing simultaneously several independent lines 
 of research. 
 
 Perhaps the chief of these was early typography, 
 especially that of Caxton and his successors in England. 
 He communicated many of his results to Mr Blades, who 
 was at this time engaged upon the first edition of his " Life 
 of Caxton," and Mr Blades repaid him in the same coin. 
 Bradshaw's correspondence with Mr Blades extends over a 
 period of twenty-five years. The earliest letters I have 
 found are dated 1857, when Bradshaw was only twenty-six 
 years old. He was already deep in the minutiae of Caxton 
 typography. The correspondence was particularly active 
 during the autumn of 1 860 and the spring of 1861. In 
 September of the former year Mr Blades paid a visit to 
 Cambridge, taking with him the first two sheets of his 
 book in type, and the rest in manuscript. It was a fine, 
 warm afternoon, and after dinner they dined earlier in 
 those days than now they went down, as Bradshaw was 
 fond of doing, into the college garden. A bottle of wine
 
 74 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 was ordered out, and there and then, without moving from 
 the place, Mr Blades read the whole of the historical 
 portion of the book to his willing listener, who frequently 
 interposed criticisms and suggestions of the most useful 
 kind. 
 
 For several months after this visit Bradshaw's letters 
 to Mr Blades were very frequent. He was busy with the 
 early printed books in the University Library, and was 
 making fresh discoveries from day to day. His letters are 
 full of new typographical facts, of minute observation and 
 ingenious suggestion, all of which he placed with open- 
 handed generosity at Mr Blades' service. Writing in 
 August, 1860, he says, "I fear a lucid style is what I must 
 cultivate more, but I trust you will be able to unravel what 
 I have written. . . . You must remember that all my 
 inferences are drawn from the incomplete collection in our 
 own library, and therefore are liable to be corrected by the 
 inferences you draw from having such much fuller col- 
 lections to go to. My grand object is to render our col- 
 lection just so complete that a person may be able to see at 
 one glance all the early varieties of our English type." 
 
 It was by no means the case, however, as might be 
 inferred from the above extract, that Bradshaw confined 
 his attention to the University Library. His letters them- 
 selves show that he was already well acquainted with the 
 college libraries in Cambridge, with the British Museum, 
 the Bodleian, and many others. He was not satisfied till 
 he had searched with his own hands and eyes for every- 
 thing that could aid him in classifying and describing the 
 books in the Cambridge collection. He visited many 
 private libraries too. . " Why did you not tell me," he 
 writes to Mr Blades in June, 1861, " of the magnificent copy 
 of the ' Propositio Johannis Russell ' in the library at Hoik- 
 ham ? It is the only Caxton they have, certainly, but then, 
 it was so unexpected and so large, etc., that it quite took my
 
 WORK ON TYPOGRAPHY. 75 
 
 breath away." " I did not mention the Holkham Propo- 
 sitio," replied Mr Blades, " simply because I had never even 
 dreamed of such a treasure being there. It would have 
 ' riled ' the old Earl Spencer dreadfully to have heard that 
 his copy was not unique." This great example of Caxton's 
 press was known at Holkham, the Rev. Alexander Napier 
 has informed me, some time before this, but it was not 
 known to the world at large. Mr Blades congratulated 
 Bradshaw on his "discovery," for such it practically was, 
 as far as Mr Blades himself and Caxtonians in general 
 were concerned. Bradshaw, however, with characteristic 
 modesty, disclaimed any credit. " You may say you are 
 indebted to me for a notice of it, but it is not my discovery, 
 as it is in a modern binding by itself, and was shown to me 
 by the librarian as one of the greatest curiosities at Holk- 
 ham." Shortly afterwards Bradshaw writes, in September, 
 1861, "I had the satisfaction of discovering at the Museum 
 on Thursday, that their unique copy of the first English 
 Psalter (1530 : i6mo) is the copy which was stolen from our 
 library some years ago." 
 
 The first volume of Mr Blades' work on Caxton was 
 published in 1861. Writing to Bradshaw in May, 1861, Mr 
 Blades says, " Your acceptance of the accompanying volume 
 will give me sincere pleasure, and afford me another oppor- 
 tunity of thanking you for the very great assistance you 
 have afforded me in my researches. That assistance has, 
 I believe, been more immediately connected with the 
 bibliographical and typographical aspect of Caxton's art 
 than with the personal history of the printer, and as such 
 I hope freely to acknowledge it in vol. ii. In the mean time, 
 I look forward to your strictures upon the contents of 
 vol. i., and hope to profit by them should a reprint ever be 
 undertaken by me." When the second volume was going 
 through the press, Bradshaw undertook, at Mr Blades' 
 request, to revise the proof-sheets, and actually revised the
 
 76 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 first two or three. " Do not scruple," he writes in Decem- 
 ber, 1861, "to be as importunate as you can. I sometimes 
 need stirring up, but you will, at any rate, see that I have 
 not been idle on your behalf. You must remember that 
 my remarks are only my criticisms freely enough given 
 before printing, that you may have the means of judging for 
 yourself; otherwise I should not have the face to send the 
 proofs back with such a mess of ink on them. If you like 
 me to correct the sheet again, I will do it in no time, as 
 there will then be nothing to investigate." That his 
 criticisms were of great use is clear from Mr Blades' letters. 
 Unfortunately, this assistance was only given for a few of 
 the sheets. Circumstances and habit proved too strong for 
 Bradshaw. " He kept the proofs so long," says Mr Blades, 
 " that I was compelled to go to press without waiting for 
 him, a proceeding in which he quite agreed." No doubt, 
 his habitual dilatoriness was chiefly to blame for this ; but 
 his notions of accuracy and responsibility were such that 
 correcting a sheet cost him nearly as much trouble as 
 writing it. To send back a proof with his imprimatur on 
 it without having verified so far as possible every state- 
 ment in it, was more than he could accustom himself to do. 
 Accordingly, after several failures to get anything more in 
 the way of answer or correction out of him, Mr Blades was 
 obliged for a time to drop the correspondence. 
 
 With all this devotion to learning and research, Brad- 
 shaw never forgot his duties to the college. During his 
 whole life at Cambridge he took an active part and 
 exercised an important influence in college politics, but this 
 influence was perhaps never more important than in the 
 critical period of transition which followed his return from 
 St Columba's. He was elected dean in 1857, and retained 
 the office till 1865. As dean he was necessarily a member 
 of the Educational Council, which, in the interval between 
 the statutes of 1861 and those of 1882, managed the educa-
 
 DECANAL DUTIES. 77 
 
 tional affairs of the college. In 1863 he was appointed 
 praelector, or " father," of the college, in which capacity it 
 was his duty to present candidates for degrees, and gene- 
 rally to superintend the relations of the junior members 
 with the university. He held this office till 1868. There 
 was at this time no tutor at King's. The first of many 
 letters from Dean Blakesley which I have found among 
 Bradshaw's papers begins with the words, " My son informs 
 me that you fill at King's the position which is occupied at 
 other colleges by the tutor." According to a paper in 
 Bradshaw's handwriting, "the duties of a tutor, as they 
 exist at other colleges, are here at King's performed by the 
 following persons : the provost, the vice-provost, the bursar, 
 the praelector, the butler, and the cook." This may have 
 been the formal state of things, but what are generally 
 understood to be tutorial duties were certainly discharged 
 by Bradshaw. He was for a considerable time almost the 
 only link between the authorities of the college and its 
 younger members. A long series of letters shows that he 
 was consulted on all sorts of topics, and that for many 
 years hardly any matter of educational importance was 
 settled in which he did not have a hand. 
 
 His official relations with the undergraduates were very 
 amicable. There were not many rules to be kept, though 
 in some respects discipline was more exacting than it is 
 now. Attendance at chapel both morning and evening 
 was the rule when Bradshaw himself entered the college. 
 By the time when he became dean, one chapel a day was 
 considered sufficient. The fact that the college had till 
 lately consisted of " a provost and seventy scholars," that 
 all came from the same school, and that the youngest 
 resident looked forward with certainty to becoming in three 
 years a Fellow of the college, had at all events one good 
 result. It prevented the formation of a gulf between dons 
 and undergraduates, and produced a community of feeling
 
 ;<s CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 which is still and, it may be hoped, will long remain a 
 distinctive feature of the place. The existence of this 
 feeling made Bradshaw's task less onerous than it would 
 otherwise have been. One who was an undergraduate at 
 the time writes to me as follows : " His duties towards us 
 were mainly confined to the receipt of the formal excuses 
 for absence from morning chapel, which ran thus : 
 ' Matutinis precibus non interfui, vespertinis interfuturus.' 
 He treated us almost, if not quite, as if we were on his own 
 level. In some respects this was successful, as it engendered 
 an unwillingness to do anything that would hurt his feel- 
 ings ; on the other hand, he could not pull us up sharply, on 
 the few occasions that required it, after letting the reins 
 hang loose so long. I remember once his catching a man 
 coming in about 5 a.m. ; the only result was that he shut 
 himself up in his room for two or three days, inaccessible 
 to all. Once only he was downright savage : it was when 
 some one ' unsported ' him [that is, opened his outer door] 
 with a dinner-knife." 
 
 He had already begun to form those lifelong attach- 
 ments to junior members of the community which followed 
 one another in an unbroken series for thirty years. The 
 discussions respecting the new statutes, which became law 
 in 1861, displayed and strengthened his influence with his 
 contemporaries and seniors. The rules under which the 
 college had existed for more than four centuries were at this 
 time undergoing radical changes at the hand of the uni- 
 versity commissioners. The college meetings summoned 
 to discuss these changes were frequent and prolonged, and 
 the private debates were at least equally lengthy. In all that 
 went on Bradshaw took an active part. He was strongly in 
 favour of a liberal policy with regard to scholarships and 
 fellowships. I have been informed by a contemporary that 
 he displayed much courage in asserting his opinions, though 
 by no means always pleasing to the majority, and that his
 
 INFLUENCE IN COLLEGE. 79 
 
 efforts, though he was one of the juniors, produced much 
 effect. The tendency to pay excessive regard to " vested 
 interests," naturally powerful in a collegiate body, was one 
 to which he was all his life opposed. The details of college 
 history are not likely to be interesting to many readers, but 
 one point may be mentioned. It was a difficult question 
 how best to effect the transition from the old system, under 
 which every one who entered King's became a Fellow as a 
 matter of course, to the new scheme, under which the Fellow- 
 ships were to be reduced from seventy to forty-six, and to 
 be obtained by competition. It was held by many members 
 of the college that an injustice would be done to the exist- 
 ing scholars if the competitive system were introduced at 
 once. Bradshaw, if he did not actually originate, had at 
 least the chief share in devising and formulating a com- 
 promise by which the difficulty was satisfactorily overcome. 
 Bradshaw's attitude in these discussions was charac- 
 teristic. In regard to the affairs of the university or of any 
 institution with which he was connected, he was neither 
 optimist nor pessimist, but to use a word which has the 
 sanction of George Eliot a meliorist. He always refused 
 to disbelieve in the possibility of making things better. 
 His reverence for the past and his consideration for others 
 made him averse from needless alterations and from petty 
 tinkering, but he had no instinctive fear or dislike of change. 
 If he saw a possible improvement, and felt convinced that 
 it was for the general good, he would push it without 
 pausing to consider its effect upon his own interests, or 
 even those of his most intimate friends. That this was so 
 on this occasion is proved by his letters to several under- 
 graduate friends whose chances of promotion were gravely 
 endangered by the impending reforms. In these letters he 
 explained quite clearly the effect which would be produced 
 on the position of his correspondents by the changes for 
 which he intended to vote, never fearing for an instant that
 
 80 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 he would forfeit their friendship by voting for what he con- 
 sidered best. But, reformer as he was, he was at once politic 
 and generous. He endeavoured to arouse as few antipathies 
 as possible, and to allow to existing interests their legiti- 
 mate, though not more than their legitimate, weight. A 
 contemporary WTites of his conduct at this time, " I re- 
 member being struck by the way in which he always tried 
 to get at the element of right, however small, which he 
 held must exist in every man's mind, no matter how 
 extortionate his claim. He would say, 'The way so-and- 
 so looks at it is this,' and then, putting himself into the 
 other man's place, do full justice to his views." It was this 
 combination of fairness, unselfishness, and judgment that 
 gave him such weight in the counsels of his college, and, on 
 the few occasions when he interfered in them, in those of 
 the university. 
 
 In June, 1861, the term of Bradshaw's appointment in 
 the library came to an end. The Library Syndicate were 
 naturally anxious to secure a continuance of his services. 
 In their report to the Senate they state that "the work in 
 which Mr Bradshaw has been engaged, under the direction 
 of the Syndicate, has been carried on in a highly satisfactory 
 manner," and " as much work of a similar nature remains to 
 be done, they recommend that Mr Bradshaw be re-engaged 
 for a period of two years, at a salary of one hundred and 
 fifty pounds per annum." The experiment which had been 
 tried in 1859 had proved completely successful, and the 
 merely nominal recognition of his services was now turned 
 into a more respectable though still inadequate compen- 
 sation. 
 
 Nevertheless, he was about this time much in want of 
 money. The emoluments of a Fellowship at King's had not 
 then passed beyond the narrow limit to which they have 
 unfortunately since that time returned. Bradshaw had, as 
 we see from letters already quoted, made great additions
 
 SALE OF IRISH BOOKS. 81 
 
 to his Irish library. Mr Quaritch tells me he bought 
 largely from him during this period. Sometimes his superior 
 knowledge enabled him in these cases to make a good 
 bargain. He once bought from Mr Quaritch for a few 
 shillings a copy of the first edition of the New Testament 
 in Irish printed in Ireland. This transaction gave him 
 much pleasure, and he used to quiz his friend the book- 
 seller about his mistake for twenty years afterwards. In 
 other cases he was undoubtedly extravagant, as when, in 
 1 86 1, he bought one of the only two copies on vellum of 
 Mr Quaritch's reprint of Carve's " Itinerary." He had also 
 large dealings with Mr Boone, Mr Stewart, Mr Ellis, and 
 other " antiquarian " booksellers. With most of these his 
 relations were by no means only those of business ; he was 
 on terms of intimacy and friendship with them, for common 
 interests brought them together. His bibliographical 
 knowledge not unfrequently enabled him to render them 
 services, which they repaid by giving him the first chance 
 of rare books, or in other ways. In later times he used to 
 lament that the old race of booksellers, the men who knew 
 and loved their books, like Mr C. J. Stewart, was all but 
 extinct. But these pleasant acquaintances were, no doubt, 
 conducive to considerable expenditure, and however parsi- 
 moniously he lived in other respects, he clearly bought 
 more books than he could afford. His frequent journeys 
 must also have carried away no small part of his income. 
 
 The result was that he was forced to take a step which 
 was very painful to him at the time, and which he never 
 ceased to regret. Not long before this date he had an- 
 nounced to Dr Todd his intention of handing over his 
 library to a public body. "Your noble proposal," writes 
 Dr Todd in March, 1857, "of ultimately depositing your 
 collection of Irish books in the academy, will, be assured, 
 prove most acceptable, and will cause your name to be 
 honoured here as a benefactor to Ireland." Eventually the 
 
 G
 
 82 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 18^8-63. 
 
 greater part of these books, as we shall see, found another 
 home, but he was now compelled to bring a number of 
 them to the hammer. He at first intended to part with 
 only a few, but eventually he determined, no doubt after 
 a painful struggle, to get rid of a great part of his library. 
 Writing to his brother-in-law, Mr Daniell, on January 9, 
 1862, he says, " K. will have told you what I told her 
 when I last saw her in October, about my determination to 
 get rid of my books, at least a portion of those which I 
 have been weak enough to buy during the past eight years, 
 and I have to-day sent off to Mr Boone the last of twenty 
 large cases containing rather more than two thousand 
 volumes, which will, I hope, be sold at Sotheby's as soon as 
 possible. It is a great wrench, as you will readily believe ; 
 but the incubus has been so great that it is a relief to have 
 sent them off. I have not sent off a stick of what my 
 father left me, but only the best and choicest of those I 
 have bought myself. . . . For the last two years I have 
 been paying and paying, and have never had anything in 
 my purse. . . . My two years and a half at the library 
 without any pay were anything but encouraging, and I 
 almost wonder how I managed ; but now that I have begun 
 to receive my 150 a year from that, I am already feeling 
 lighter. . . . The books cannot well bring less than 200, 
 and they ought to bring much more." They were sold at 
 Sotheby's in July, 1862, "as the property of a gentleman," 
 and realized a nett receipt of 136 a ridiculous price. 
 Carve's " Itinerary " fetched only 5 1 5.?. 5</., and his " Lyra " 
 only 3 5^. ; other rarities went for equally absurd sums. 
 Well might Mr Boone express his astonishment that the 
 University Library should have made no effort to prevent 
 such books from leaving Cambridge. Bradshaw was so dis- 
 gusted with the result of the sale that he formed a reso- 
 lution never again to part with any books by auction, and 
 adhered to it. More than twenty years later, when some
 
 WORK IN THE LIBRARY. 83 
 
 one recommended him to part with some of his treasures, 
 he wrote, "As for realising money, I have had enough of 
 selling books. I never did it but once, and I got just six- 
 pence a volume for every pound that I gave, sometimes less. 
 This was a sufficient dose." 
 
 Soon after the renewal of his appointment at the 
 University Library he was requested by Dr Smith, who was 
 then proposing a scheme for a new Biographia Britannica, 
 to write some lives for the intended work. This was the 
 first, I believe, of several similar proposals made to him 
 from time to time ; but he never did much in this way, and 
 it was perhaps well that he did not attempt it. He was 
 too conscientious in his own work, and too sceptical about 
 the accuracy of others, to publish anything of the truth of 
 which he had not convinced himself by original investiga- 
 tion. The amount of labour which he would therefore 
 have gone through in order to write a short article for a 
 publication of this kind would have been hardly commen- 
 surate with the result. He was, in fact, too busy with his 
 researches in the library, and too much occupied in going 
 over new ground, to be able to spend time. on work of this 
 kind. He contributed much to the catalogue of manuscripts 
 then in progress. Dr Luard, writing to him in October, 
 1861, says, "I am sure if all the assistance you have 
 rendered to me and others in the course of the publication 
 [of the catalogue] were paid for, no share in the amount 
 paid by the Library Syndicate would compare with what 
 you would have earned." 
 
 During the early months of 1862 he was actively 
 engaged on the Oriental manuscripts. He mastered the 
 elements of Sanscrit, Arabic, and other Eastern languages, 
 so far as was necessary for the purpose of cataloguing. He 
 writes to Mr Blades in February, 1862, "Except a few 
 minutes given to you, I have been collating Sanscrit and 
 Arabic books all day. We have just got a large parcel
 
 84 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 from Calcutta, and I am almost tired of the sight of them." 
 Such was the multifarious character of his work. 
 
 In the spring of 1862 Bradshaw made one of the 
 most interesting and important of his many discoveries, 
 that of the long-lost Vaudois manuscripts. These manu- 
 scripts had been brought to England and deposited in 
 the University Library by Samuel Morland, Cromwell's 
 envoy to the Duke of Savoy. The persecution of the 
 Vaudois Protestants will be remembered as having occa- 
 sioned one of Milton's most famous sonnets. Cromwell 
 sent Morland to the duke in the year 1655, in order 
 to induce him to put a stop to the persecution. It is 
 matter of history that the mission failed, but that Cromwell 
 succeeded in extorting from the duke by means of French 
 intervention what he was unable to obtain by a direct 
 appeal. Morland's journey was not, however, altogether 
 fruitless. On his return to England he brought with him 
 a number of books and documents which, at Archbishop 
 Ussher's suggestion, he had collected while in Savoy 
 These records formed the basis of his " History of the 
 Evangelical Churches of the Valleys of Piedmont," and 
 of much that has since been written on the subject. Some 
 of them are in the Ussher collection in the library of 
 Trinity College, Dublin ; but the larger and more valuable 
 portion was, according to Morland's own statement, pre- 
 sented in 1648 " to the Public Library of the famous 
 University of Cambridge," where the books have remained 
 ever since. 
 
 The manuscripts so deposited were marked by the 
 letters of the alphabet from A to W. The first six of them 
 possessed special interest. They contained translations 
 of portions of the Bible, religious treatises, and poems, 
 the earliest remains of the Waldensian language and 
 literature. The manuscripts themselves were said by 
 Morland to date from the thirteenth century ; the originals
 
 DISCOVERY. OF THE VAUDOIS MANUSCRIPTS. 85 
 
 he supposed to be much older. One poem, entitled " La 
 Nobla Leygon," or " The Noble Lesson," contained, accord- 
 ing to Morland, the following couplet : 
 
 " Ben ha mil e cent an compli entierament 
 Que fo scripta lora, car son al derier temp ; " 
 
 that is, " There are already a thousand and one hundred 
 years fully accomplished since it was written thus, for 
 we are in the last time." These lines appeared to fix 
 the date of the original poem at the beginning of the 
 twelfth century. Two other copies of the poem, preserved 
 in manuscript at Dublin and Geneva, gave the same 
 reading. These manuscripts were, indeed, declared by 
 experts to be not earlier than the fifteenth century, but 
 there was no reason why they should not have been 
 copied from twelfth-century originals. The lines in 
 question were the more important, since, according to 
 Mr Algernon Herbert,* "the only date really exhibited 
 in the text and body of any Waldensian document whatso- 
 ever is that in ' The Noble Lesson.' " Other evidence for 
 the high antiquity of these records was entirely external. 
 A great point w_as made of this date by those who 
 wished to show that in the southern valleys of the Alps 
 there existed a Protestantism of the Genevan type four 
 hundred years before Calvin. The whole history of the 
 Vaudois was influenced by this belief, and was brought 
 into confused connection with the Albigensian movement 
 in the south of France. On the other hand, Dr Todd 
 and Mr Algernon Herbert distinguished the Vaudois 
 movement from that of Peter Waldo, which was declared 
 heretical in 1183, and maintained that the " Pauperes de 
 Lugduno," as Waldo's followers called themselves, had 
 little or nothing in common with the Vaudois Protestants, 
 In the discussion of this question the date of " The Noble 
 
 * British Magazine, vols. xviii., xix. : cf. Dr. Todd's "Books of the 
 Vaudois" (1865), p. 93 (note).
 
 86 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 Lesson " was a matter of primary importance. No one 
 suspected that it was incorrect. Those who doubted the 
 antiquity of the poem only sought to show from internal 
 evidence that it could not be so old as was supposed, or 
 attempted to make the line containing the date mean 
 something quite different from its obvious signification. 
 Evidently a great deal depended on the genuineness 
 of the reading in the manuscripts which Morland had 
 brought from Savoy. 
 
 Unfortunately, these precious little books had dis- 
 appeared. It was not even certain, in spite of Morland's 
 assertion, that they had ever been deposited in the Uni- 
 versity Library : at all events, no one knew where they 
 were. Dr Gilly, in his " Waldensian Researches," 1838, 
 speaks of them as having "been removed nobody knows 
 how or where." The catalogue of manuscripts, of which 
 the first volume was published in 1856, described the 
 rest of the Morland collection (Dd. iii. 25-38) as " Walden- 
 sian manuscripts, presented together with other and more 
 ancient but now missing documents," to the University 
 of Cambridge. Various theories were invented to account 
 for their disappearance. Some maintained that these 
 invaluable testimonies to the antiquity of Protestantism 
 had been spirited away by the Romanists in the days 
 of James II. Others believed that the Puritans, fear- 
 ing for their safety after the Restoration, had secretly 
 conveyed them away to some safe hiding-place, where 
 they probably lay forgotten. A third theory, strongly 
 supported by Mr Algernon Herbert, was that they had 
 been destroyed by Morland himself or his confederates, 
 on discovering that they could not pass muster as manu- 
 scripts of the age ascribed to them. "A deep and ugly 
 suspicion," says Mr Herbert, " hangs over all the dealings 
 of these people with the books." Fortunately, all these 
 ingenious hypotheses were superfluous. In the printed
 
 DISCOVERY OF THE VAUDOIS MANUSCRIPTS. 87 
 
 catalogue of 1856 six little volumes (Dd. iii. 29-34) are 
 described, but the authors of the catalogue, following in 
 this respect Nasmith's earlier list, classed them as Spanish. 
 No one thought anything about them ; they were, as a 
 later volume of the catalogue says, " considered to be of no 
 interest or value." Yet these uninteresting little Spanish 
 books turned out to be the missing Vaudois manuscripts. 
 
 Bradshaw, when he came to examine the older 
 catalogues, found that the books were in the library 
 as late as 1689. It was possible that, after all, they might 
 be there still. He set to work to look for them, and 
 he was successful. Whether he was guided in his search 
 by a suspicion that the catalogue was incorrect, or whether 
 he was simply following his usual plan of taking down 
 every volume from the shelves and turning over every 
 page, I do not know. At all events, he found the books. 
 
 " It will be readily believed," he says in March, 1862, 
 in a paper read before the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 
 " that it was with some pleasure and some surprise that 
 I laid my hand upon the whole of these volumes a few 
 weeks ago. In the same binding as the rest of the 
 documents three of them with Morland's and the donors' 
 names and the date on the first page, all six with the 
 reference-letters A, B, C, D, E, F clearly written inside 
 the cover, and all standing on the shelves as near to 
 the ' documents ' [the rest of the collection] as the 
 difference of size would allow the only wonder is how 
 they could ever have been lost sight of." 
 
 His work did not, however, end here. A few minutes' 
 examination of the books disclosed the fact that they 
 were by no means of so early a date as was supposed. 
 In the passage from "The Noble Lesson" already quoted, 
 which was thought to establish the early date beyond 
 dispute, Bradshaw found an erasure before the word "cent," 
 and by the aid of a glass detected the remains of an
 
 88 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 Arabic 4. More than this, in another manuscript of the 
 same collection, hitherto entirely unknown, was a fragment 
 of the same poem, in which the line was written in a 
 slightly different form, thus : 
 
 "Ben ha mil e. cccc. anz compli entierament." 
 
 It was thus placed beyond doubt that the date of the 
 poem was the fifteenth instead of the twelfth century. 
 A similar fate befel another manuscript, supposed to 
 have been written in 1230, which Bradshaw showed 
 to contain an allusion to Wyclif, and to be not earlier 
 than the beginning of the fifteenth century. Under these 
 blows the foundation, on which the supposed antiquity 
 of Waldensian Calvinism had so largely rested, crumbled 
 away. The philological importance of the change of 
 date need hardly be pointed out.* 
 
 These discoveries naturally provoked some resentment 
 on the part of supporters of the theories which they 
 overthrew, and doubts were thrown on Bradshaw's con- 
 clusions. But the best authorities accepted them. Dr 
 Maitland, the well-known author of "The Dark Ages," 
 in a very characteristic letter to Bradshaw, dated March 
 1 8, 1862, says, "The matter is most wonderful, and 
 most particularly interesting to me, and not the least 
 wonderful part of the business is that the librarian should 
 not, by some accident, have fallen in with the volumes. 
 You will suppose naturally that I have a fellow-feeling 
 for librarians, and I really write without ever knowing 
 who might be to blame, or assuming any right to judge 
 them ; but really, as between themselves, fellow-feeling 
 is quite used up in forbearance, and charity almost choked 
 with holding its tongue. ... I hope you have told my 
 
 * The above account is partly taken from the paper read by Bradshaw 
 before the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, on March 10, 1862, and printed 
 in its Communications, vol. ii. p. 203, partly from Dr Todd's " Books of the 
 Vaudois>" 1865, and elsewhere.
 
 5. 1?. CROTCH. 89 
 
 old friend Dr Todd. If not too late, may I take the 
 liberty to suggest that it should be communicated to 
 him with great care and consideration, lest it should 
 throw him into fits ? But, seriously, I hope you will make 
 known the discovery to the public, or at least to such 
 part of the public as can be brought to care about historic 
 truth." A year latter, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, in 
 thanking Bradshaw for sending him a copy of the paper 
 which he read before the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 
 says, " The discovery is an important one. . . . The date 
 of the ' Nobla Ley9on ' seems to be fixed, on unquestion- 
 able evidence, to a year subsequent to 1400 A.D." 
 
 During the early summer of 1862 Bradshaw spent some 
 time at Oxford, and worked hard in the Bodleian. He 
 writes from Christchurch to an undergraduate friend, 
 "Oxford is extremely pleasant just now. . . . This is the 
 first time I have seen anything like full term here ; though 
 you will say that working in the Bodleian from nine till 
 four is not the way to see much of Oxford life." The 
 greater part of the Long Vacation he spent in a long ramble 
 on the Continent with his friend S. R. Crotch of St John's. 
 Crotch was an enthusiastic naturalist, and possessed 
 perhaps the finest collection of Coleoptera in the kingdom, 
 a collection which he had for the most part made himself, 
 not only in this country, but in Spain, Madeira, and else- 
 where. He was in many respects a very original and strik- 
 ing character, with a great turn for philosophy and abstract 
 speculation, but at the same time a strong grasp of facts 
 and details however minute. His eyesight and observation 
 were so acute, and his memory for nomenclature so retentive, 
 that I have seen him name and describe without hesitation 
 a great number of insects placed at random in a box, and 
 at a distance at which ordinary eyes could hardly distin- 
 guish any characteristics at all. This kind of power had 
 great attraction for Bradshaw, who himself possessed the
 
 go CAMBRIDGE 'LIFE. 1858-63. 
 
 same qualities, except that of long sight, to a remarkable 
 extent. Crotch was eccentric in his habits, utterly careless 
 of conventionalities, affectionate, and lavishly generous. 
 His only accomplishment, in the ordinary sense of the 
 term, was that of being a remarkable gymnast. He was 
 a great friend of the late Professor Clifford, and they used 
 to practise gymnastics together. In 1866 he received a 
 temporary appointment in the University Library, and in 
 October, 1867, when a second assistant librarianship was 
 created, he obtained the post. He resigned in 1871, and 
 some time afterwards went to America in company with 
 Professor Clifford. He travelled widely in the United 
 States for some time, hunting beetles in California and else- 
 where, with an ardour and recklessness which ruined his 
 health. On one of his expeditions he exposed himself to 
 such privations that he fell into a consumption, and died 
 on June 16, 1874. 
 
 The enthusiasm and thoroughness which Crotch dis- 
 played in his scientific pursuits first filled Bradshaw with 
 that respect for natural science, its votaries, and its 
 methods which he cherished to the end of his life. He told 
 more than one of his friends that he learnt from Crotch's 
 way of dealing with his insects much that was useful to him 
 in his own bibliographical and typographical studies, and 
 that under his influence he assimilated his own methods 
 more closely to those of natural science. 
 
 With this friend he travelled over a great part of 
 Europe in the summer of 1862. He passed through 
 Germany into Austria, doing a good deal of work in the 
 libraries of Vienna and Prague. Thence he went on to 
 Denmark and Sweden. He was abroad for two months, 
 but one of his anti-epistolary fits was on him ; at all events, 
 the only letter from him during this period which I have 
 been able to discover is one written to Mr Blades from 
 Lund, in Sweden, from which I give some extracts.
 
 A LONG VACATION RAMBLE, 91 
 
 " Being in Sweden, I wish immensely I could afford to 
 go on to ' Stockholm and Upsala,' and see the second copy 
 of the ' Laurentius de Saona,' but I cannot do it now. 
 However, I hope to be again in Sweden before very long. 
 I have never been anywhere except the country parts of 
 France before this summer, and I have not had once more 
 than a fortnight's holiday from Cambridge since I went up 
 to reside there in the spring of 1856, so that it was getting 
 absolutely necessary for me to have a run somewhere. So 
 I have been through Leipzig and Dresden to Prague and 
 Vienna. Here [at Vienna] I amused myself for nearly a 
 fortnight. It is the most delightful place I ever was in, but 
 for me the library is a particularly inconvenient one to use, 
 as they will not on any account allow you access to .the 
 catalogues, which for my purposes renders the place next to 
 useless. However, I saw the Caxtons, as far as they knew 
 they had any. . . . They are all in the condition w r hich I 
 most dislike, or very nearly all patched copies in gorgeous 
 bindings. From Vienna I came back to Prague; from that to 
 Berlin, where, however, I did not see the library ; and thence 
 to Hamburg, where I had a great treat. The library is most 
 conveniently arranged, and the early printed books are all 
 put in order of place and date. No English or Bruges 
 books, however, appear to be there. From that we came on 
 to Copenhagen, and, having been there for nearly a week, 
 we finally settled here. ... I like the royal library at 
 Copenhagen immensely ; there too everything is nationally 
 arranged, and they allow you free use of the catalogues. 
 I shall go there again when I return, but, as far as I could 
 learn, they have but one Caxton there, the ' Mirror of the 
 World.' I am learning Swedish like anything here. No 
 one here, except a few of the students, who are now away, 
 speaks anything but his own language, though, as might 
 be expected, English is commonly taught as a part of 
 education. This, however, is literary English, and, as every
 
 92 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 one knows, you may be able to read a language freely, and 
 yet not have a word to say when a person talks to you. 
 The intense nationality of these northern countries is 
 astonishing. Except the mild form of it which tries to 
 exist in Ireland, I have never met with anything of the 
 kind. Their libraries are all arranged on the same prin- 
 ciple, Swedish and non-Swedish, Danish and non -Danish. 
 It is very convenient, of course, in many respects." 
 
 In the above letter, Bradshaw speaks of learning 
 Swedish. When he and his friend arrived at Lund, they 
 could neither of them speak a word of that language, and 
 they had not the advantage of knowing German. The 
 first thing they did was to buy a dictionary and a grammar 
 and several newspapers. With these they shut themselves 
 up at the hotel, and worked hard for a day and a half, at 
 the end of which Bradshaw was able to make himself 
 tolerably well understood. He afterwards took lessons in 
 Swedish, and learnt enough to be able to read it for his 
 own purposes. 
 
 In the early part of 1863, Bradshaw, who abstained 
 from public discussions in general, took some part in a 
 controversy about the authenticity of the Codex Sinaiticu, 
 which made considerable stir in the learned world at that 
 time. This precious document, now generally recognized 
 as the most ancient manuscript of the Bible, was discovered 
 by Dr Tischendorf in 1859, in the monastery of St Catha- 
 rine on Mount Sinai. The controversy about it, now well- 
 nigh forgotten, is sufficiently amusing to make it worth 
 while to recall its more important passages. One Simo- 
 nides, a Graculus esuriens, who had some time before been 
 convicted by Dr Tischendorf of endeavouring to palm off 
 forged manuscripts, gave out, apparently in order to revenge 
 himself, that the Codex Sinaiticus was itself a forgery. He 
 declared that he had written it with his own hands when a 
 young man. This " whimsical story," as Dr Hort calls it
 
 THE CODEX SINAITICUS. 93 
 
 obtained a certain amount of credence. During the autumn 
 of 1862 and the early part of 1863 a correspondence was 
 carried on in the Guardian on the subject. In the 
 number of that paper for September 3, 1862, is a long letter 
 from Simonides, purporting to give an account of how he 
 came to write the manuscript and how it passed into the 
 possession of the monks of Sinai. " Any person learned in 
 palaeography," he remarks, " ought to be able to tell at once 
 that it is a manuscript of the present age," and he con- 
 cludes, with an amusing air of injured innocence, "You 
 must permit me to express my sincere regret that, whilst 
 the many valuable remains of antiquity in my possession 
 are frequently attributed to my own hands, the one poor 
 work of my youth is set down by a gentleman who enjoys 
 a great reputation for learning, as the earliest copy of the 
 Sacred Scriptures." The story of Simonides was ingenious 
 and full of circumstantial details, but it contained state- 
 ments which, when carefully examined, carried with them 
 their own refutation. Its absurdities were exposed by Mr 
 Aldis Wright, in a letter published in the Guardian for 
 November 5, 1862. A month later, a letter appeared in 
 the Guardian, purporting to be written by one Kallinikos 
 Hieromonachos, who wrote in defence of Simonides. His 
 letter was in Greek, and a translation was appended by the 
 editor, who made no concealment of his suspicions. " I 
 have read," says the unknown writer, " what the wise Greek 
 Simonides has published respecting the pseudo-Sinaitic 
 Codex by means of your excellent weekly publication, and 
 I too myself declare to all men by this letter that the 
 Codex . . . which was abstracted by Dr Tischendorf from 
 the Greek monastery of Mount Sinai, is a work of the hands 
 of the unwearied Simonides himself, inasmuch as I myself 
 saw him in 1840, in the month of February, writing it in 
 Athos." In the next number Simonides writes to back up 
 his friend. " I must inform you," he says, " that the above-
 
 94 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 mentioned Kallinikos is a perfectly upright and honourable 
 man, well known for truth and probity, so that his simplest 
 word may be relied on." 
 
 Mr Aldis Wright had little difficulty in disposing of 
 his advocacy, and involving Simonides in a tissue of 
 inconsistencies and improbabilities. " What does the 
 evidence amount to ? " he asks. " Kallinikos says, ' Simonides 
 wrote the Codex, for I saw him.' 'Believe Kallinikos,' 
 says Simonides, 'for he saw me write it.' We know 
 Simonides, but who is Kallinikos ? " Unfortunately, no 
 proof of his existence, much less of his probity, was 
 forthcoming. " His story," says Mr Haddan, in a letter 
 to Bradshaw, " reminds me of an Irish lad from Connemara, 
 who sent his regards to a man who had been fishing 
 there, with the said lad to help, and begged him to 
 tell the Londoners 'any number or weight of fish he 
 liked,' as having been caught by him, and he would 
 be ready and delighted to swear to it." The British 
 chaplain at Alexandria knew nothing of Kallinikos, " the 
 Greek monk who takes in the Guardian and the Literary 
 Churchman" In vain did Simonides attempt to strengthen 
 his case by publishing several more letters from Kallinikos. 
 Strange to say, one correspondent of the Guardian, at 
 least, appears to have thought that a repetition of un- 
 supported assertions constituted a proof, but the majority 
 were less easily convinced. Mr Haddan urged Bradshaw 
 to interfere. In a letter dated November 19, 1862, he says, 
 "You could really do a service to truth if you would 
 put upon paper the results of your examination of the 
 Codex, and let it be published, with or without your 
 name. . . . The question is really important, and you could 
 throw light upon it." To this Bradshaw replied that 
 he thought the time was not yet ripe for discussing the 
 palaeographical part of the question. 
 
 However, Simonides returned to the charge, and in a
 
 THE CODEX SIN A incus. 95 
 
 long letter to the Guardian (January 21, 1863) stated, 
 among other facts tending to prove his capacity for writing 
 the Codex, that he had written a letter in uncial characters 
 to Mr Bradshaw a few months before, when he was staying 
 at Cambridge during the meeting of the British Association. 
 This produced the following letter from Bradshaw, pub- 
 lished in the Guardian for January 28, 1863 : 
 
 " SIR, 
 
 "As Dr Simonides has cited a letter which 
 he wrote to me in uncial characters in October last, while 
 he was at Cambridge, and as I have with my own eyes 
 seen and examined the Codex Sinaiticus within the last 
 few months, perhaps you will allow me to say a few 
 words. 
 
 "The note which I)r Simonides wrote to me was 
 to convince me and my friends that it was quite possible 
 for him to have written the volume in question, and to 
 confirm his assertion that the uncial character of the 
 manuscript was as familiar and easy to him to write 
 as the common cursive hand of the present day. 
 
 " He had invited some of us to Christ's College to 
 examine his papyri and to discuss matters fairly. He 
 could speak and understand English pretty well, but 
 his friend was with him to interpret and explain. They 
 first taxed us with believing in the antiquity of manuscripts 
 solely on the authority of one man like Tischendorf, and 
 they really seemed to believe that all people in the 
 West were as ignorant of Greek as the Greeks are of 
 Latin. But the great question was, ' How do you satisfy 
 yourselves of the genuineness of any manuscript ? ' I 
 first replied that it was really difficult to define ; that 
 it seemed to be more a kind of instinct than anything 
 else. Dr Simonides and his friend readily caught at 
 this as too much like vague assertion, and they naturally
 
 g6 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 ridiculed any such idea. But I further said that I had 
 lived for six years past in the constant, almost daily, 
 habit of examining manuscripts not merely the text 
 of the works contained in the volumes, but the volumes 
 themselves as such ; the writing, the paper or parchment, 
 the arrangement or numbering of the sheets, the dis- 
 tinction between the original volume and any additional 
 matter by later hands, etc. ; and that, with experience 
 of this kind, though it might be difficult to assign the 
 special ground of my confidence, yet I hardly ever found 
 myself deceived even by a very well-executed facsimile. 
 All this Dr Simonides allowed and confirmed. He 
 gave the instance of the Jews in the East, who could 
 in an instant tell the exact proportion of foreign matter 
 in a bottle of otto of roses, where the most careful chemical 
 analysis might fail to detect the same. Indeed, any 
 tradesman acquires the same sort of experience with 
 regard to the quality of the particular goods which are 
 daily passing through his hands ; and this is all that 
 I claimed for myself. Dr Simonides afterwards told 
 me himself that this was the only safe method of judging, 
 that there was no gainsaying such evidence, and that 
 he only fought against persons who made strong and 
 vague assertions without either proof or experience. Yet 
 when I told him that I had seen the Codex Sinaiticus, 
 he spoke as if bound in honour not to allow in this 
 case the value of that very criterion which he had before 
 confessed to be the surest ; and he wrote me the letter 
 to which he refers, in the hope of convincing me. I 
 told him as politely as I could that I was not to be 
 convinced against the evidence of my senses. 
 
 "On the 1 8th of July last I was at Leipzig with a 
 friend, and we called on Professor Tischendorf. Though 
 I had no introduction but my occupation at Cambridge, 
 nothing could exceed his kindness ; we were with him
 
 THE CODEX SINAITICUS. 97 
 
 for more than two hours, and I had the satisfaction of 
 examining the manuscript after my own fashion. I had 
 been anxious to know whether it was written in even 
 continuous quaternions throughout, like the Codex Bezai, 
 or in a series of fasciculi each ending with a quire of 
 varying size, as the Codex Alexandrinus, and I found 
 the latter to be the case. This, by-the-by, is of itself 
 sufficient to prove that it cannot be the volume which 
 Dr Simonides speaks of having written at Mount Athos. 
 
 " Now, it must be remembered that Dr Simonides 
 always maintained two points first, that the Mount Athos 
 Bible written in 1840 for the Emperor of Russia was 
 not meant to deceive any one, but was only a beautiful 
 specimen of writing in the old style, in the character 
 used by the writer in his letter to me ; secondly, that 
 it was Professor Tischendorf's ignorance and inexperience 
 which rendered him so easily deceived where no decep- 
 tion was intended. For the second assertion, no words 
 of mine are needed to accredit an editor of such long 
 standing as Professor Tischendorf. For the first, though 
 a carefully made facsimile of a few leaves inserted among 
 several genuine ones might for a time deceive even a 
 well-practised eye, yet it is utterly impossible that a 
 book merely written in the antique style, and without 
 any intent to deceive, should mislead a person of moderate 
 experience. For myself, I have no hesitation in saying 
 that I am as absolutely certain of the genuineness and 
 antiquity of the Codex Sinaiticus as I am of my own 
 existence. Indeed, I cannot hear of any one who has 
 seen the book who thinks otherwise. Let any one go 
 to St Petersburg and satisfy himself. Let Dr Simonides 
 go there and examine it. He can never have seen it 
 himself, or I am sure that, with his knowledge of manu- 
 scripts, he would be the first to agree with me. The 
 Mount Athos Bible must be a totally different book ; 
 
 H
 
 98 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 and I only regret, for the sake of himself and his many 
 friends in England, that he has been led on, from knowing 
 that his opponents here have seen no more of the original 
 book than he has himself, to make such rash and con- 
 tradictory assertions, that sober people are almost driven 
 to think that the Greek is playing with our matter-of-fact 
 habits of mind, and that, as soon as he has tired out 
 his opponents, he will come forward and ask his admirers 
 for a testimonial to his cleverness. 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW. 
 
 "Cambridge, January 26, 1863." 
 
 It will be observed that Bradshaw had his own reasons 
 for concluding that Simonides had not written the Codex 
 which was in Dr Tischendorfs possession. No one else, 
 apparently, had as yet called attention to the peculiar 
 construction of the book itself. But he confines himself 
 carefully to the particular point at issue. He does not 
 trouble himself about the truth of the story told by 
 Simonides ; he only declares that, assuming Simonides 
 to have written such a book as he pretends, this book 
 cannot be identical with the Codex Sinaiticus. This, 
 after all, was the only question of real importance. 
 
 The controversy was continued for some time longer, 
 but no fresh facts concerning the manuscript were eluci- 
 dated, though several were published of a character 
 damaging to Simonides. It eventually appeared that 
 there was such a person as Kallinikos Hieromonachos, and 
 that he lived in the monastery on Mount Sinai. But when 
 requested to state whether he had written the letters 
 which Simonides attributed to him, he at once replied 
 that he had never written the letters, and that Simonides 
 had never been at the monastery. Simonides rejoined 
 that his friend was Kallinikos of Athos, and that he had 
 nothing to do with Kallinikos of Sinai. Some time later
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH MR BLADES. 99 
 
 he produced another letter from his Kallinikos, dated 
 from Rhodes, which simply reiterated the previous state- 
 ments. In the same number of the Guardian (November 
 11, 1863) in which this letter appeared, there appeared 
 also a series of answers obtained by Mr Aldis Wright, 
 through the medium of the British Consul at Salonica, 
 from the Archimandrite Dionysius of the monastery of 
 Xeropotami, on Mount Athos. These answers proved 
 that Simonides in his original story had told a pack of 
 lies. Benedict, whom he called his uncle and declared 
 to have been the head of the convent, never held that 
 position, and was not in any way related to him. Simonides 
 himself had been twice at the convent, but on the last 
 occasion so annoyed the monks with his random talk 
 and disorderly behaviour that they sent him about his 
 business. These damaging disclosures were soon after- 
 wards confirmed, and other things equally discreditable 
 brought to light, by Amphilochus, Bishop of Pelusium. 
 With this the matter closed, and Simonides, who died 
 hard and to the very end was supported by a few dupes 
 of his ingenious mendacity, finally disappeared from view. 
 
 In the spring of 1863 Bradshaw's correspondence 
 with Mr Blades entered on another phase of activity. 
 Early in that year the second volume of Mr Blades' " Life 
 of Caxton " appeared. On March 9 he sent Bradshaw 
 one of the early copies, and wrote, " I feel that I owe 
 you very much indeed, and only regret that distance 
 prevented my having the assistance of your critical 
 eye while every sheet was passing through the press. 
 Please make a note of the errors which you are sure 
 to discover, and allow me, when next I have the pleasure 
 of a chat with you, to benefit by them." Bradshaw readily 
 acceded to this request. On April 13 he writes, "I was 
 passing through London the other day, and went into 
 the Museum to look after some stolen goods [i.e. books
 
 ioo CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 which had once belonged to the Public Library at 
 Cambridge*], and I took the opportunity of looking 
 at one or two other things ; " and then he scribbles off 
 a letter of five closely packed sheets, full of minute de- 
 scriptions and observations. On April 16 Mr Blades writes, 
 " Your first lot of criticism has afforded me plenty of mental 
 food. I value it very much, and almost agree in every 
 deduction. . . . Upon my return I found your second 
 remittance, which I must digest before answering." After 
 going through his criticism in detail, he concludes, ' And 
 now for a time adieu, and believe me that no review 
 in the Athenaum or Saturday will give me half the 
 inward satisfaction that I feel when you tell me that 
 my book has enabled or assisted you to write such 
 a body of sound critical notes as now lies before me." 
 In answer to this letter, Bradshaw writes, "Do not be 
 grieved or disappointed about any mistakes. It is only, 
 as I said before, by having such a book before me 
 constantly, and working from that to the particular copies, 
 that any mistakes can be got rid of. You have done 
 far more than all the others put together have succeeded 
 in doing." And again, " The fact is that it is only by 
 having your book constantly before me that I am able 
 to work out any of the many things which are now 
 becoming daily clearer to me. Every day shows the 
 untold advantage of free access to a really large collection 
 [i.e. that of the University Library] of entirely undoctored 
 books at any rate, books which have not been doctored 
 or bound for one hundred and fifty years. Of course, 
 the collections in the Museum and at Althorp are fuller ; 
 but there is hardly a volume in either which is perfectly 
 trustworthy evidence in matters of collation, many having 
 been made perfect from other copies, and most having 
 been bound so tightly and washed so clean that it is 
 
 * Cf. above, p. 75.
 
 THE LOST BREVIARY. 101 
 
 difficult to use them." In March, 1864, he writes to M. 
 Holtrop, " Could you see my copy of Mr Blades' book, 
 you would find every article almost crowded with additions 
 and corrections ; and I always tell Mr Blades that there 
 is no such good evidence of the value of his book." 
 
 Several quotations from his letters have already shown 
 that he took a peculiar interest in hunting up books 
 which had once belonged to the University Library, but 
 had disappeared, being lost, stolen, or merely forgotten 
 by the custodians and those who had taken them out. 
 The number of valuable books which were unaccountably 
 missing was very large. Of the three hundred and thirty 
 books mentioned in the catalogue of 1473, Bradshaw was 
 able to find in the library in 1862 only nineteen. This 
 year (1863) he discovered one of his lost treasures in 
 a somewhat remarkable manner. It was a book of great 
 value, a Sarum Breviary, on vellum, in one volume, printed 
 at Venice in 1483. The Cambridge copy was the only 
 one known. This book disappeared from the University 
 Library towards the close of the last century. About 
 the year 1825, the National Library at Paris bought 
 from a Mr Macarthy a Sarum Breviary of 1483. This 
 book Bradshaw believed to be the lost Cambridge copy. 
 In May, 1863, Mr George Williams happened to be 
 visiting Paris, and Bradshaw asked him to look at the 
 book and see if it answered to the description of the 
 lost volume, or possessed the class-mark of the University 
 Library on the first page. Mr Williams wrote back, " I 
 was at the Imperial Library yesterday, and saw the Sarum 
 Breviary. ... It is a lovely book, quite perfect, in two 
 volumes, bound in French binding of about the beginning 
 of last century. No trace of an erasure on the first page, 
 which is blank, the quire being quite perfect." The book, 
 therefore, he concluded, could not be the Cambridge 
 copy.
 
 io2 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 Bradshaw, however, was not so easily satisfied. He 
 armed himself with a magnifying-glass, noted the class- 
 mark of the lost book on a slip of paper, and set out 
 for Paris. When the book was brought to him, he first 
 examined the outside, as was his custom, and his knowledge 
 of bindings told him it was not an early eighteenth-century 
 binding, but a modern imitation. Then he looked at 
 the beginnings and ends of the volumes. " This book 
 was originally in one volume," he said, " for the beginning 
 of the first volume and the end of the second are soiled 
 and show the impress of the original boards, but the 
 end of the first volume and the beginning of the second 
 are clean." Then, knowing that the ink used for marking 
 the books in the University Library in the last century 
 was of a peculiar kind, which could not be wholly got 
 rid of without destroying the paper, he looked at the 
 first page with his glass, and found a mark which looked 
 like what he was searching for. Handing the book and 
 the glass to the assistant, he asked him whether he could 
 see the faint remains of a class-mark there. " Yes," said 
 the assistant, " I can." " Is this it ? " said Bradshaw, 
 taking the slip of paper out of his pocket. And, sure 
 enough, the Cambridge mark appeared dimly on the page. 
 Mr Alexander Macmillan met him immediately on his 
 return, and heard the story from his own lips. He told 
 it, rubbing his hands with glee, almost as well pleased 
 by finding out what had become of the book as if he 
 had brought it back in his pocket. In his note-book 
 is the entry, referring to this book, " Sarum Breviary, 
 Venice, 1483. Leaf 2a has C. 14. remaining of our 
 mark. . . . Early in the sixteenth century some one 
 has written on the last page of text 
 
 ' VJE tibi qui rapida librum furabere palma, 
 Nam videt antitonans cuncta futura deus.' 
 
 So much for Dr Combe's conscience."
 
 WORK IN THE LIBRARY. 103 
 
 In the summer of 1863 the term of Bradshaw's re- 
 appointment in 1861 was coming to an end. The Library 
 Syndicate invited him to make a statement of the work 
 done during the four preceding years, and thereupon made 
 a report to the Senate, which, as an official account of his 
 labonrs, may be quoted verbatim. The Syndicate says 
 
 " That since Mr Bradshaw's appointment by the Senate 
 in 1 86 1, he has been chiefly occupied with the manuscripts 
 and early printed books, of which the university possesses 
 a large and valuable collection, the extent of which has 
 heretofore been very imperfectly known. 
 
 "The manuscript department, especially the valuable 
 collection of Oriental manuscripts collected by Burckhardt 
 in the East, which was reduced to a state of great disorder 
 in the process of their removal from the old library ' to 
 the new buildings, has been carefully rearranged by 
 Mr Bradshaw, so as to be rendered easily accessible to 
 any one who wishes to consult it Many volumes have 
 been rebound, and very many more have been subjected 
 to a thorough and systematic bibliographical collation, 
 which has led to the discovery of some curious and valuable 
 literary treasures, the existence of which was before 
 unknown. The same may be said of the early printed 
 books, among which Mr. Bradshaw has found many of 
 very great historical and bibliographical interest, as well 
 as of considerable intrinsic value. 
 
 " All the manuscripts are now brought together, of which 
 a large number have remained uncatalogued since the 
 beginning of the last century. All the late Professor 
 Dobree's books have been brought up into the manuscript 
 class and catalogue ; as also those with the manuscript 
 notes of various scholars bought at Hermann's sale, which 
 form an entire class of books in themselves, and are 
 catalogued under the head of Adversaria. A variety of 
 miscellaneous matter, discovered in different parts of the
 
 iO4 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1858-63. 
 
 library, has been brought together, arranged, bound, and 
 catalogued. 
 
 " The collection of the ' old library ' books, temporarily 
 arranged on the upper shelves of the west and north 
 rooms, has been brought into a much more satisfactory 
 state ; and as it was found that a large number of choice 
 and rare books had been lost from the general library, 
 in times past, the remaining specimens of early English 
 literature have been selected from the other books, and 
 placed under safer custody. 
 
 " Much, however, still remains to be done, as the process 
 of collation, to be thorough and complete, must necessarily 
 be slow and tedious ; and the crowded condition of the 
 library has hitherto prevented any attempt being made 
 to reclass the manuscripts, or to form a regular collection 
 of the Incunabula and literary curiosities of the University 
 Library ; both which objects, it is hoped, may be carried 
 out in the proposed new buildings. 
 
 " We cannot pass over unnoticed the very important 
 assistance which Mr Bradshaw has offered, not only to 
 members of the university, but also to strangers from 
 a distance, who wish to make use of the manuscripts 
 or of the older part of the library of printed books for 
 literary purposes. We believe that the presence in the 
 library of an officer deeply versed in so important a 
 department of bibliography, not commonly studied, reflects 
 credit on the university. 
 
 "As we should feel it to be a serious misfortune that 
 the University Library should be deprived of the advantage 
 of Mr Bradshaw's knowledge and experience, we re- 
 commend that his services be engaged for a further term 
 of five years, and that his salary be increased to ,200 per 
 annum." 
 
 The grace giving effect to the above recommendation 
 was passed on June 4, 1863. The Syndicate had proposed
 
 WORK IN THE LIBRARY. 105 
 
 as high a stipend as it was in their power to suggest, 
 for the librarian at that time only received two hundred 
 guineas a year. Bradshaw's position could now be re- 
 garded as established. He had no formal status or title, 
 and a letter which I shall presently quote shows that 
 he felt the want of this, though he was the last person 
 in the world to regard it as a grievance. But he had 
 made himself indispensable to the library, he had estab- 
 lished his reputation in the learned world, and he might 
 fairly expect that whatever his profession had to offer 
 would one day be within his reach.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 IN the year 1863 Bradshaw began to fill the long series 
 of note-books which contain a record of his researches 
 from that time down to within a few days of his death. 
 There are thirty-two of these books, uniform in shape 
 and size, not too large to go into one of his capacious 
 breast-pockets. He never went anywhere without one, and 
 in them he wrote down, without any order or arrangement, 
 whatever he thought worth noting. To most persons this 
 mass of disjecta membra would be a hopeless labyrinth, 
 but Bradshaw himself never seemed to find the least 
 difficulty in referring to anything he wanted. His memory 
 was so tenacious that he never forgot the place and date 
 at which anything had occurred. All he had to do, there- 
 fore, was to turn to the note-book for such and such a year 
 or month, and he found it at once. 
 
 The contents of these note-books are for the most part 
 records of facts and observations only : collections of 
 books and manuscripts ; lists of documents or service- 
 books ; notes on public libraries or private collections, on 
 Dutch, Flemish, and other presses, on the order of the 
 " Canterbury Tales " or Chaucer's rhyme-endings, on cathe- 
 dral statutes or college history on everything, in fact, which 
 came in his way. Now and then, but very seldom, he 
 wrote down his conclusions or inferences, if made at the 
 moment ; but generally he was too busy at the time to do 
 anything but note what was before him. His deductions 
 were worked out afterwards on large sheets of ruled fools-
 
 NOTE-BOOKS. 107 
 
 cap, the note-books supplying the materials, with infinite 
 expenditure of ink and manual labour, for writing things 
 out over and over again was the only way, he used to say, 
 to get them clear. One is astonished at the apparent 
 want of connection, at the multifarious nature of these 
 researches simultaneously carried on. His mind was 
 busy on so many subjects at once that he seldom looked 
 for any particular thing without finding half a dozen other 
 matters of interest, each of which was noted down, to 
 form, perhaps years afterwards, a link in a long chain of 
 argument. Here and there he would jot down something 
 personal, some record of his own doings and impressions, 
 if it were of special interest to him. Thus, in the middle 
 of his bibliographical or typographical notes, the most 
 unexpected entries occur, showing how little of a Dryas- 
 dust he was, how in the thick of his intellectual labours his 
 heart remained as active as his head. Here it is a pedigree 
 of some friends for he was never content without knowing 
 all about his friends crammed in between the collation of 
 a breviary and the Tibetan alphabet ; there, some charac- 
 teristic remark by an acquaintance, preceded by a list of 
 Caxton's presses, and followed by a bill at the Panier d'Or 
 at Bruges. Sometimes, again, one comes on scraps of 
 conversation, carried on with a foreigner who could read 
 English, but could not understand the spoken word ; or with 
 his old friend Mr Boone, the bookseller, who bought for 
 him at many important sales, but was so deaf that con- 
 versation with him in a crowded room was inconvenient. 
 The note-books are thus not only a treasure-house of 
 information, but they are also to some extent a journal of 
 his life, and contain not a few illustrations of his character. 
 The renewal of Bradshaw's appointment in the library 
 made no difference in his manner of life. That he was 
 happy in his work, the following extract from a letter to 
 a friend, dated November 7, 1863, will show: "I really
 
 io8 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 must disagree with you entirely in your theory that work 
 that is paid for must be uncongenial. I grant that in very 
 many cases the work which, by circumstances, a man is 
 doomed to spend his life upon and make his bread of, is 
 not such as he would have chosen if his inclinations and 
 tastes had been exclusively .consulted. But for myself, I 
 have earned money by very uncongenial work before now, 
 and at present the university pays me liberally for that 
 which is of all others the thing which gives me greatest 
 pleasure." His duty to the college kept him at Cambridge 
 this winter. He had generally spent Christmas with his 
 mother or his sister, Mrs Daniell, whose house was a second 
 home to him. But he was now senior dean, and felt bound 
 to remain at his post. He writes to his sister on December 
 23, 1863, "Dearest K., I wish so much I could come and 
 spend my Christmas with you, but I cannot manage it 
 this time. It is generally such an utterly dreary place at 
 this time of year, but I have persuaded the Provost to have 
 service in the chapel on these days about Christmas and 
 the New Year, and the children at the Lodge have been 
 hard at work for a week past, with any help they can get 
 in college, at some decorations for the chapel. There has 
 never been anything of the kind before, and it is the only 
 place in Cambridge where there has been nothing, so on all 
 accounts I am willing to try and make the place a little 
 more reasonable. It is, of course, an experiment, but it will 
 be a great satisfaction to have tried, even if it fails in the 
 end." The experiment was a success, and, though the 
 decorations have been discontinued, the chapel services 
 have been kept up ever since. 
 
 It was about this time that he began to be well known 
 to students of English literature for his acquaintance with 
 Chaucer, though as yet he had written nothing on the sub- 
 ject. Mr Alexander Macmillan, one of Bradshaw's oldest 
 friends, asked him in January, 1864, to join Mr Earle and
 
 CHAUCER WORK, ETC. 109 
 
 Mr Aldis Wright in editing a library edition of Chaucer's 
 works. This project was unfortunately never carried out. 
 Bradshaw had it in his mind, in one form or another, for 
 fifteen years, and made large preparations, but time and 
 opportunity seemed always wanting. It is clear, however, 
 that about this time Chaucer engaged much of his attention. 
 His correspondence with Dr Furnivall had already begun, 
 before they had made acquaintance in person. Dr Fur- 
 nivall preserves a clear recollection of his appearance the 
 first time he saw him. He was at work in his rooms, in a 
 very airy summer dress, wearing only a grey flannel shirt 
 and trousers, with nothing at all on his feet. In this garb 
 which at the time was habitual with him he received 
 his visitor and gave him the heartiest welcome, and a 
 friendship was at once formed which lasted for more than 
 twenty years. 
 
 In February, 1864, the office of librarian became vacant 
 through the resignation of Dr Power, afterwards Master of 
 Pembroke. Bradshaw was pressed by several friends to 
 stand for the post, but declined. The Rev. J. E. B. Mayor, 
 now professor of latin, was elected without opposition. 
 It may be mentioned that an important addition was 
 made to the staff of the library about the same time by 
 the appointment of an under-librarian, at a stipend of one 
 hundred and fifty pounds a year, in the place of the princi- 
 pal assistant. This change, it may be remembered, or 
 something very like it, had been advocated by Bradshaw 
 when he became principal assistant eight years before. 
 
 In the autumn of 1863, and subsequently, Bradshaw con- 
 tributed several short articles to a publication entitled Le 
 Bibliopliile, edited by M. J. P. Berjeau, in which he was 
 interested.* Among these notes is one on Bunyan's 
 " Pilgrim's Progress," and its possible connection with the 
 
 * These two papers are not signed, hut letters from M. Berjeau shew them 
 to be Bradshaw's.
 
 no CAMBRIDGE L/F, 1863-67. 
 
 " Pelerinage " of Guillaume de Deguilleville. He says, 
 "There is a book called 'The Pilgrim,' 'which is supposed 
 to be an English translation of the ' Pilgrimage of Man,' 
 printed by Pynson, in quarto, of which the only known 
 copy is in the library of Queen's College, Oxford." He 
 then proceeds to describe the few existing copies of the 
 " Pelerinage," two of which he says " are modern versions of 
 the story, made in the time of Charles I, and transcribed 
 between 1630 and 1660." He concludes by pointing out 
 that Bunyan might have seen and read these copies a 
 point which he thinks ought to be examined by future 
 editors of his works. His contributions to the Bibliophile 
 were by no means only literary. In January, 1864, 
 M. Berjeau writes to thank him for a donation of ten 
 pounds. But the magazine seems to have been in diffi- 
 culties from the first, and although a year later the editor 
 again acknowledged "the sacrifices which Mr Bradshaw 
 had made for this unfortunate publication," it soon after- 
 wards expired. 
 
 At Easter, 1864, Bradshaw paid the first of many visits 
 to Belgium. His studies in the early history of printing in 
 England had naturally led him on to the study of early print- 
 ing elsewhere, and especially in Flanders. Above all he 
 was drawn to Bruges, where, under the tuition of Colard 
 Mansion, Caxton learnt his art. M. Holtrop, the librarian 
 of the Hague, had published a year before his great 
 collection of facsimiles, the " Monuments Typographiques." 
 This book gave Bradshaw the keenest pleasure. He 
 bought two copies, one of which he kept intact ; the other 
 he cut to pieces, rearranging the plates according to a 
 system of his own. In November, 1863, he wrote to Mr 
 G. I. F. Tupper : " I have been revelling for the last fort- 
 night in Holtrop's ' Monuments Typographiques du Pays- 
 Bas ' lithographic facsimiles of all the Dutch and Belgian 
 fifteenth-century printers." In January, 1864, he began
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH M. HOLTROP. 1 1 1 
 
 a correspondence with M. Holtrop, which only came to an 
 end with the latter's death in 1870. It was continued with 
 M. Holtrop's brother-in-law and successor, M. Campbell. 
 Like most of the correspondence with Mr Blades, these 
 letters are generally too technical for quotation in a memoir 
 of this kind, but I cannot help giving some passages. 
 
 In his first letter to M. Holtrop, dated January, 1864, 
 Bradshaw says, " Your catalogue of the Royal Library 
 [published in 1856] has been with me a constant book of 
 reference ever since it came out, and your ' Monuments 
 Typographiques ' have given me more pleasure and 
 information than anything of the kind for a long time, 
 but I am most anxious to see it completed." Two months 
 later he writes, " Your letter did reach me, and most 
 welcome it was ; for real bibliographers are very scarce in 
 this country, and the study of Incunabula is never carried 
 out in a satisfactory way." Then follows a closely written 
 letter of four sheets, giving a full list of the types (with 
 examples) used by Gerard Leeu, who printed at Gouda 
 and Antwerp in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. 
 This list was to serve as a specimen of the system of 
 classification which he wished to see generally adopted. 
 The list of types is followed by a descriptive catalogue of 
 all the books printed by Leeu of which specimens existed 
 in the University Library. Nothing could show the eager 
 helpfulness of the man better than a letter of this 
 kind. All this information is given without a thought of 
 self, merely in the cause of science and to help another 
 student in whom he recognized a fellow-worker of the 
 right stamp. The value of the help given may be judged 
 from the fact that eight of the ten Gerard Leeus in the 
 University Library were not in the catalogue of the Royal 
 Library at the Hague, and five of them were wholly unde- 
 scribed. Letters of this kind abound in the correspondence 
 with M. Holtrop.
 
 ii2 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 On the other side, M. Holtrop was equally ready 
 with his pen, and there ensued a mutual interchange 
 of good offices between these two enthusiasts which is 
 charming to witness. In his second letter Bradshaw had 
 said, " I only wish you could write down a list of Veldener's 
 types with references to the books, as I have attempted 
 to do for Gerard Leeu." Accordingly M. Holtrop, after 
 sending him, on March 10, 1864, a list of books by Leeu 
 at the Hague, arranged after Bradshaw's system, writes 
 on March 12, " Mon cher monsieur, Pour faire la liste 
 des differents types de G. Leeu, j'avais du me transporter 
 dans la salle ou se trouvent nos incunables. Apres 1'avoir 
 fini et lorsque j'avais eu le plaisir de vous 1'envoyer, je me 
 disais : Te voila en train ; pourquoi pas profiter de 1'oc- 
 casion et essayer de faire une liste des types de Veldener, 
 qui ferait plaisir a Mr Bradshaw?" And then follows 
 a list of the Hague books by Veldener, who printed at 
 Louvain, Utrecht, and Culembourg between 1473 and 1484, 
 drawn out as fully as Bradshaw could have desired. He 
 answers on March 21, "Your extremely interesting letters 
 really make me .quite ashamed when I think of the 
 immense amount of trouble it has entailed upon you 
 to make out these valuable tables. My only consolation 
 is that they are themselves of such really great value 
 in the elucidation of the history and work of your own 
 printers. What I feel very strongly is that unless you 
 and your colleague, Mr Campbell, do this, no one for 
 a long time will be able to do it." 
 
 Under these circumstances, it is easy to imagine with 
 what delight he went to Flanders at Easter, 1864, and 
 saw for the first time the cities where the early printers 
 had lived and worked. He travelled with two friends, 
 F. T. Cobbold and J. A. Willis, junior Fellows of his own 
 college. They visited Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges. At 
 the latter place they put up at a humble inn opposite
 
 FIRST VISIT TO FLANDERS. 113 
 
 the belfry, the Panier d'Or, which was from that time 
 forward his favourite resort whenever he visited Bruges. 
 On this occasion he wished to see a particular book at 
 the library. The librarian was very polite, but declared 
 that the book had been removed by the French at the 
 beginning of the century. Bradshaw insisted that it 
 must be there, but the librarian stuck to his assertion. 
 Thereupon Bradshaw blurted out the letter, shelf, and 
 number under which the book would be found and there 
 it was. He had no note of this on paper ; the class-mark 
 was in his memory, along with all other particulars about 
 the book. From Bruges they went on to Ghent, and 
 thence returned home. It was but a short tour, but 
 Bradshaw acquired an affection for these ancient cities, 
 more especially for Bruges, which led to several other 
 and lengthier visits. 
 
 In the midst of these bibliographical studies, which 
 to so many persons seem incompatible with the existence 
 of any human affections, it is not unpleasant to turn to 
 a correspondence which shows another side of Bradshaw's 
 character. He had shortly before this time made the 
 acquaintance of an undergraduate of St John's, who relates 
 the beginning of their friendship as follows : " My earliest 
 recollection of Henry Bradshaw is of an active, bright- 
 looking man, hurrying along in a college cap, but without 
 a gown, through the catalogue-room of the University 
 Library. Though he was evidently in haste over some 
 papers which he was carrying tenderly in his left hand, 
 he looked so pleasantly good-natured that I dared to 
 ask him the whereabouts of a shelf from which I wanted 
 a book. He stopped at once and directed me, and when, 
 a short time after, I was still searching for a book suitable 
 to my purpose, I heard a voice behind me inquiring, 
 ' Still looking for a good little book for our good little 
 Sunday school boys ? ' And there he was, smiling 
 
 I
 
 ii4 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 quizzically at my embarrassment. He put me at my 
 ease, however, directly, and pointed out one of Dr Neale's 
 little volumes of stories of Christian Heroines which he 
 liked. We had a talk about Neale's liturgical work. That 
 I took an interest in a special study of his own seemed 
 to draw us together. I often found myself wandering 
 into the library with no definite purpose beyond that 
 of seeing ' Mr Bradshaw,' and having a chat with him. 
 Sometimes I sought him out in one of the little rooms 
 where Miss Shields was copying the Vaudois manuscripts 
 for him ; sometimes he would come hurrying past as 
 I stood at a shelf, snap his fingers to call my attention, 
 and hold out his hand behind, as if inviting me to follow 
 him, but without pausing a moment to let me overtake 
 him. So it came about that I often saw him, until at 
 last it became one of my daily necessities. . . . The two 
 years in which I got to know him so well had their special 
 seasons, and one was the Long of 1864. What a time 
 of happiness that was ! Those little dinners in his rooms 
 for he seldom went into hall then those strolls in the 
 Fellows' garden, where we watched as well as heard 
 the nightingales ; those readings aloud of Dickens by 
 him, for I always listened. Then he would very often 
 walk with me through the backs to my rooms, see me 
 get to work, and either stay and read, or more generally 
 go home to his own labours." 
 
 Soon afterwards his young friend was a candidate 
 for the Mathematical Tripos. The result was a grievous 
 disappointment to him. I will let him tell in his words 
 what Bradshaw's sympathy was worth at the time. " We 
 walked together to the Senate-house on that cold January 
 morning, when the list was to be published ; we listened 
 for, but did not hear my name among the Wranglers, 
 caught a copy of the lists as they were scattered from 
 the gallery, and went away. Neither of us spoke. He
 
 UNDERGRADUATE FRIENDS. 115 
 
 took my arm and led me to my rooms. . . . He did 
 not leave me for days. He sent off the telegrams that 
 I had promised ; helped me with my letters, or wrote 
 them himself; insisted on my living in his rooms, except 
 merely to sleep ; and, as soon as he could arrange to 
 get away, took me off to Paris. A trip to Paris would 
 do him good, was his way of putting it. We stayed in 
 Paris a week. He knew the place well, and gave himself 
 up to amusing me, showing me everything that was 
 to be seen. He greatly enjoyed my astonishment at a 
 scene in the Church of La Madeleine. Passing one day, 
 we saw the exterior hung with black, and, hearing the 
 organ, we entered. In the centre of the church, before 
 the high altar, was a grand catafalque, with hundreds 
 of wax tapers burning round the coffin. A very large 
 congregation was present, and a requiem was being sung. 
 In the middle of it all, the Suisse, in gorgeous black, 
 came down and opened a passage among the worshippers, 
 through which a bride and bridegroom with their party 
 passed to a side altar. The wedding took place, mass 
 was said, the bridal party left the church, and all the 
 while the funeral music never ceased. Bradshaw remarked, 
 as we left the church, ' Nothing reminds you so much 
 as a sight like this, that you are in a Roman Catholic 
 country.' " 
 
 From Paris Bradshaw took his friend to Bournemouth, 
 to stay a few days with his mother and youngest sister 
 at their house, Fernside, where they all combined, he 
 says, to " spoil " him. No better solace for a mind diseased 
 could well be imagined. " When our holiday ended, we 
 lived on the same life in correspondence. For weeks we 
 wrote to each other nearly every day." Some quotations 
 from Bradshaw's letters to this friend will illustrate his life 
 at this time. " Dearest Charlie," he writes, on February 28, 
 1865, in the middle of a college meeting, " I am desperatel
 
 ii6 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 afraid of writing you too many letters. I must, however, 
 
 send you a letter which came from this morning. It 
 
 did my heart good, to see how thoroughly you are 
 appreciated wherever you go. ... Oh, these people ! they 
 are discussing daily service ; they do make me so sick." 
 Next day he cut his right hand so badly as to be unable 
 to use it, but he wrote a long letter with his left. " I hope 
 you have not got two letters from me any day. I have 
 been at considerable pains to avoid it, and, I fear, without 
 success. However, in a week or so, no doubt, I shall have 
 sobered down, and shall find it difficult to write one letter 
 in three weeks. . . . Enter here a letter from the Master 
 of Caius [Dr Guest], to say that Dr Tischendorf (do you 
 know the name ?) is coming here on Saturday, and will I 
 come and meet him at dinner on Monday ? Will I not 
 indeed ? " 
 
 On March 4, his friend's birthday, he writes, " You will 
 begin to revive again to-day, I trust, and never allow your- 
 self more than five minutes in any one day for the luxury 
 of dumpishness, in which your last letter shows that you 
 are indulging to "too great an extent. Bodily presence 
 is absolutely needed for one to sit upon a person, or I 
 should sit upon you now effectually, which I cannot 
 possibly do by letter." On March 9 he says, "Tischendorf 
 was in here a good part of yesterday, and we had a good 
 deal of talk about the books. He looks much younger 
 than you would think from the amount of work he has 
 gone through. He and I had a long discussion yesterday 
 as to the possible former contents of the Codex Sinaiticus, 
 where we differ slightly, on arguments derived from the 
 actual construction of the volume ; but I shall have to 
 put my views on paper, for it is rather difficult struggling 
 through a mixture of several languages. . . . As soon as 
 I have to write you a letter that is, to stop and think 
 what to write, instead of talking with my fingers as I do
 
 WORK FOR OTHERS. i r 7 
 
 at present I shall leave off altogether, so you know what 
 you must expect in a week or less, perhaps." A little 
 later, " This is the only night no one has been in to 
 tea, and now (9.20) I suppose no one is likely to come 
 in. All the afternoon and evening I have been very 
 busy looking over court-rolls from Henry VI to James I, 
 in search of some particular entries about some rights 
 to timber which the college is supposed to have at Ruislip, 
 in Middlesex, and it is dreary work, though there is to 
 me a certain satisfaction always in getting a minute 
 acquaintance with any kind of legal documents with which 
 I was unacquainted before." 
 
 On March 21, "'Dr Lightfoot on the Galatians' is to 
 be out to-day. Will you let me send you a copy ? Say ,no 
 if you had rather not, but the fact is, I have been looking 
 forward for months to getting the book, and on my break- 
 fast-table on Sunday morning there it was, with his kind 
 regards. I could not believe my eyes, but there it is, and 
 all Sunday I feasted on it. ... Altogether it is a beautiful 
 book, and my expectations are more than realized. I am 
 thick in correspondence with Furnivall just now about his 
 Early English Text Society. He writes (letters) with the 
 most perfect fluency, and gets through an immense amount 
 of work besides ( I wish I could). Last night I sent him 
 four closely written sheets, and where it requires some 
 thought, as in this case, such letters take it out of one 
 considerably.* . . . This talk has done me good and quite 
 revived me, so I shall be able to go to my meeting at the 
 Lodge with a much lighter heart." 
 
 Here is a sketch of a day's work, all for others (March 
 30, 1865). " I have been literally overwhelmed with writing 
 work, whether for Shirley or Haddan.f Thanks to an 
 
 * This letter is, unfortunately, not to be found. 
 
 t The Rev. W. W. Shirley, D.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History at 
 Oxford, and editor of Fasciculi Zizaniorum, Royal Letters, etc., died in 1866. 
 The Rev. A. W. Haddan, B.D., of Trinity College, Oxford, co-editor (with 
 Dr Stubbs) of the " Ecclesiastical Councils, etc.," died in 1873.
 
 n8 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 excellent device, I got all Haddan's Gildas sent off last 
 night, but it was six hours' work. I got C. to come 
 from ten to eleven, then P. from eleven to twelve, then 
 Miss Shields came into the library most opportunely and 
 read till half-past one ; and then, after a mouthful of bread 
 and butter, P. came again, and we finished the work 
 and the revision just by four o'clock. So that is off my 
 mind. Then for Shirley, I have done about half the fair 
 copy for him, and have sent back all his papers done with, 
 and written him a long letter besides, in which I have given 
 him a bit of my mind ; so I am curious to see what he says. 
 Furnivall has gone to the wall for the present, but I must 
 work him off finally before I leave." And after all this, it 
 is a joy and a relaxation to him to sit down and write a 
 letter of eight sides to his friend. Here is a specimen of 
 an evening in his rooms (April i). " C. is here thirsting 
 for tea, so I oughtn't to be sitting silent, talking to you ; 
 but M. was here from hall till half-past seven, and P. 
 and H. were here till eight, and then D. was here discussing 
 his prospects till nine, and C. came in at nine, and it is now 
 half-past, so tea ought to be pouring out." There was 
 nothing unusual in this, and what was habitual in 1865 
 was equally habitual ten years or twenty years later. 
 
 The allusions to Dr Shirley in the letters quoted above 
 are explained by a copious correspondence with the pro- 
 fessor in which Bradshaw was engaged about this time. 
 How long he had been acquainted with Dr Shirley I do 
 not know, but when the correspondence before me begins, 
 in January, 1865, he evidently knew him well. Dr Shirley 
 was at that time engaged on Wyclif, of whose works he was 
 preparing a catalogue with a view to an edition, which un- 
 fortunately he never lived to carry out. He frequently 
 consulted Bradshaw on bibliographical points connected 
 with the manuscripts of Wyclifs works. Writing to him 
 on January 10, 1865, Bradshaw says, "It strikes me very
 
 WORK ON WYCLIF, ETC. 119 
 
 forcibly what an immense boon it would be if you would 
 take Wyclif's greater works and print them first. I don't 
 throw this out as a new idea to you, for it is what you have 
 always impressed upon me ; but I fear it is impossible to 
 move the university to so great an undertaking. Only the 
 more one labours at the subject, the more palpable the 
 waste of time and labour appears to be, when you know 
 that it would be so infinitely easier to edit the minor works 
 (indeed, so impossible to edit them properly otherwise), if 
 you had the ' Summa Theologiae' and the 'De Sermonibus 
 Domini in Monte/ etc., in print for some time so as to work 
 the subject up." After giving an account of one or two 
 manuscripts, he continues, " I have exhausted Trinity 
 Library by taking every single volume in order from the 
 shelves and examining them all. It is the only way to find 
 anonymous treatises. The ' De Sermone Domini in Monte ' 
 in Trinity Library is a very curious book. ... I wish, in 
 your catalogue, you could treat the ' Summa Theologiae ' with 
 its preliminary treatise, ' De Dominio divino,' as one work. 
 It is most distressing to think how few of the treatises of the 
 Summa are to be found in England or rather, have been 
 found in England, for I doubt not there are many more 
 than we know of." 
 
 In a letter a few days later there is a characteristic bit 
 of scolding, what he would himself have called a "viper," 
 but it illustrates also one of the main principles of his work 
 the conviction that you must know the history of a manu- 
 script if any sound results are to be got out of it : "I wish 
 you would stir up either your press delegates or the 
 Bodleian people not to send out catalogues of manuscripts 
 in such an extremely unpleasant manner. There is a 
 catalogue of Syriac manuscripts just out without one single 
 word to say where the collections come from. Oxford 
 men perhaps know by instinct, but a very few lines would 
 have been sufficient to say when and where the collections
 
 120 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 were made, and how they came to the Bodleian. ... I am 
 afraid, though, that you will say, like every one else, it is 
 not in your department." 
 
 The correspondence was interrupted for a short time by 
 the visit to Paris and Bournemouth already mentioned, but 
 was renewed on Bradshaw's return to Cambridge. It is 
 mainly concerned with the arrangement and relations of 
 Wyclifs works, but the points discussed, though of interest 
 to students of Wyclif, are too minute for general readers. 
 In his anxiety to help Dr Shirley, Bradshaw contemplated 
 a visit to Vienna and Prague at Easter, 1865, in order to 
 examine the Wyclif manuscripts preserved at those places, 
 but he did not carry out the project. Meanwhile he was 
 working hard for Mr Haddan. On March 30, 1865, he 
 writes to Dr Shirley, " I have been very much pressed 
 with some other work which I promised Mr Haddan, the 
 full collation of our manuscript of Gildas for the new 
 Oxford edition of Wilkins' ' Concilia,' and this I have got 
 finished to-day, thank goodness. I am sure you have very 
 little notion of the actual amount of time which is required 
 to draw up such a list of sermons as I sent you before. 
 All bibliographical work is very dry and very tedious ; and 
 I never yet met a literary man who could in the very least 
 appreciate the difficulties. Literary men find such work 
 an infinite nuisance when they have to do it themselves, 
 while everything but first-class work of the kind is aggra- 
 vating to the last degree. Take any one of the lists of Wyclif, 
 for instance, and the descriptions are perfectly sure to fail 
 you exactly where you want help. If it is a sermon, and 
 you want the incipit, you are sure to find only the incipit 
 of the text given, whereas you have two or three sermons 
 on the same text. If it is a treatise, you find the end 
 given secula seculorum, or some such merely formal end- 
 ing, which conveys no identifying quality at all. . . . As 
 for the arrangement of Wyclifs different Summae, it has
 
 WORK ON WYCLIF, ETC. 121 
 
 always struck me that it would be as well to look at the 
 arrangements of the similar works of his contemporaries 
 and predecessors in common, however different the mode 
 of treatment might be." 
 
 On the eve of his departure for his Easter holiday abroad, 
 he sent to Dr Shirley an account of the Wyclif manuscript 
 in Trinity College Library (B. 16. 2). "I leave this in an 
 hour or two," he writes ; " I am thoroughly tired out and 
 glad to get a holiday." On his return, the correspondence 
 was renewed. Dr Shirley submitted to him drafts of his 
 list of Wyclifs works.* In May he was at Lincoln, and 
 sent Dr Shirley the results of his explorations in the 
 chapter library there. " I am afraid," he says on May 29, 
 " that many of the choicest things have disappeared from 
 the library since Tanner's time, and I cannot find any 
 traces of Dan John Gaytrege or the ' Mandatum ' of Arch- 
 bishop Thoresby, though I have taken every single manu- 
 script off the shelves in order, one after another, so that I 
 must have come upon it if it had been there ; but this is 
 only my first day, and I have spent eight hours very 
 pleasantly at work there. The library is full of things 
 curious and interesting to me, and with the good-will of 
 the librarian [the Rev. G. F. Apthorp] and the dean's key, 
 I can work just as long as ever I please, which is an im- 
 mense comfort." 
 
 The result of all this work and of the abundant proofs 
 of knowledge which he had given was naturally that Dr 
 Shirley begged him to aid in the edition of Wyclifs works. 
 Writing to Dr Shirley on June 14, 1865, he says, "You 
 say, will I undertake the Postils f instead of the Corpus 
 tracts ; but the utmost I ever undertook was to copy or 
 get copied the volume at Corpus. J It never entered my 
 
 * " A Catalogue of the Original Works of John Wiclif." Oxford : 1865. 
 Bradshaw's description of the Trinity manuscript is printed in the preface. 
 
 t Commentaries on, or short expositions of, passages of Scripture. 
 
 t Probably No. ccxcvi. in Nasmith's catalogue, described as a fourteenth- 
 century manuscript containing thirty treatises by Wyclif.
 
 122 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 head to edit them. If you are not going to do, or rather 
 would prefer not to do the Postils, so as to set you free to 
 do some other equally pressing works, and you know of no 
 one else to do them, I will undertake them and do my best 
 to carry them through ; but remember that I have never 
 edited anything before, and you may not like to trust 
 such things to a new hand. I must begin editing soon, 
 there is no doubt, and there are plenty of things which I 
 can find to do. I only want you to understand that you 
 are not bound to ask me to do the work if you find at 
 Oxford men (as there must be some) able and willing to 
 do the work ; all I ask is that you should act freely in the 
 matter, and speak your mind plainly, and I for my part 
 will give you any help I can, and that you think worth 
 having." 
 
 But other work intervened ; Chaucer proved too 
 attractive, and Wyclif was indefinitely deferred. On 
 January 9, 1866, he writes from Glasgow to Dr Shirley, 
 " I am afraid I am a very hopeless subject to manage. . . . 
 It is very wrong of me never to have written to thank you 
 for the catalogues which I found on my return home in the 
 autumn. I am hard at work at something of the same 
 kind for Chaucer ; only it is so fearfully complicated, 
 and the copies are so very much scattered about the 
 country." This did not look much like going on with 
 Wyclif, and Dr Shirley wrote on January i r, "What I 
 meant by asking what you were doing about Wyclif is 
 this. You talked of editing his English Homilies. Are 
 you doing anything at them ? Are you likely to be able 
 to work at them soon ? " He went on to say that he had 
 just had "the offer of valuable assistance towards editing 
 the English works," and wanted to hear from Bradshaw 
 in order to know what he would be free to propose to his 
 friend. " If you can do the work," he says in a later letter, 
 " nothing so good ; but I do not wish to miss a real chance,
 
 JOURNEY TO ITALY. 123 
 
 and then to find I cannot get you either." Unfortunately, 
 Bradshaw felt himself unable to make a definite promise, 
 and wrote on February 2, 1866, to resign his share in the 
 undertaking. " By all means get your nameless friend," he 
 says, " to do all he will do for you, and do not for one second 
 think that I can be annoyed at your doing so. I am more 
 than pleased to find that you have found some one whom 
 you can rely upon to do the work well. I did not under- 
 take the proposed work eagerly, but rather because you were 
 unable to find any one ; and my province is much rather to 
 give help on certain details which most people don't care 
 about, than to undertake the editing of large works, which 
 require a kind of research which is rather out of my beat" 
 So ends the episode. On November 20, 1866, as Bradshaw 
 notes in his diary, Dr Shirley died. I have carried on the 
 account of their correspondence thus far, in order to avoid 
 interruption, but must now return. 
 
 In January, 1865, he was made an ordinary member 
 of the Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft (German 
 Oriental Society). What caused this honour to be con- 
 ferred upon him I do not know, but his knowledge of 
 Oriental manuscripts, as of manuscripts in general, was very 
 great, and he had had much to do with the cataloguing of 
 the Oriental manuscripts in the University Library. It is 
 possible that in giving information or assistance to some 
 German scholars, he may have displayed knowledge which 
 proved him to be worthy of admission into the society in 
 question. 
 
 The Easter Vacation of 1865 was spent in a journey to 
 Italy with F. W. Cornish and E. C. Austen Leigh, two of 
 the younger Fellows of his college, in the course of which 
 they visited Genoa, Milan, and Venice. His letters home 
 do not often contain anything remarkable, but they show, 
 what no one who was fortunate enough to travel with him 
 could fail to see, that travelling gave him intense and
 
 124 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 unfeigned pleasure. His observant eyes and receptive 
 mind took everything in. His simple but genuine sense of 
 beauty was delighted with Milan Cathedral and St Mark's, 
 with the glow of Titian and Veronese in Venetian galleries, 
 with the distant snows of Monte Rosa, glistening against 
 the blue, or the wave-like outline of the Euganean Hills 
 traced on a background of purple sunset ; while his 
 memory, stored with literature and history, threw the 
 glamour of association over every haunt of fame or 
 romance. He was not critical ; he saw, but did not pause 
 to compare. It was the open-eyed enjoyment of a child 
 combined with the intelligent observation of a well-read 
 man. 
 
 While at Milan, he of course visited the Ambrosian 
 Library. In a letter to Mr Yeld, he relates his first 
 meeting with M. Ceriani, one of the librarians. " He is 
 quite a young man, and full of life and vigour, and so 
 pleasant. I had no difficulty in talking Italian to him to 
 any extent, and in understanding him. I saw the famous 
 Plautus, of the fourth century or earlier, and some of the 
 Irish manuscripts from the old convent at Bobbio, books 
 I had long wanted to see. What pleased me so immensely 
 was that, whatever books I asked for, he called a man and 
 sent him after them, telling the man the number and where 
 to find them, just as I should do at Cambridge, never 
 having to look in a catalogue to see where they were, 
 or whether they had them or not. I wouldn't have missed 
 him for anything." To his sister he writes that M. Ceriani 
 displayed " an intelligence I rarely find in large libraries." 
 
 Venice was still Austrian in 1865, little guessing that 
 in another year it was to form part of Italy. Bradshaw 
 and his friends stayed there more than a week, and his 
 letters brim over with enjoyment. He found out at once, 
 what many travellers never find out at all, that it was 
 possible to walk all over Venice, and he preferred this
 
 JOURNEY TO ITALY. 125 
 
 mode of wandering. On Good Friday, when they had 
 been there two or three days, he writes, " We have not 
 been doing much since we came here, for it takes some time 
 always to domesticate in a strange place, and this, too, such 
 a very strange place ; but we have been basking in the 
 freshness of everything without making much effort to do 
 a large number of things. . . . Yesterday evening [Maundy 
 Thursday] we went to a service at St Mark's, and it was 
 with some difficulty we made out what the service was. 
 Cornish has an ' Officium Septimanae Sacrae,' but we were 
 long puzzled, until I noticed that after every one thing a 
 candle on the great stand was put out, and by that means 
 was able to calculate that it must be a certain psalm in 
 Mattins for Good Friday, said over-night ; and on turning 
 to that part of the office, sure enough there they were. I 
 must try and make out the services, for if there is one thing 
 more uncomfortable to me than another, it is going to a 
 church and being obliged to stand like a dissenter in King's 
 Chapel, wondering and not knowing in the least what is 
 going on." 
 
 He visited the Scuola di San Rocco, which he liked "as 
 one of the few places in which you can see a large mass 
 of one man's work. It requires much more drilling than 
 I have ever enjoyed to be able to profit by a miscellaneous 
 collection of pictures. It is a part of a gentleman's edu- 
 cation which ought not to be neglected, but it is waste of 
 time trying to pick up scraps of ignorant enjoyment from 
 stray pictures. To my mind it is just like taking up a 
 volume of selections from different national poets, and 
 reading pieces for the beauty of the sound of the verse, 
 without having learnt the language." 
 
 " Easter Tuesday. As it is a strict holiday to-day, I 
 have been amusing myself in St Mark's Library, in the 
 Ducal Palace. Not that the books are accessible to 
 readers, but from a librarian's point of view I have not by
 
 126 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 any means wasted my time, as it is worth something to 
 me to have mastered the arrangement of the place and the 
 general method of the library ; and besides this, the cases 
 are all protected by very open wirework, and the books 
 are almost all clearly lettered, so that one can see to a 
 great extent what books they have. . . . You can't think 
 how delightful it is travelling with Cornish and Edward 
 Leigh ; they are so utterly different from each other, and 
 none of us, fortunately, are gifted with a disposition to 
 sulk, so I think we all enjoy ourselves thoroughly. Leigh is, 
 fortunately, most punctual and business-like ; Cornish is, 
 also fortunately, entirely the reverse ; so between the two 
 we manage perfectly. You know what I am." 
 
 Next day he paid a visit to the Armenian Convent. 
 " I wouldn't have missed going there for anything. . . . 
 The young man who took us round told me they had but 
 one Greek manuscript in the place, a copy of the Gospels, 
 which I was naturally curious to see ; but he said only the 
 librarian had the key. My stupid thought of not boring 
 Leigh would probably have prevented my asking to see 
 the librarian, but Leigh boldly asked him if it would give 
 him very much trouble to fetch the librarian, and off he 
 went at once. When he came I was delighted, for he is 
 a real librarian, and full of his work and his subject ; and 
 it ended by our staying nearly an hour and a half at the 
 convent, and I got a great deal of information out of 
 him. ... I satisfied myself about some things for Light- 
 foot. . . . Altogether my visit there was most interesting 
 and most profitable. I bought a few little books, among 
 them a grammar and an English translation of the 
 Armenian liturgy. I have long wanted to know some- 
 thing of Armenian, so I shall begin at once with this 
 opportunity. We have very few Armenian manuscripts 
 at Cambridge, but I do hate having books under my 
 charge which I am not able even to read so as to see
 
 LINCOLN AND BURGHLEY HOUSE. 127 
 
 what they are. The alphabet is, however, the very worst I 
 have ever had to deal with far worse than Russian or 
 Sanscrit. ... I hope to get something done to-day, both 
 at the Greek establishments and at the library in the 
 Ducal Palace. Fancy a library to which Petrarch left all 
 his books, going on still, containing books written and 
 annotated by his own hand and Boccaccio's, not merely 
 as great curiosities, but part of the staple of the library. 
 It is all things of that sort that make one feel the utter 
 difference between Italy and every other country in the 
 world. The succession of literary life is so extraordinary." 
 
 Once back at Cambridge, the almost daily correspon- 
 dence with his friend Yeld ceased, but occasional letters 
 give us glimpses of his life. " Last week," he says, writing 
 on May 10, 1865, "I did nothing but entertain canons. 
 Philip Freeman was here from Exeter. . . . Then Walter 
 Shirley came from Christchurch ; and on Saturday I had 
 Dr Pusey all to myself for dinner and tea. I must stop ; 
 Dr Bosworth wants me." On May 23, " I shall try and 
 do my best to write to you periodically at short intervals, 
 if I can. You must not, however, be too sanguine. You 
 know a little of my power of silence." In May, 1865, he 
 went to Lincoln, as I have already said, to do some work 
 for his friend Dr Shirley, timing his visit so as to coincide 
 with the ordination of one of his friends. 
 
 From Lincoln he writes to his mother (June 4, 1865): 
 " I had promised Walter Shirley (at Oxford) to send him 
 some information out of the Lincoln library before the 
 end of May, and I saw no way of doing it satisfactorily 
 except by doing it myself; and I had long wanted to see 
 the cathedral library here, as well as the minster itself. . . . 
 I have been living perfectly in clover, having the full 
 benefit of the minster service, and full liberty to work in 
 the chapter library from morning till night ; and I have 
 used my time well, for I have had eight hours a day on an 
 average, and have been well repaid."
 
 128 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 From Lincoln he went to Stamford to see Burghley 
 House. A journey always had the effect of loosening his 
 pen. He writes to Mr Yeld on June 13 "Burghley House 
 is indeed worth a pilgrimage. ... I spent about four hours 
 there yesterday, and have been there from six to seven 
 hours to-day again. I thought it probable that, as Lord 
 Exeter came from the eldest son of the Lord Treasurer 
 Burghley in Elizabeth's reign, I might find the treasurer's 
 library still there, which would indeed have been curious. 
 A few minutes, however, showed me that there was not a 
 single vestige of his library remaining. The question then 
 arose, whose collection the present library could be, and I 
 soon found traces enough to show that it was made by the 
 fifth earl, who held the title from 1700 to 1721. It is a 
 thoroughly well-formed and well-used library of that date, 
 formed by a man of highly cultivated tastes, who had 
 travelled much and to some purpose, especially in Italy. 
 Thus much the library proved, as also that he was nothing 
 of a book-antiquary whatever. . . . After all, the most 
 interesting thing to me is not so much finding particular 
 books, as tracing the history the individuality of great 
 libraries which have come down to the present time." 
 
 Although he was clearly in a wandering mood, he 
 does not appear to have gone abroad again, except on 
 the sudden expedition to Paris already mentioned (p. 115), 
 for more than a year. He spent his money in another 
 and a characteristic way. In a letter dated June 18, 1865, 
 he says, " I have just set a Hungarian rabbi [Dr Schiller- 
 Szinessy] at work upon our Hebrew manuscripts, and 
 with his knowledge and my method of cataloguing, I hope 
 it may be a creditable book.* But what with this, and 
 young Palmer [afterwards Professor Palmer] for the Arabic, 
 
 * The work done by Dr Szinessy was eventually purchased from Mr 
 Bradshaw by the Syndicate for the sum of .300, which he had expended 
 on it, and Dr Szinessy reduced it into the form of a catalogue.
 
 COLLEGE POLITICS. 129 
 
 and Miss Shields for the Vaudois manuscripts, all being 
 paid out of my own pocket, it leaves me but little prospect 
 of going abroad this summer." In cases of this kind 
 and those he mentions are only three out of many he 
 always acted on a certain principle. He endeavoured to 
 give, to those who required and deserved it, such assistance 
 as would enable them in future to help themselves. If 
 they were, as he used to say, " worth their salt," that is, 
 if they only lacked opportunity to do good work, he would 
 put them in a position to do it. He thus not only did 
 them the greatest possible service, but did it in the most 
 delicate way. The recipients of his bounty were intended 
 to feel under no obligation. They were supposed, in fact, 
 to be helping him, not to be receiving help from him ; 
 they were merely getting compensation for work which 
 he wanted to get done. The university had done thus 
 much for him, he would say ; why should he not do it 
 for others ? No one's self-respect could be injured by 
 receiving a favour tendered with so much consideration. 
 
 Meanwhile Bradshaw was taking an active part in 
 the affairs of his own college, which was passing through 
 a critical period of its development. The new statutes 
 came into force in 1861, but various circumstances delayed 
 their taking effect. It was only by considerable sacrifices 
 on the part of the governing body that their provisions 
 could be put into speedy execution, and it was not 
 without difficulty that an antagonistic minority was induced 
 to consent. In the contention which arose respecting the 
 claims of Fellows under the old system, Bradshaw's good 
 sense and conciliatory bearing gave him considerable 
 influence. He was nominated on a committee for discussing 
 
 o 
 
 the best method of reconciling conflicting claims, and 
 had the chief hand in drawing up an agreement, known 
 in the annals of the college as the " Eirenicon," by which 
 the dispute was brought to a satisfactory termination. 
 
 K
 
 130 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 In all these proceedings he showed great anxiety that 
 the new statutes should be enabled to take effect without 
 delay. He was so much annoyed at the success of an 
 appeal which deferred their application, that he refused 
 at first to have anything to say to the author of it, and 
 always spoke of him as "the impostor." His wrath, 
 however, soon gave way to kindlier feelings, and the 
 " impostor " became a lifelong friend. 
 
 When, a few years later, steps were taken to throw 
 open the college, which had hitherto been confined to 
 those on the foundation at Eton, Bradshaw did all he 
 could to facilitate the change. The chief questions under 
 discussion during the years 1861-1865 were the reduction 
 of the number of Fellowships from seventy to forty-six, of 
 which I have spoken above (p. 79), the creation of exhibitions, 
 the admission of pensioners, and the appointment of a 
 tutor. All these steps were indispensable if the college 
 was to act in the spirit of the new statutes, and to take 
 anything like its proper place in the university. About 
 all of them Bradshaw was actively engaged in corre- 
 spondence and negotiation with other leading members 
 of the governing body, especially with William Johnson, 
 who will long be remembered as the most brilliant Eton 
 tutor of his day. It is probably not too much to say that 
 to him and to Bradshaw the college owes more than to 
 any others the infusion of a new spirit into its counsels, 
 which enabled it to break loose from the narrow traditions 
 of its previous history. It was Mr Johnson who led the 
 way to the creation of an exhibition fund by the gift of 
 400 for that purpose a gift to which he made many 
 later additions. Bradshaw, who himself subscribed largely, 
 was mainly instrumental in collecting the rest of the sum 
 required. Classics and theology had hitherto been the 
 only subjects to which any attention was paid at King's. 
 Mr Johnson was very anxious that the exhibitions should
 
 COLLEGE POLITICS. 131 
 
 become the means of introducing other studies, especially 
 those of mathematics and .natural science, and here again 
 he found an active supporter in Bradshaw. 
 
 Many aided in the good work, but it was on Bradshaw 
 that the burden of the struggle chiefly fell. His official 
 position in the college pointed him out as the natural 
 person to urge the wishes of the reformers on the residents, 
 among whom he was then almost alone in his thorough 
 approval of the changes proposed. It was his duty, too, 
 in the absence of a tutor, to carry out the votes respecting 
 the admission of pensioners and the award of exhibitions, 
 to arrange the details of examinations, and to draw up 
 and issue the notices in which the opening of the college 
 was announced to the world. In October, 1865, the first 
 non-Eton men entered King's. The beginnings of a new 
 era in the history of the college were small enough, but 
 a new era had begun. When, a short time afterwards, 
 a tutor was appointed, and the tutorial duties were severed 
 from the disciplinary functions of the dean, Bradshaw 
 felt that the chief attraction which the latter office had 
 possessed for him had disappeared, and he accordingly 
 resigned. But in relinquishing his official position, it 
 need hardly be said that he continued to take an active 
 interest in the development of the system which he had 
 done so much to introduce. The details of college politics 
 will be of little interest to any but those immediately 
 concerned, but it is well to say thus much, in order to 
 show that Bradshaw's favourite pursuits never hindered 
 him from taking a public-spirited share in the affairs of 
 the society to which he belonged. 
 
 In January, 1866, he was at Glasgow, working in the 
 Hunterian Museum. From Glasgow he went to Man- 
 chester, where he met Mr Crossley, " a wonderful storehouse 
 of information," and saw his collection of tracts and 
 pamphlets of the time of the Great Rebellion, numbering
 
 132 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 a hundred volumes, which had belonged to his relative, 
 John Bradshavv, the regicide. . " These pamphlets," says 
 Bradshaw, " were bound by the man after whom my father 
 named me, and his familiar signature, ' Henry Bradshaw, 
 is on the title-page of every volume." Many of his friends 
 will remember a little wooden tobacco-stopper, in the form 
 of a weather-cock, which belonged to the same gentleman. 
 
 In June, 1866, Bradshaw was elected a member of the 
 Roxburghe Club, being proposed by Mr W. G. Clark, 
 then public orator at Cambridge, and seconded by Mr 
 Dickinson. He undertook, about the time of his election, 
 in accordance with the rules of the club, to edit the book 
 entitled "The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of the Manhode," 
 a prose version by an unknown writer of the " Pelerinage 
 de la Vie Humaine" by De Deguilleville. Of this poem 
 he writes in a letter to Dr Furnivall, dated February 22, 
 1867, "About De Deguilleville's three pilgrimages, please 
 first observe the spelling, which is as I have written it. 
 The three are (i) the 'Pilgrimage of the Life of Man,' (2) 
 the 'Pilgrimage of the Soul after Death/ and (3) the 'Pil- 
 grimage of the Life of Jesus Christ.' . . . Of the first there 
 is a prose translation, which I am editing for the Roxburghe 
 Club ; " and then he goes on to give an account of the 
 various translations of the poem and the different manu- 
 scripts in which they are to be found, showing that he had, 
 at all events, taken the preliminary steps for an edition in 
 his exhaustive way. Various causes hindered the execution 
 of this undertaking, and on his election to the post of 
 university librarian in 1867 he handed over the work to 
 Mr W. G. Clark. It was eventually carried out in 1869 
 by Mr Aldis Wright, who mentions in his preface the 
 " valuable assistance rendered by Mr Bradshaw whenever 
 he had occasion to consult him in the course of the work." 
 
 The calls upon his time were indeed too numerous, and 
 he was still too much immersed in his researches in the
 
 LITERARY DISCOVERIES. 133 
 
 library and elsewhere to be able to undertake any con- 
 tinuous work. It must be allowed, moreover, that un- 
 methodical ways and dilatoriness in correspondence were 
 growing upon him, or rather had become too habitual 
 to be shaken off. He undertook this summer to correct 
 the sheets of Dean Hook's " Lives of the Archbishops '' 
 as they passed through the press, but after correcting two 
 or three he was obliged to give it up. In spite of the 
 delay, which had already caused some inconvenience, the 
 dean set so much value on his services that he tried to 
 persuade him to continue them, but in vain. Bradshaw 
 was fully conscious of his own failings in this respect. 
 Writing to a friend about this time, at the end of a long 
 letter full of valuable information, he says, " I am obliged 
 to write here [in the library] because I know if I were 
 to wait two hours after getting your letter, it would be 
 weighing down my pocket for many weeks." 
 
 Early in 1866 Mr Winter Jones, librarian of the 
 British Museum, referring to a discovery which Bradshaw 
 had made at Glasgow, * writes him as follows : " Pray 
 accept my warm congratulations and the expression of 
 my admiration at your good ' Fortune,' the reward of 
 ' Vertu.' Some time ago, when Elwin was the editor of 
 the Quarterly, he asked me to write an article on Bib- 
 liography, to be enlivened by anecdotes of remarkable 
 finds and bringing together of disjecta membra. I was 
 too much occupied to undertake it, but I think that you 
 have now a sufficient store of materials to make such an 
 article very striking. I used to think Maskell the most 
 fortunate discoverer, but there certainly are now two 
 Richards in the field." A couple of months later Brad- 
 shaw added another feat to the many that had already 
 
 * Bradshaw had discovered, in the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow, a copy 
 of "L'Estrif de fortune et vertu," by Colard Mansion, of which only one copy 
 was previously known.
 
 134 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863 67. 
 
 won Mr Winter Jones' admiration, by discovering two 
 hitherto unknown poems by the early Scotch poet 
 Barbour. 
 
 One of these, the " Siege of Troy," consists of two 
 fragments, about 2200 lines in all, tacked on at the 
 beginning and end of a Scotch copy of Lydgate's " Troy 
 Book." In a paper which he read before the Cam- 
 bridge Antiquarian Society,* Bradshaw says that he had 
 looked into the book merely with the object of seeing 
 " how far Lydgate's southern English had been modified 
 in the progress of transcription by a Scotch scribe." In 
 glancing through the volume, he noticed two lines in larger 
 writing than the rest, one near the beginning 
 " Her endis barbour and begynnys the monk ; " 
 
 and another towards the end 
 
 " Her endis the monk and begynnys barbour." 
 
 Moreover, the verses at the beginning and end of the poem 
 were of a different metre from those in the middle, and the 
 language was not southern English at all. 
 
 The poem thus discovered was evidently by Barbour, 
 but no one was hitherto aware that he had written any- 
 thing about Troy. " After spending some hours," Brad- 
 shaw continues, "in searching through the various works 
 on Scottish literary history which were to be found in the 
 library, I wrote to Mr Cosmo Innes to ask for some 
 information about the book, being very slow to believe 
 that it was possible for me to discover anything in such an 
 accessible library as ours, which had escaped the keen and 
 lifelong searches of such antiquaries as Scotland now 
 possesses." It was true, nevertheless. The poem, a 
 translation by Barbour of Guido de Colonna's " Historia 
 Trojana," was quite unknown to Scottish and other anti- 
 quaries. " I think it is no mare's nest," writes Mr Cosmo 
 
 * Cambridge Antiquarian Society Publications > vol. iii. p. ill.
 
 THE HARBOUR POEMS. 135 
 
 Innes, " but a real and valuable discovery the second * you 
 have made for old Scotland. The language is probably 
 its chief value, but that is no small matter, if the scribe is 
 nearly contemporary with the translator, and if that trans- 
 lator is our friend the Dean of Aberdeen." Mr Joseph 
 Robertson writes, "I have just heard from Cosmo Innes 
 of your very interesting discovery of part or the whole of 
 a translation of the ' Siege of Troy ' by Archdeacon Barbour. 
 In so far as I know, there is no trace in Scotland of his 
 having written such a work, so that you may imagine how 
 interested we are about it." And again, a little later, "No 
 doubt we should have been better pleased if Barbour's 
 whole book had been preserved, but two thousand lines of 
 the Father of Scotch poetry are a great boon, and to be 
 received with all gratitude to its discoverer." 
 
 But how came these fragments to be combined in so 
 strange a way with Lydgate's poem, forming a sort of 
 prefix and conclusion to the latter, in the place of its 
 own proper beginning and end ? Bradshavv's explanation 
 is "that the Scotch scribe, wishing to make a copy of 
 Lydgate's ' Story of the Destruction of Troy,' was only able 
 to procure for his purpose a copy mutilated at beginning 
 and end ; and that, in transcribing, he supplemented his 
 original by taking the missing portions of the story from 
 the antiquated and in his eyes less refined translation made 
 by his own countryman in the previous century." 
 
 This discovery was sufficiently remarkable, but the 
 other poem, which Bradshaw identified shortly afterwards 
 as Barbour's, gave occasion to a still more striking display 
 of his peculiar powers. It was a volume of " Lives of the 
 Saints," which Bradshaw " had long known by sight, and 
 had shown to all his Edinburgh friends in the hope of their 
 recognizing it as a well-known work, even if not by a known 
 author." As he found no one to satisfy him on the sub- 
 
 * The first was the Book of Deer (see above, p. 69).
 
 1 36 C A MB RID GE ' L IFE, 1 863-67, 
 
 ject, he set to work to examine the poem no light task, 
 for it contains about 40,000 lines, or about twice as many 
 as the Iliad. In mere bulk it was, therefore, a much 
 weightier contribution to Scotch literature than the " Siege 
 of Troy." In the paper * which he read before the Anti- 
 quarian Society, Bradshaw explains the grounds on which 
 he arrived at his conclusions about the poem. It may be 
 interesting to quote an extract from his note-book, dated 
 April 24, 1866, in which these conclusions appear as he 
 jotted them down for his own use. 
 
 "After four o'clock, I went to get manuscript Gg. 2. 6, 
 the Scotch manuscript of ' Lives of the Saints,' to see if I 
 could make anything of it. It was clearly Scotch, not 
 merely north country ; the writing showed that, and the 
 Katherine Grahame on fly-leaf. On looking further, I 
 found a quire with a parchment slip down the middle, 
 containing 'Jacobus dei gracia rex Scottorum omnibus 
 probis hominibus suis salutes.' This was quite enough. 
 The handwriting may not be much before 1500, but the 
 work and its author ? In the prologue the author says, as 
 he is too old and feeble to minister in the church, he writes 
 lives of holy men, to eschew idleness. The book divides 
 into two pretty equal divisions. The first contains 
 apostles, evangelists, and ordinary saints, ending with 
 St Maurice and St Macharius. The second contains 
 ordinary saints, among whom St Ninian. Here was clear 
 evidence of the Scottish origin. In the prologue of St 
 Maurice he says he would fain before others say something 
 of the saint as being patron of Aberdeen. So far, then, 
 the author is an ecclesiastic, a very old man, and apparently 
 connected with Aberdeen. But his date ? In the story of 
 St Ninian there are many narrationes by the compiler. 
 One of a man in his own time personally known to himself, 
 a native of Moray or Elgin. . . . Another story of what 
 * See above, p. 134, note.
 
 THE B ARBOUR POEMS. 137 
 
 happened in his own time, when David Bruce was king, 
 to a knight, Sir Fergus Macdonel, in Galloway. David II 
 was king 1329-1370, and even from these few facts I think 
 there can be no shadow of a doubt that this is another 
 great poem which, during the past fortnight, it has been my 
 lot to add to the list of the works of John Barbour, the 
 Archdeacon of Aberdeen, the author of the Bruce, and the 
 father of Scottish poetry." 
 
 The arguments here briefly stated were developed and 
 supplemented by others, given in the paper, which together 
 appear to make the conclusion incontrovertible. But the 
 "skill and knowledge" which Mr Winter Jones had re- 
 marked in him in 1859 enabled him to make discoveries 
 where others had found nothing, while the exhaustiveness 
 of his research constantly corrected the mistakes of more 
 superficial workers. He gave a striking instance of this 
 power a few months after the discoveries which I have 
 just described. In the paper read before the Antiquarian 
 Society he suggested the possibility that other " anonymous 
 copies of Barbour's ' Siege of Troy ' might have been pre- 
 served, either entire or, as here, combined with Lydgate's 
 work," though none such were then known to exist. In 
 the summer of 1866 he was working in the Bodleian, 
 mainly at printed books ; " but, seeing a manuscript of 
 Lydgate's ' Troy Book ' in an adjoining case, I was tempted," 
 he says, " to take it down, although I knew that all the 
 Bodleian Lydgates had been recently examined with great 
 care for the committee of the Early English Text Society." 
 The beginning and the end were indeed Lydgate's, but 
 on examination it turned out that in the middle were 1200 
 lines of Barbour, additional to those found at Cambridge, 
 which previous investigators had either failed altogether to 
 look at, or had observed, but supposed to be Lydgate's 
 work. Thus did one discovery with him lead on to another. 
 The importance of the poems discovered may be appre-
 
 138 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 elated when we recollect that, as he says, " hardly anything 
 of Scotch literature remains to us earlier than the middle 
 of the fifteenth century, except the ' Brus ' by Barbour, who 
 died in 1395, Wyntovvn's Chronicle called the 'Orygynale' 
 (about 1420), and the poems of King James I, who died 
 in 1437." 
 
 A few words should be said here about the publication 
 of these poems. No sooner had the discovery been made 
 known to the world than a member of the Roxburghe 
 Club requested Bradshaw to allow him to edit them as 
 his contribution to that society. But the finder of the 
 manuscripts was naturally unwilling to give them up so 
 easily. Mr Cosmo Innes suggested that Bradshaw should 
 edit the poems as part of the series published under the 
 direction of the Lord Clerk Register, corresponding to the 
 Rolls series in England. " For every reason," he writes 
 in July, 1866, "we should wish you to be editor, and to 
 have the credit of your own trouvaille" Writing a little 
 later, after Bradshaw had apparently communicated to 
 him his discovery at Oxford, Mr Innes says, " It is indeed 
 curious that you should go about, like the loadstone- 
 fingered hero of the fairy tale, to draw out all the lost 
 fragments of Barbour ; " and he goes on to press him 
 again for an answer as to the publication of the poems. 
 As his letter to M. Holtrop shows (below, p. 143), Bradshaw 
 was seriously contemplating an edition. He made con- 
 siderable preparations for the work, had a large portion 
 of the manuscript copied out, and sketched out a title- 
 page, which remains among his papers. But early printing 
 occupied almost all his time this autumn, and his promotion 
 to the post of librarian must have caused further delay. 
 
 In the autumn of 1867, Mr Innes, who had meanwhile 
 visited Bradshaw at Cambridge, writes as follows : " I 
 have dreamt of Cambridge ever since I left you. I was 
 most fortunate in my weather, and shall never again see
 
 THE B ARBOUR POEMS. 139 
 
 anything so glorious as that walk with you through your 
 own garden and through Trinity and St John's. ... I 
 am to meet [the Lord Clerk Register] to-day, and shall 
 try to have something put in shape about a print of the 
 lately discovered poems of Barbour. It seems to me 
 his lordship points to selections from all, as well the 
 translation of the ' Troy Book,' as the original ' Legends 
 of Saints.' It would evidently form a capital philological 
 and critical opportunity. The contemporary English and 
 Scotch cannot be brought better en evidence than in 'the 
 Monk ' and ' Barbour.' I fancy the editor must work out 
 the forgotten original of Guido de Colonna. Certainly 
 a scholar familiar with Chaucer would not find his previous 
 study useless. I cannot fancy anything dealing with 
 manuscript and black letter more interesting, more pictu- 
 resque, than an introduction written by the discoverer 
 of such masses of Barbour's verse at Cambridge and 
 Oxford one qualified to compare the language of the 
 author and the manuscript of the scribe with the corre- 
 sponding diction and scripture of English contemporaries." 
 Unfortunately, the proposal came to nothing. Years 
 passed by ; one thing after another occupied Bradshaw's 
 attention, and he was never able to set his hand to the work. 
 Eventually, both the " Troy Book " fragments and the 
 " Legends of the Saints " were edited by Dr C. Horstmann.* 
 The history of the Barbour fragments has obliged me 
 somewhat to anticipate. I must now go back a little, 
 in order to take up another thread of Bradshaw's researches. 
 In the autumn of 1866 he made a journey to Belgium^ 
 in the course of which he very much enlarged his know- 
 ledge of early typography. His researches in the history 
 of Dutch and Flemish printing had been discontinued 
 for some time after the date of the last letter to M. Holtrop 
 
 * Heilbronn, 1881-2 : cf. Ilorstmann's " Altenglische Legenclen" (Neue 
 Folgc), 1 88 1.
 
 140 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 quoted above (p. 112). It was apparently an accident 
 that led him to resume his correspondence. He writes 
 to M. Holtrop in August, 1865, "You must think that 
 I have forgotten you, but I have been drawn away to 
 so many things which I could not neglect, that I am 
 afraid my work at the Dutch and Flemish books has 
 almost gone out of my head. . . . The unexpected dis- 
 covery of a small quarto volume containing eight pamphlets 
 printed by (i) John de Westfalia, (2) Gerard Leeu, and (3) 
 in mortario aitreo, has roused me again, more particularly 
 as several of them are not in your collection. Besides 
 this, a friend of mine has just sent me three leaves rescued 
 from a book- cover, part of a book printed by Colard 
 Mansion in his larger type, and this has again set me 
 upon investigating his books." A fortnight later, " I am 
 delighted to get your letter, full, as usual, of most interesting 
 information. I confess I am very glad to hear you are 
 forced to extend your ' Monuments ' to a 2ist livraison. I 
 could wish it were larger, for without it I can do nothing, 
 and with it it is hardly too much to say that I can do 
 almost everything I wish with our Dutch and Flemish 
 incunabula. I have just identified two little Delf books, 
 thanks to your Delf livraison. ... I felt by a sort of 
 instinct that they were within my beat, and that I ought 
 to know them. German books for the present I leave. 
 We have very few, and I must be content to learn one 
 thing at a time ; and my present object is to take advantage 
 of your ' Catalogus ' and ' Monuments,' so as to make our 
 little collection of as much service as I can." 
 
 On May 10, 1866, in answer to a letter from M. Holtrop, 
 saying that he has been seriously ill, he writes, " I am 
 extremely sorry to hear of your illness, and only hope 
 most sincerely that you are by this time quite recovered. 
 We cannot afford to lose our master yet ; for I always 
 look on you and speak of you as the chief of my de-
 
 EARLY PRINTING. 141 
 
 partment the ctipartement des incunables for, indeed, there 
 is no one connected with any English library, still less 
 in Paris, who has the leisure and inclination to study 
 our subject scientifically ; and a merely dilettante employ- 
 ment upon it is of all things the most pernicious and 
 contemptible. ... I find the best way by far is to master 
 one subject thoroughly before going on to the next. In 
 this way I have mastered Caxton, and to a good extent 
 the other English printers during the fifteenth century ; 
 at any rate, I may safely say (and it is very little to say, 
 after all) that I know more about the matter than any 
 one in any of our public libraries, or elsewhere as far 
 as I know. Next I take Holland and Belgium as the 
 country from which, until 1491, our English type all came. 
 Of the mass of undated books before 1473 I know very 
 little ; we have not one specimen in Cambridge. But 
 from 1473 to 1500, thanks to your ' Catalogus ' and 
 ' Monuments,' as a basis to start from, I am pretty well 
 master of the subject. This leads on to the various early 
 Cologne printers, and this at present is the extent of my 
 range." 
 
 He proposed to send M. Holtrop a fortnightly bulletin 
 of his work and discoveries, " for I am almost always 
 finding something concerning your affairs." The first 
 was to be on Colard Mansion, and was to be sent on 
 May 15. However, the bulletins never came to the birth. 
 It was cruel to disappoint M. Holtrop, who writes on 
 June 4, "Je me permets de vous ecrire que ce sera avec 
 le plus grand plaisir que je regevrai vos Bulletins : je ne 
 regrette qu'une chose, c'est que tout 1'avantage de cette 
 correspondence sera de mon cote, puisque je ne saurais 
 vous aider dans vos recherches sur les imprimeurs anglais, 
 . . . tandis que vous m'avez donne des observations et des 
 donne'es si precieuses relatives a mes Etudes sur les editions 
 incunables Neerlandaiscs. J 'attends avec impatience votrc
 
 142 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 premier Bulletin." But the letter-writing fit had gone 
 off, and M. Holtrop had to wait four months and to 
 write several appeals before he could get anything more. 
 In the last of these he begs Bradshaw to let him know 
 if a certain book printed by Thierry Martens is in the 
 University Library. This produced an answer in the shape 
 of a closely written letter of four sheets, dated September 
 19, 1866. " I send you with this," says Bradshaw, " a de- 
 scription of all the books I can find in our library which 
 are printed by Thierry Martens at Alost. They are very 
 few, but out of the six three are not in your printed 
 catalogue. ... I should be glad to know if my character- 
 istics are belied by the other books which you have. The 
 descriptions are copied simply from the list which I am 
 making (on slips) of the early printed books in our 
 University Library. It takes some time to make the 
 preliminary investigation, but when that is made, each 
 fresh book falls into its place with ease. My chief wish 
 is to see some simple and exhaustive method of col- 
 lation introduced, and it is for this reason that I have 
 troubled you with more than you wanted, in order that 
 you may see more clearly what I want. ... I hope 
 before long to have some kind of trustworthy list of 
 English books to refer to. At present there is none. 
 I have been nearly six hours, I find, at this one letter, 
 and have left neither time nor space for all the apologies 
 which I owe you for not writing for so long. I was all 
 packed up and ready to start for the Hague early in 
 August, when something happened which took me to 
 Oxford instead, and for a month nearly I worked for 
 ten hours a day or more, exploring the whole place in 
 search of fifteenth-century books printed in England, the 
 Netherlands, and the early Cologne presses." 
 
 His note-books show that for some time past he had 
 been working chiefly at Chaucer, in preparation for his
 
 SECOND VISIT TO FLANDERS. 143 
 
 edition, and at early printing. In one of them (No. ix) 
 is a list of fifteenth-century books printed in England 
 and the Netherlands, classified under towns and presses, 
 the fullest and most complete which he had yet made. 
 He was getting all his knowledge on the subject into 
 order, so as to profit as much as possible by the visit to 
 Belgium which he intended to make in the autumn. This 
 time, being intent on work, he went alone. He had 
 intended to be away only a few days, but he remained 
 abroad nearly a month. Early in October he was at 
 Bruges, staying at the Panier d'Or, opposite the belfry. 
 Making Bruges his head-quarters, he wandered about, 
 visiting Ghent, Brussels, Lille, and other towns, and 
 revelling in archives and libraries to his heart's content. 
 On October 6, 1866, he writes to M. Holtrop : 
 " I came here last Monday in consequence of a stupid 
 note in the last edition of the ' Manuel du Libraire,' etc., 
 which speaks of variations in Colard Mansion's ' Boccace,' 
 besides what I had already noticed in the first leaf; and 
 with my very full notes, the result of my work at Paris in 
 January, I thought that two or three days would be amply 
 sufficient to satisfy myself abundantly ; and I could not 
 bear to send you my notes, which seemed so incomplete, 
 and possibly inaccurate. ... I should myself have more 
 leisure for these things were I not at the same time minutely 
 engaged upon collation of manuscripts for a large edition of 
 Chaucer's works, as well as some early unpublished Scotch 
 romances, not to mention that a Jewish rabbi and myself 
 are at work upon a minute and elaborate catalogue of our 
 Hebrew manuscripts, in which everything bibliographical 
 falls to my share. However, the extreme kindness which 
 I meet with wherever I go is most refreshing. Paris is 
 the only place I know where everything in the De"parte- 
 ment des Imprimes is cold and hard and official, when 
 M. Richard is away. But this is uncharitable as well as
 
 144 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 uninteresting. Good-bye, my dear sir, and believe me to 
 be always, 
 
 " Your devoted disciple and servant, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 It was, apparently, on this occasion that he made 
 acquaintance with Mr Weale, the well-known authority on 
 the art and literature of the Low Countries in the Middle 
 Ages. Mr Weale tells me that he first met Bradshaw at 
 a book-sale in Bruges. He was bidding for a book. Mr 
 Weale, seeing that he was an Englishman, asked him if 
 he had collated it. Bradshaw replied that he had not. 
 " Well," said Mr Weale, " it is imperfect, and I thought I 
 had better tell you before you bought the book." "It 
 doesn't matter," said Bradshaw, " I don't want the book ; 
 I am only bidding to keep things going ; they are so slow." 
 He then asked if he could see the Archives, which Mr 
 Weale obtained permission for him to do. On hearing 
 from Mr Weale that he had discovered some fragments of 
 early printing in the bindings of churchwardens' registry 
 from the villages near Bruges, he was extremely delighted, 
 and, seizing him warmly by the hand, exclaimed, "Ah, 
 you are just the man for me ! If only people would find 
 out what treasures there are in the bindings of books ! " 
 
 On October 13 he writes, still from Bruges, to M. 
 Holtrop, " I went to Ghent yesterday afternoon, and, on 
 the strength of your letter and Mr Weale's promise of an 
 introduction, I boldly called on M. Ferdinand Vander- 
 haeghen. I need not tell you of his kindness, for you 
 must yourself have experienced that before now. I will 
 only say that I never met anything like it, and I have met 
 with a good deal in my day." From Bruges he went on 
 to Lille, whence he writes to M. Holtrop on October 19, 
 "You will see by the date of this that I find it more 
 difficult to get back to England than I had expected.
 
 SECOND VISIT TO FLANDERS. 145 
 
 What with the books I find, and (perhaps as much) the 
 unequalled kindness I have met with all the time I have 
 been abroad, it will take me long to forget my three weeks' 
 holiday this autumn. I left home for three days, and I 
 have been already three weeks away." From Bruges he 
 wrote to his eldest sister as follows : 
 
 "Bruges, October 21, 1866. 
 
 " DEAREST K., 
 
 " I left Cambridge on the first of October for this 
 place, for the purpose of seeing and examining some books, 
 which are here in the library, and also at Lille, which it 
 was necessary to see for my purposes. I fully thought I 
 should be back again in five if not in three days, and ac- 
 cordingly have had no letters of any kind. I hope all is 
 well at home, but I am always haunted with ideas that 
 something dreadful will happen while I am away like this. 
 
 " Meantime, to be free for a moment from such thoughts, 
 I must tell you how intensely I have enjoyed myself, both 
 in my work and out of it. If I had been a volunteer,* I 
 could not have been met with greater kindness on all 
 sides, and on Tuesday, when I get back, I shall have been 
 here four weeks without one single unpleasant recollection 
 to carry away with me. 
 
 "... On Sunday last I made the acquaintance of a 
 young Frenchman [Leon Lefebvre], who was opposite me 
 at the table d'/wte that day and the day before. I had 
 been struck with his face, and I can generally judge when 
 a man is worth knowing by his face and manner ; and in 
 the evening we were thrown together, and something led 
 us to talk. I found he lived at Lille ; andJt ended by my 
 going to Lille with him on Tuesday last. I had wanted 
 more than anything to go there, because of one book which 
 
 * A large detachment of English volunteers had recently visited Belgium, 
 in order to take part in the Tir National at Brussels, and had been very 
 hospitably received. 
 
 L
 
 146 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 exists only there ; but I was afraid, after being here so 
 long, my funds would compel me to go straight home, 
 besides which, my shyness would have made me miserable 
 in a strange place, not having that ordinary savoir faire 
 which helps most people on in the world. . . . 
 
 " Leon Lefebvre is in business a partner in a house 
 at Menin, in Belgium, and himself lives at Lille and 
 manages their business there. Nothing could be kinder 
 than he has been. He took me to a hotel, and next morn- 
 ing at nine he came and took me to the public library, 
 and introduced me to the librarian, and when he had com- 
 fortably settled me there, he left me on his own affairs. 
 At four o'clock, when the library shut, he came to see 
 what I would like to do. As soon as my six-o'clock 
 dinner was over, he came to take me for a walk, and then 
 to his soctiti, the Socie'te' des Orphe'onistes de Lille, with 
 his other half, one Jules Lefebvre the same name, but 
 no relation just his own age (twenty-one), and doubles 
 in friendship from children. 
 
 " I cannot express in writing the sensations which this 
 visit has given me. To be thrown into the middle of 
 young French life, and to find it so utterly different from 
 what I had expected. L. L. is a devoted musician, and 
 would have devoted himself to music, but that his father 
 (who is an ancien professettr, and a charming old man), 
 with his large family three sons and four daughters 
 thought it better for him to go into business, and so he 
 has taken to it keenly, but he still keeps up his love for 
 music. I had often heard of the Orpheonistes of Lille, 
 but I little expected to be thrown among them in this way. 
 You go there in the evening, and you find a quantity of 
 people, mostly young men, at different tables, with their 
 dominoes, or draughts, or cards, or billiards, and their glass 
 of beer, but what struck me most of all was that it was all 
 for amusement and for excitement. At the university it
 
 LEON LEFEBVRE. 147 
 
 is rare to find men who will sit down to games, such as 
 draughts, at all, still less who will play at cards or billiards 
 for love. They must have some stake, they always say, 
 however small. Here it is quite different. Then after- 
 wards they go upstairs to their concert-room three or four 
 nights a week, and have their choruses, all without instru- 
 ments. I never heard anything equal to the singing. 
 Then between ten and eleven off they go to bed. It is the 
 naturalness and simplicity and healthiness of the whole 
 thing that is so enjoyable to come in contact with (I never 
 heard an approach to bad language) ; and I might have 
 gone to Lille a hundred times without falling into such 
 company. . . . Good night, dearest K. I wish these hor- 
 rible forebodings about some one or other of you being 
 ill or dying didn't haunt me so. It is enough to make me 
 break off the habit of never writing letters, 
 
 " Your most affectionate brother, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 The episode related in this letter is a good instance of 
 Bradshaw's power not only of making friends, but of bind- 
 ing them to him with the ties of a warm and lasting affec- 
 tion. In such cases he simply fell in love with his friends, 
 and they with him. I have given one example already ; 
 this is another, and many more might be mentioned. The 
 impression produced was generally immediate, a sort of 
 love at first sight ; but it was indelible. Years might pass, 
 the friends might hardly ever meet again, but neither he 
 nor they forgot. At Lille, on this occasion, Bradshaw 
 spent only a few days, but it was enough. He never saw 
 Jules Lefebvre again. His friend Leon, having business 
 in this country, went to England with Bradshaw, who 
 introduced him to his eldest sister and her husband, and 
 took him down to their country house at Fairchildes, near 
 Croydon. It was characteristic of him that he was never
 
 148 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 happy till he had made his friends and his family 
 acquainted with each other, and he was also anxious to 
 show the young foreigner the interior of an English country 
 home. Mr Daniell remembers Le'on well, as a well-bred 
 young man of pleasant manners and appearance, whose 
 conversation showed considerable intelligence. They were 
 struck by his foretelling the Franco-German war. The 
 battle of Sadowa had recently been fought, and four years 
 later the conflict which he prophesied was raging. 
 
 Bradshaw and his young friend never met again. The 
 sequel may have some interest, for few episodes in his life 
 made a deeper impression on Bradshaw's mind, and he 
 used to speak of it years afterwards as one of his happiest 
 recollections. Unfortunately, it was a case in which his 
 incapacity for continued or regular correspondence evi- 
 dently gave some pain, and can hardly but have been 
 to some extent misunderstood. The letters which Brad- 
 shaw received from both his friends for some time after his 
 visit are full of affection. Those of Le'on Lefebvre contain 
 frequent allusions to the kindness which Bradshaw showed 
 him while in England. He writes on October 31, 1866, 
 " Mon bon et tres cher Monsieur Bradshaw, Je suis arrive 
 a Lille apres avoir passe* a Boulogne-sur-Mer ainsi qu'a 
 Calais trois journe"e bien agreables. . . . Maintenant que 
 vous dirais-je encore si ce n'est : Merci ! Mille fois merci 
 pour tout ce que vous avez fait pour moi a Londres ! 
 Merci pour le livre de calcul que vous m'avez envoye ! 
 Vous me connaissez maintenant sans doute assez pour 
 savoir que je ne suis pas un ingrat. Sachez seulement, 
 que dans toute occasion ou je pourrai vous rendre service, 
 je suis a votre disposition, et que des a present je vous ai 
 voue" une sincere et respectueuse amitieV' 
 
 M. Le'on Lefebvre was known amongst his musical 
 friends of the Societe" des Orphe"onistes by the nickname of 
 " Domisol." " Ce nom de Do-mi-sol" M. Jules Lefebvre says
 
 LEON LEFEBVRE. 149 
 
 in a letter to me, " il permettait a ses bons amis seulement 
 de le lui donner. Vous savez que ce surnom lui avait etc 
 donne a cause des ses grands aptitudes musicales, et pour 
 le distinguer de mon frere, qui se nomme Le'on." Writing 
 to Le'on on November 3, 1866, Bradshaw puts another in- 
 terpretation on the name : " . . . Adieu, Le'on ! Vous etes 
 veritablement Domi Sol ; ce qui est, chez lui, le soleil de 
 sa famille, et de ceux qui raiment comme on doit 1'aimer. 
 Croyez moi de cceur tout a vous, Henry Bradshaw." This 
 view of Le'on Lefebvre is fully borne out by what his 
 friend and brother-in-law, M. Jules Lefebvre, says of him : 
 " Domisol etait le gargon le plus expansif, le plus de"voue, 
 le plus courageux et le plus obligeant que 1'on puisse voir." 
 For some little time this mutual correspondence con- 
 tinued. The two friends at Lille showed each other the 
 letters they received from Bradshaw, complimented him 
 on his French, or playfully corrected here and there the 
 slight mistakes they found. The whole family regarded 
 him as their friend. Leon complained that he Wrote too 
 seldom. He answers on November 13, "Pour moi, c'est 
 la facilite meme de lire qui m'emporte un de'gout presque 
 incroyable en faisant 1'essai d'ecrire. Je vois seulement 
 des pages remplies de fautes de grammaire et d'expression, 
 que neanmoins je ne sais ni corriger moi-meme ni faire 
 corriger : c'est le de'gout d'un homme qui aime surtout la 
 langue et la litterature de la France, mais qui n'a pas assez 
 d'energie pour se rendre maitre des elements les plus 
 simples de la grammaire." He writes again on Novem- 
 ber 1 8, "Ce n'est qu'une petite lettre, mais je suis force" 
 de vous ecrire quelques mots. Je m'assied tout seul dans 
 ma chambre, et je ne peux pas faire attention a ce que je 
 voudrais lire, parceque je me souviens toujours du meme 
 jour (la Dimanche) et de la meme heure (cinq a six heures 
 du soir) du jour auquel, il y'a cinq semaines, je m'asseyais 
 dans la sallc a manger du Panier d'Or, pour prendre du
 
 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 cafe. Certes je ne trouve pas a mon cote le bon M. Byron, 
 ni m'attend maintenant la bonne fortune de voir entrer 
 mon jeune ami franc.ais pour demander s'il y ait de bonne 
 musique a quelqu'une des eglises de Bruges. Mais c'est 
 cela une espece de bonheur qui ne se presente pas tous 
 les jours, et je dois rester content de m'en rappeler par 
 occasion." 
 
 He expected to visit Belgium again early in 1867, but 
 the journey was deferred, and gradually the correspond- 
 ence dropped. The two friends could not understand it. 
 " Vous aurai-je froisse"," writes Leon, " dans ma corre- 
 spondance par hasard ? Alors je vous en demanderai 
 mille pardons. . . . Vous savez, M. Bradshaw, quel attache- 
 ment j'ai pour vous, aussi je suis malade depuis que je vois 
 arriver la fin du mois de Janvier sans voir ni vous ni une 
 lettre de vous." He wrote to tell Le"on of his becoming 
 librarian, and received his warm congratulations, but 
 after 1869 he does not appear to have written again. At 
 length, thirteen years afterwards, something caused him 
 to write once more to Leon. The letter was answered 
 by his friend Jules, now professor of mathematics at the 
 University of Lille, for Leon was dead. In the interval 
 Leon had married the daughter of a manufacturer at Lille. 
 He had much improved his business, and was in a fair 
 way to make his fortune, when he was carried off by a 
 sudden illness. His delicate constitution had been under- 
 mined by incessant hard work and anxiety, and he died 
 in July, 1882, preserving to the last so M. Jules Lefebvre 
 informs me the most affectionate recollection of his 
 English friend. 
 
 If this episode shows the geniality and simplicity of 
 Bradshaw's character in the most agreeable light, other 
 qualities are as clearly displayed in a letter which he wrote 
 early in 1867, to a friend, W. M. Young, a junior Fellow 
 of King's, on the occasion of the sudden death of his
 
 PROSPECT OF LIBRARIANSHIP. 151 
 
 brother, also a member of the college. " Long before you 
 went away, you may remember my telling you how he 
 won my heart at Eton by coming up to me when I was 
 there in 1861, and introducing himself to me in the school- 
 yard as your brother. We had a walk together at that 
 time, and it was the beginning of our friendship. It is 
 hard to say what made him so much liked by every one 
 here. That he was so, there is no shadow of a doubt. 
 Living so much as I do among the undergraduates, and 
 noticing so much all those little casual expressions of dis- 
 like or prejudice which the speakers would be so unwilling 
 to have brought up against them, I must have seen it. ... 
 You may well indeed speak of his example. You may, 
 perhaps, know the dreadful force which the example of 
 a younger man has, and how very different it is from that 
 of one of one's own contemporaries. I cannot tell you 
 in how many hundred ways he is recalled to me in these 
 things. He literally made me do many things by that 
 gentle, unspeaking compulsion which it is so hard to 
 describe and yet so easy to feel." Other passages in the 
 letter show how deep and real were his religious feelings 
 and convictions. It was only on occasions like this that 
 his reluctance to talk of what he felt and thought on such 
 matters was overcome. 
 
 During the winter of 1866-7 Bradshaw was somewhat 
 disturbed by the prospect of succeeding to the post of 
 librarian, which Prof. Mayor had resolved on giving up. 
 He had written to Bradshaw of his intention early in 
 November, 1866. After expressing his opinion that the 
 statute requiring the librarian to reside would have to be 
 modified, lest his successor should be compelled, like him, 
 to do without a holiday of more than eight days together 
 for nearly three years, Prof. Mayor continues, " I have left 
 myself no room to speak both of your generosity in leaving 
 the field open to me in 1864, and of the ready help which
 
 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 you have given me all along. Without you, I should have* 
 thrown up my post in disgust long ago." Professor Mayor 
 has told me that nothing could exceed Bradshaw's help- 
 fulness during this period, or his readiness to interrupt the 
 researches in which he took so intense an interest, in order 
 to undertake any drudgery which had to be done. On 
 March 4, 1867, Bradshaw wrote to M. Holtrop, "Since 
 my return from Bruges and Lille at the end of October, 
 I have not been able to attend for a single day to my 
 early printed books. The news that Mr Mayor was going 
 to resign his place of librarian unsettled me very much, 
 because it was just possible I might succeed him ; and if 
 not, I should leave Cambridge altogether and go and work 
 for you and myself at Oxford, which is at present an 
 unworked field for true bibliographers. I have accordingly 
 been trying to put into shape and order a good deal of 
 the work upon which I have been employed in a desultory 
 manner for more than eight years past, and this has been 
 no easy task. . . . You are most kind in proposing to 
 dedicate your 'Etudes bibliographiques' on Thierry Martens 
 to me ; * I know very few things which I should appreciate 
 so much. As for my titles, I have none whatever. In the 
 library I am nothing whatever. I receive a salary on the 
 express stipulation that I tell the world that I have no 
 status whatever in the place. It is singular, but true." 
 
 Writing to Mr Coxe on February 26, Bradshaw says, 
 " Mr Mayor, I believe, resigns to-day. If I should not 
 succeed him, which is of course easily possible, I shall 
 have to ask you to give me some work for a short time, 
 which I have no doubt you would be willing to do. It 
 will be a great comfort when the matter is fairly settled." 
 On Mr Mayor's resignation, Bradshaw at once sent out 
 the following circular to the members of the Senate : 
 
 * M. Iloltrop's pamphlet on Thierry Martens appeared in 1868, with 
 a dedication " a son ami, Henry Bradshaw."
 
 CANDIDATE FOR LIBRARIANSHIP. 153 
 
 "King's College, February 27, 1867. 
 
 " SIR, 
 
 " I beg to offer myself as a candidate for the 
 office of Librarian, which has become vacant by the 
 resignation of Mr Mayor. 
 
 " My work in the University Library during the last 
 ten years has, I hope, given me some experience of the 
 requirements of the place ; and, if the Senate should so 
 far honour me with their confidence as to entrust me with 
 office of Librarian, I can conscientiously say that it would 
 be my one desire and aim to fulfil the duties of the position 
 to the satisfaction of University and to the utmost of my 
 power. 
 
 " I have the honour to be, Sir, 
 
 " Your obedient servant, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 Not a few of his friends had urged Bradshaw to stand 
 for the library in 1864. In 1867, there appeared to be but 
 one feeling in the university. During the past ten years 
 he had gained an intimate acquaintance with the library 
 and its contents. A valuable testimony to this qualifica- 
 tion for the librarianship appeared very opportunely just 
 at this time. Shortly before Prof. Mayor's resignation, the 
 fifth and last volume of the catalogue of manuscripts was 
 published. In his report to the Syndicate, the editor, Dr 
 Luard, remarks, "It is believed that now every manuscript 
 in the library, and every book with manuscript notes and 
 adversaria, has been examined and catalogued. The 
 editor also hopes that the defects and errors which have 
 been observed in the earlier volumes of the catalogue will 
 be found to be remedied by the corrigenda. . . . The editor 
 cannot speak of this part of his work without mentioning 
 to the syndices the very great assistance he has received 
 from Mr Bradshaw, to whom many of the most important
 
 154 CAMBRIDGE LIFE, 1863-67. 
 
 corrigenda are due, and who has brought together the 
 scattered manuscripts from different parts of the library 
 in such a way as to make the arranging and cataloguing 
 of the additional manuscripts a comparatively easy task." 
 It must also be remembered that he had had valuable 
 experience of the ordinary work of the library during the 
 two years in which he acted as assistant. These and other 
 considerations pointed him out as the fittest man for the 
 post. On March 8, 1867, he was elected librarian without 
 opposition. One among the many letters of congratula- 
 tion which he received appears to sum up the general 
 conviction of the university. It was from Mr Moody, one 
 of his earliest friends, who says, " You are one of the few 
 pegs I know of that has apparently got into the right 
 hole."
 
 ( 155 ) 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 HENRY BRADSHAW'S appointment to the post of librarian 
 was a turning-point in his life. Hitherto he had been, for 
 the most part, an independent worker in the field of 
 science ; henceforward he was to be a public servant, 
 whose time and energies were at the service of others. 
 He never ceased to be a student, but his real student-days 
 were over. The leisure and the opportunities of research 
 which he had enjoyed for the last ten years were no longer 
 his. In the interests of learning, the change may be re- 
 garded as unfortunate, but without it some of the best 
 points in his character would not have fully come to light. 
 He had for some time past been accumulating stores of 
 learning, which he only required time to digest and put 
 into shape ; he had struck on rich veins of research, which 
 in a few more years he might have satisfactorily worked 
 out. A scholarly edition of Chaucer, a history of typo- 
 graphy, treatises on Irish literature, mediaeval liturgies, 
 and other subjects, might have been expected from him. 
 But for such work time was indispensable, and time was 
 just what was denied him. During the early part of his 
 librarianship, he does not appear to have given up the 
 hope of producing his results ; he published more, indeed, 
 after 1867 than before. But his publications were in the 
 main the outcome of previous study, and he was unable 
 to settle down to any task demanding continuous applica- 
 tion. He was, therefore, forced gradually to relinquish all
 
 156 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75, 
 
 hope of giving to the world the works which at one time 
 he contemplated, and to rest content with directing 
 younger students along the lines which he had marked 
 out for himself. 
 
 Nothing in his life brings into clearer relief his strong 
 sense of duty than his behaviour in these altered circum- 
 stances. Reluctant as he must have been to give up his 
 favourite pursuits, he never allowed them for a moment 
 to interfere with his duties. In discharging those duties 
 he 'may not have been uniformly successful ; there were 
 times when the condition of things in the library produced 
 some discontent. But no one attributed these defects, if 
 defects there were, to any inclination on the part of the 
 librarian to spare himself trouble, or to any subordination 
 of duty to private study. From the moment when he 
 accepted the post, his studies, dear as they were to him, 
 fell into the second place. For the last nineteen years 
 of his life he devoted himself assiduously to his task. He 
 hardly ever left Cambridge ; he was always to be found in 
 the library, always ready to give assistance to any student 
 who required it. It would hardly have been possible for 
 any one to act more fully up to his own maxim, that " the 
 first duty of a librarian is to save the time of others." 
 
 One of the first subjects discussed by the Library 
 Syndicate, after Bradshaw became librarian, was an addi- 
 tion to the staff and the increase of the librarian's stipend. 
 At this time there were in the library one under-librarian 
 and four assistants. At the recommendation of the Syn- 
 dicate, a second under-librarian was appointed, and the 
 librarian's stipend raised from 210 to 400. At this 
 figure it remained till 1883, when it was raised to 500 
 a year. 
 
 Bradshaw's acceptance of the post of librarian almost 
 coincided with the completion of the south-west wing of 
 the library buildings. This addition, the most important
 
 THE LIBRARY IN 1867. 157 
 
 which had been made since the erection of Cockerell's 
 building in 1842, was originally suggested by his friend, 
 Mr George Williams. It had been begun in 1864, and 
 the building was finished early in 1867 ; but the new rooms 
 were not ready for use till the summer of 1868. One of the 
 first things, therefore, that occupied Bradshaw's attention 
 in the library was the transfer of books into the new wing. 
 A room on the ground floor was allotted to him as libra- 
 rian, but he never made much use of it, for it was too 
 inaccessible. For any one much occupied with his own 
 concerns and anxious to find a retreat where he would be 
 free from interruption, this room would have formed a 
 quiet and agreeable haunt ; but Bradshaw preferred to 
 take up his abode in the large room on the first floor. 
 Here he was much exposed to interruption, or rather, as he 
 would have preferred to put it, he was accessible to every 
 student who demanded his assistance. Here, too, he was 
 among his favourite books and manuscripts, for he at 
 once resolved to transfer to this part of the library its 
 most valuable possessions. The room was shut off from 
 the rest of the building by fireproof doors, and the trea- 
 sures which had hitherto been more or less scattered about 
 and unprotected were brought together into one place of 
 security. 
 
 The new librarian began at once to increase the collec- 
 tion of early printed books, with the view of forming a 
 sort of museum of typography. An excellent opportunity 
 of advance towards this end was afforded by the occur- 
 rence, in December, 1867, of a great book-sale at Haarlem. 
 This was the sale of the famous Enschede collection, and 
 it seems to have been the first chance which Bradshaw 
 had of ordering books of this kind for the University 
 Library. The Syndics placed the sum of ,100 at his 
 disposal, and he bought several incunabula of importance, 
 including two books attributed to Ulric Zel, of Cologne,
 
 158 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 a printer in whom, as we shall presently see, he took a 
 special interest. But a much more valuable accession to 
 the library was made when, in the spring of 1868, he pre- 
 sented to it his own collection of early printed books. 
 The donation consisted of no less than fifty-eight books 
 printed in the fifteenth century, more than "half of which 
 were by Ulric Zel and other Cologne printers, the rest 
 being mainly Dutch, Flemish, and French books. Shortly 
 before this, he had presented to the library twelve folio 
 volumes of Sanscrit works, printed at Bombay. For both 
 of these acts of munificence he received the special thanks 
 of the Syndicate. Nothing could more clearly have indi- 
 cated his intention to identify himself with the institution 
 committed to his charge than this transference of his most 
 valued possession to its shelves. 
 
 A discussion about the archiepiscopal library at Lam- 
 beth Palace, which arose in the autumn of 1867, induced 
 him to write what was, I believe, the only letter he ever 
 addressed to the daily papers. The letter in question 
 exemplifies his acquaintance with the history of great 
 libraries, a subject to which he always devoted particular 
 attention. It is addressed to the editor of the Times. 
 
 " SIR, 
 
 " In recent discussions about the Lambeth 
 Library I find it suggested that the Archbishop might be 
 relieved altogether from the responsibilities attaching to 
 its custody, and it has been tacitly assumed in letters 
 written on the subject that the books would, as a matter 
 of course, be transferred to the British Museum. I beg, 
 however, to suggest that, if for any reason the collection 
 should be removed from Lambeth, the University of 
 Cambridge is the body to whose care it should on all 
 reasonable grounds be trusted. 
 
 "Any one who is acquainted with the history of the
 
 LETTER ON THE LAMBETH LIBRARY. 159 
 
 library knows that it was established by Archbishop Ban- 
 croft by his will in 1610, under the express stipulation that 
 it should be reserved to his successors if they would enter 
 into covenants to hand it over intact to their successors ; 
 or, failing this, that it should go to the King's College at 
 Chelsea if such college were erected within six years, 
 which did not come to pass ; and again, failing this, he 
 bequeathed it to the public library of the University of 
 Cambridge. 
 
 " On the execution of Archbishop Laud and the aboli- 
 tion of episcopacy, the University presented a petition to 
 Parliament claiming the library on the ground that the 
 first two conditions of Bancroft's will were no longer 
 capable of fulfilment The justice of the claim was readily 
 allowed, and by order of the Lords and Commons the 
 whole library, including the additions made by Bancroft's 
 successors, was removed without delay to its new home. 
 A large room was set apart for the collection ; various 
 catalogues (still preserved here) were made, so as to render 
 it as useful as possible ; and there is ample evidence that 
 the new acquisition was well cared for and highly prized 
 by the University. At the restoration the University at 
 once yielded to the representations of the then Archbishop 
 of Canterbury, and the library was restored to Lambeth. 
 
 " The fact that the original library was contingently 
 bequeathed to the University, and that, on the contingency 
 arising, the whole collection was transferred to Cambridge 
 by the authority of Parliament, affords a strong argument 
 in favour of a like proceeding now if it should be found 
 impracticable to fulfil the first condition of the founder's 
 will. I may further mention that by the rules of our 
 University the books would be accessible to all real 
 students, from whatever quarter they come, and capable 
 of being borrowed under such regulations as form a per- 
 fect safeguard for their custody without being a bar to
 
 l6O LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 their free use a boon fully appreciated by those who have 
 enjoyed the privilege of access while the books have been 
 in their present keeping. 
 
 " Your obedient servant, 
 
 "HENRY BRADSHAW. 
 
 " University Library, Cambridge, October 5 [1867]." 
 
 It was about the same time that Bradshaw was 
 requested by Archdeacon Cheetham, then one of the sub- 
 editors of the " Dictionary of Christian Antiquities," to con- 
 tribute articles on lectionaries and other liturgical subjects 
 with which he was intimately acquainted. He did not like 
 to refuse, but asked leave to defer his decision till he could 
 form a better judgment as to the amount of time at his 
 disposal. He found it impossible to do what he was 
 asked. Archdeacon Cheetham wrote several times, but 
 could get nothing out of him. In connection with this, he 
 wrote to Dr Hort, " I should be very glad indeed to write 
 to Cheetham, if I had anything to say, as I feel very much 
 ashamed of myself for never having answered one of his 
 letters for so many years ; * but nothing but oral communi- 
 cation is of any good with me in these matters, because I 
 really have no ideas in my head, or rather, perhaps, I know 
 a few facts which might be useful, but, from never having 
 talked the matter over with any one and had my facts put 
 into shape, I have no motion what to do either towards 
 writing or helping some one to write an article." 
 
 Some time afterwards, in 1869, Dr Westcott was more 
 successful in appealing to him on behalf of the " Dictionary 
 of Christian Biography." By dint of great pressure, in the 
 application of which Dr Lightfoot assisted, Dr Westcott 
 succeeded in obtaining from him four short articles. They 
 were biographies of St Abbanus, St Abel, St Abranus, and 
 St Achea. I can remember his writing them, in great 
 
 * This was a slight exaggeration.
 
 HELP TO MR. SEEBOHM. 161 
 
 haste and with much reluctance, for he detested working 
 under pressure, and the work itself was not of a kind at all 
 suitable to him. After this the editors came to the con- 
 clusion that the advantage of his assistance was more than 
 counterbalanced by the trouble which it cost him to give 
 and them to obtain it, and asked him for no more. 
 
 But although he could not find time to bring the results 
 of his own research to the birth, he found time, as usual, to 
 help other students. Mr Seebohm was about this period 
 working at the second edition of his "Oxford Reformers." 
 His studies of Dean Colet's writings brought him into con- 
 nection with Bradshaw. Now and then he would run up 
 from Hitchin for a night, to be hospitably entertained in 
 Bradshaw's college rooms, where all students found a wel- 
 come. In the examination of manuscripts, in tracing the 
 history of Colet's portrait in the library, and in many other 
 matters connected with the book, Bradshaw gave him much 
 assistance. Speaking of a transcript of Colet's lectures on 
 the Epistle to the Romans which he was superintending, 
 Bradshaw writes in October, 1868, " It was finished as far as 
 my transcriber could do it last week, and brought to me ; but 
 there are many insertions in that dreadful hand of Colet's, 
 which I can quite forgive him for not having courage to 
 put in, and I am going through it as rapidly as I can. But 
 unless I go to the library before breakfast, which I have 
 given up doing lately, there is but one hour and a half in 
 the day to do any work of the kind. ... I will make the 
 rest (I have done six chapters already) my Sunday work, 
 and so see if you can't have it by Tuesday at latest." Re- 
 ferring to the portrait of Colet, which he had been trying 
 to get photographed for Mr Seebohm, and on the history 
 of which he writes him a long letter, he says, " I am afraid 
 it will not be possible to trace it out more at present, though 
 I am most anxious to find the pedigree of all our portraits, 
 and I have traced a good many within the last few months." 
 
 M
 
 1 62 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 This was in connection with his papers on th istory of 
 the library, of which more presently. He rea' a paper on 
 these portraits before the Cambridge A^tioi ian Society 
 in 1872.* 
 
 At the same time he was aiding " jpton, who was 
 
 editing Colet's works. In writing to n that he had 
 
 obtained leave for him to retain a man, for a longer 
 
 time than usual, he says, "I hope you wiL le to use it 
 
 with satisfaction, and without that sense 01 which is 
 
 destructive of all good work ; " and in thankh. Lupton 
 
 for a volume of Colet, "It is very interesting how 
 
 your labours and Mr Seebohm's are stirring peo^^^^ 'kc 
 an interest in one who has far too long been ne^-Q -d." 
 A little later he writes to Mr Seebohm, " I am reall^.. ery 
 much obliged for the copy of Mr Myers's ' Cat"? olic 
 Thoughts ' in its complete form, and I have been devour- 
 ing it in such intervals as I can get from my long day's 
 work. For the last ten days or nearly a fortnight we have 
 been very hard at work moving the manuscripts and all 
 my other belongings down into the new building, and my 
 arms are so tired I can hardly write straight. ... I hope 
 to get a fortnight, or nearly so, at the English Lakes before 
 the end of this month, to set me up with a stock of fresh 
 air for the rest of the year." 
 
 During the Lent Term of 1869 there appeared in the 
 Cambridge University Gazette, a publication then lately 
 started, a series of papers on the history of the University 
 Library by the librarian. These papers were afterwards 
 reprinted and published in 1881 as No. 6 of the 
 " Memoranda." " It must be borne in mind," says the 
 author in his preface to the re-issue, " that the papers here 
 reprinted are not the result of any research made at the 
 time or for the purpose, but merely notes embodying a few 
 of the facts picked up in the course of twelve years' work 
 
 * Cambridge Antiquarian Society's Communications, vol. iii. p. 275.
 
 PAPERS ON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. 163 
 
 at the library by one who loved to know something of the 
 personal history of any volume which might come into his 
 hands." Writing to Mr H. B. Wheatley in 1883 about 
 this sketch, he says, "I reprinted [in 1881] everything as it 
 stood, and it is one mass of mistakes. But that matters 
 little, as, though published, it is not likely to be read by 
 many people." However this may be, the papers are not 
 only valuable in themselves as containing the only con- 
 tinuous history of the library yet in existence, but as throw- 
 ing light on the affection with which Bradshaw regarded 
 the treasures committed to his charge. 
 
 In speaking of the fourth side of the eastern quadrangle, 
 built by Archbishop Rotherham about 1475, he laments 
 the "characteristic manner" in which the authorities .of 
 the university afterwards treated the benefaction. A cen- 
 tury ago Rotherham's building was pulled down, " and the 
 Gothic front, with the bishop's arms, etc., upon it, was sold 
 off as rubbish, and now forms the entrance to the stables at 
 Madingley Hall. After this it is needless to add that the 
 new building contained no record of its replacing an older 
 one, and all notice of Rotherham is obliterated from the 
 library." The latter half of the sixteenth and the first 
 quarter of the seventeenth century were a very bad time 
 for the library. In Edward VI's reign there was a 
 " general clearance of rubbish, as old books were then con- 
 sidered. . . . The hatred of the old learning seems to have 
 been for a time so intense, that few things having the sem- 
 blance of antiquity about them were spared. The fact that 
 in the king's own copy of the new edition of the Greek 
 Testament (ed. Steph. Paris : 1 550) we find large fragments 
 of an early manuscript of Horace and Persius used for 
 binder's waste, is a fair illustration of the respect in which 
 the different kinds of learning were then held." During 
 the first fifteen years of Elizabeth's reign, the whole amount 
 laid out upon the library was i 6s. 8<f. To the period of
 
 164 LlBRARIANSHlF, 1867-75. 
 
 James I may perhaps be attributed " that rcbincling of all 
 the manuscripts which has destroyed every trace of their 
 former history, even to the names of the donors." Better 
 times came in the reign of Charles I. One of the few good 
 things recorded of the first Duke of Buckingham is that, 
 when chancellor of the university, he founded the collection 
 of Oriental manuscripts, and intended to spend seven thou- 
 sand pounds on rebuilding the library. A little later many 
 other benefactions were made, among them the Vaudois 
 manuscripts presented by Morland. The ignorance which 
 prevailed about these books, says Bradshaw, is only " one 
 example in a thousand of the disregard of such treasures 
 which the whole history of the library brings to light." 
 
 The activity and good management which encouraged 
 these gifts in the seventeenth century ceased during the 
 Georgian period. The most valuable part of Bishop 
 Moore's library was treated as almost beneath consider- 
 ation : " Nothing could be more disgraceful than the way 
 in which the manuscripts were literally shovelled into their 
 places." The library was left almost entirely unguarded. 
 During the thirty-five years that followed the presentation 
 of Bishop Moore's library to the university by George I in 
 1715, "the pillage was so unlimited that the only wonder 
 is that we have any valuable books left." This culpable 
 neglect went on throughout the century. In 1748 over 
 nine hundred volumes were reported as missing from the old 
 library alone ; at the next inspection, in 1772, many more 
 rare volumes were found to have disappeared. And yet 
 no attempt was made to limit the freedom of access to all 
 parts of the library. " The ' Cicero de Officiis,' printed in 
 1465, on vellum ; a Salisbury Breviary printed in 1483, on 
 vellum (the only known copy of the first edition) ; the 
 Salisbury 'Directorium Sacerdotum,' printed by Caxton 
 (the only known copy), are three instances out of many 
 scores which might be mentioned as purloined during the
 
 PAPERS ON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. 165 
 
 latter half of the eighteenth century, simply from this total 
 disregard of all care for the preservation of the books." 
 One can imagine the pain with which Bradshaw must have 
 recorded these irreparable losses which the library had sus- 
 tained. 
 
 I may mention here that in the year 1869 Bradshaw 
 was made a member of a Syndicate of which Mr W. 
 G. Clark (public orator), Dr Luard, and Professor Mayor 
 were also members, appointed to consider the form of ser- 
 vice for the Commemoration of Benefactors. The work of 
 revision was long and laborious. In the addition of names 
 to the list and the correction of errors, Bradshaw's ac- 
 quaintance with the history of the university was of great 
 service. The form now used on the day of commemo- 
 ration is the work of this Syndicate. 
 
 Meanwhile, in the midst of his official and literary 
 occupations, Bradshaw's social life went on unchecked. 
 The change in his position made no difference in his 
 habits, except that he was more continuously at Cam- 
 bridge. One of the short absences which he allowed him- 
 self was occasioned by the return of his friend, W. M. Young, 
 to India. Bradshaw insisted on " propemping " him, as he 
 called it, on his way. It was in June, 1867. Mr Young 
 tells the story as follows : " When I left for India, he said 
 he should come and see me off at Charing Cross. To my 
 surprise, when we met there, he said there was a book he 
 wanted to see in Paris, and he was coming so far with me. 
 We spent a day in the Paris Exhibition, and he found out 
 that he had long wanted to see Avignon, and made up his 
 mind to come on. After we had got into the train, I found 
 that he had taken his ticket for Marseilles. He should go 
 to Avignon, he said, on his way back. As he stood on the 
 quay watching the Messageries vessel gliding away, I took 
 off my old silver watch-chain and threw it to him. He 
 wore this as a guard for his keys for years." On his way
 
 1 66 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 home from Marseilles, Bradshaw turned aside to Grenoble, 
 where he wished to see a Vaudois manuscript of the New 
 Testament. The librarian was away ; in his absence no 
 one could get in. Bradshaw begged for admittance, but 
 the concierge, an old woman, was obdurate. " I only want 
 to see one book," he said, " and I have come all the way 
 from England on purpose." " But if I let you in, you 
 would never find the book." " Oh yes, I should ; I know 
 where it is." This persistence, with the aid of a ten-franc 
 piece, which I find noted in his diary, was too much for the 
 old lady, and she fetched the keys. He knew the class- 
 mark of the book, and, once in the library, a moment's 
 glance at the arrangement of the shelves showed him its 
 geography. He went straight to the place, took out the 
 book, made a few notes, and went his way. At Paris he 
 did the work which had been the pretext for his journey, 
 and in six days was back at Cambridge. 
 
 Towards the end of the Michaelmas Term, 1868, an in- 
 cident occurred which illustrates at once the kindness of his 
 heart and the width of his intellectual sympathies. A con- 
 gress of students was to be held at Ghent, to which dele- 
 gates from Cambridge were invited. The invitation, being 
 addressed simply " to the students of the University of 
 Cambridge," was handed over, as such postal curiosities 
 generally are, to the librarian. Bradshaw read it aloud one 
 evening for the amusement of some undergraduates who 
 were in his rooms. Two or three congresses, it appeared, 
 had been held already. Their general object seems to 
 have been to promote a rapprochement between university 
 students and the working classes, both being the victims 
 of oppression, the former at the hands of the professors, the 
 latter at those of the capitalists. The comic side of the 
 affair was that which struck the larger part of those present 
 most strongly ; but one of them, being of a somewhat 
 revolutionary turn, was inclined to take it seriously.
 
 SOCIAL LIFE. 167 
 
 Suddenly Bradshaw, who had been laughing with the rest, 
 turned to the solitary supporter of the scheme and said, 
 " Will you go, and report to me all about it ? I will gladly 
 pay your expenses." The proposal was promptly accepted ; 
 a companion was found, and Bradshaw paid the expenses 
 of both, merely exacting from them the condition that he 
 should have a full daily report of their proceedings. The 
 "delegates," B. F. Lock, of King's, and A. C. Cook, of 
 Trinity Hall, went to Ghent, were very well received by the 
 other members of the congress, who were mostly Belgian 
 students, heard and made speeches of an " anti-govern- 
 mental and anti-professorial " character, drank rather more 
 beer than they liked, but otherwise enjoyed themselves to 
 their hearts' content. 
 
 The fortnight's holiday, to which he was looking forward 
 when he wrote to Mr Seebohm, was spent in the Lakes in 
 July of that year (1869), in company with an undergraduate 
 friend. He wanted a holiday badly, for he had hardly been 
 away at all for nearly three years, and during that time 
 had been incessantly at work. A week was passed at 
 Grasmere, and another at Thirlspot. When on these 
 excursions, though he habitually took but little exercise 
 at Cambridge, he was capable of tramping over hill and 
 dale for long distances. During the holiday of which I am 
 speaking, he and his friend walked one day over Armboth 
 Fell to Rosthwaite, in Borrowdale, and thence over Styhead 
 Pass to Wastdale Head. It was very wet, and when they 
 arrived at the little inn, then kept by the well-known Willie 
 Ritson, they were drenched to the skin. Being out for a 
 single night only, they had little baggage ; but Ritson had 
 plenty of dry clothes, and Bradshaw was soon rigged out 
 from top to toe in one of his host's best suits. A sharper 
 contrast could hardly be found than that between the ex- 
 teriors of the two men, and Bradshaw cut a quaint figure in 
 the tall and meagre north-countryman's clothes, which re-
 
 1 68 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 fused to meet round his waist, and had to be turned up 
 half-way to his knee. There were other guests too, both 
 men and women, all equally wet through, but Ritson and 
 his wife possessed a wardrobe sufficient for all. The 
 comical appearance of the circle round the fire that evening 
 was one not to be forgotten. Among the visitors there- 
 happened to be a member of a Quaker family well known 
 at Darlington. Bradshaw had never met him before, but 
 of course knew all about him, and no sooner heard his 
 name than he began inquiring about his relatives. At 
 first the young man was a little shy and distant, but Brad- 
 shaw's manner was irresistible, and before the conversation 
 was over he had fairly thawed him out of his reserve. 
 
 A month later he was at Liverpool, bidding farewell to 
 his sister and her husband, Bishop Oxenden, who were 
 starting for Montreal. He thought nothing of travelling 
 from one end of the country to the other for a purpose of 
 this kind, and enjoyed turning up at unexpected hours at 
 the house of a friend or relative. " I got to London at half- 
 past four yesterday morning [from Liverpool]," he writes, 
 "just in time to wash and change and go down to Croydon 
 by the six-o'clock train ; and then had a seven miles' walk 
 over to Fairchildes, which I reached just before breakfast." 
 Shortly afterwards he was with his mother at Bourne- 
 mouth. Two of his sisters were there too, and this renewal 
 of the family circle made him very happy. Writing from 
 her house there to a friend, whom he had asked down to 
 stay there with him, he says, " I can't tell you how de- 
 lightful it is being here in this way. My mother is very 
 much better than I expected, and altogether I shall not 
 easily forget the happiness of this visit, short as it is ; and 
 as I cannot see you, I am at least glad to have the oppor- 
 tunity of talking to you from here, which is the next best 
 thing to having you." It was the last visit to Bournemouth 
 which he was to pay under these happy circumstances, for in
 
 LETTER ON LONGLEAT LIBRARY. 169 
 
 the winter of this year, to his intense grief, his mother died. 
 To the same friend, with whose family he had spent a 
 day in town, he writes a little later, " I cannot tell you 
 how glad I am to have seen you all at home, and to 
 have got over that utterly stupid fear of unknown people 
 which somehow I almost always have until I actually see 
 them." 
 
 In September, 1869, he was at Longleat, examining the 
 Chaucer manuscripts in the Marquis of Bath's library. It 
 was a member of that family who brought out the editio 
 princeps of the poet in 1532. He was delighted with his 
 visit. Writing thence to a friend, he says, "This place is 
 beyond description charming, and I little thought a year 
 ago that my Chaucer studies would be so well rewarded by 
 having a week's enjoyment here, with liberty to explore to 
 my heart's content." Soon afterwards he wrote to his host 
 as follows : "Dear Lord Bath, I must take the opportunity 
 of the first free hour that I have had after the flood of work 
 which I found waiting for me on my return home, to write 
 and express some little portion of the thanks which I owe 
 for the delights of my visit to Longleat. Your own and 
 Lady Bath's unlooked-for kindness made my stay there so 
 very different from what it might have been that I am not 
 likely soon to forget my week there ; and I can only wish 
 that there was anything that I could do to be of use to you 
 in my own way, in return for the ready confidence with 
 which you threw open all your treasures to me. ... I look 
 forward very much to two things being carried into effect 
 about which you were speaking. One is that a thorough 
 inventory should be made of all the things in the house, 
 which would be of very great service both now and here- 
 after ; the other is that, if the Government will really 
 undertake to calendar the papers within a reasonable time 
 (this would be a most important stipulation), I am sure you 
 would have no reason to regret allowing it to be done. . . .
 
 I/O LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 I have run on longer, perhaps, than I ought to have done 
 on this subject, but the fact is that the first result of my 
 moving down this summer into a new wing of the University 
 Library, where I have brought together all the manuscripts 
 and early printed books, is that I am now for the first time 
 able to attempt a classification of our collection of manu- 
 scripts, which have been classed for more than a hundred 
 years without any regard whatever to subject or even to 
 size. And here my week at Longleat has just had the 
 effect of determining me finally to what had been formerly 
 merely a floating idea, namely, to make two broad divisions 
 into books and papers, the first containing the literature, 
 where manuscripts were succeeded by printed books ; and 
 the second, all the letters, papers, accounts, loose charters, 
 and other miscellaneous documents of which there are 
 always so many in any large library, but which it is gene- 
 rally so hopeless to attempt to classify as part of a collection 
 of books" 
 
 Later in the autumn he made a hasty rush to Belgium, 
 in order to see the Meyer collection, which was to be sold 
 shortly afterwards at Ghent. He took with him the same 
 undergraduate friend who had been with him in the Lake 
 district earlier in the year, and paid all the expenses of the 
 journey. They were away less than four days, starting on 
 a Friday afternoon and coming back the next Tuesday 
 morning, but it was long enough to see Bruges pretty 
 thoroughly. Mr Weale was a kindly and omniscient guide 
 among the churches and pictures of the old Flemish town, 
 and the hospitable Panier d'Or supplied clean beds", fair 
 wine, and an excellent table d'hote. It was Saturday 
 morning and market-day when the friends arrived. The 
 towering belfry looked down from the opposite side of the 
 market-place on the little inn, where the breakfast was 
 served in the sunny salle a manger ; the great square out- 
 side was alive with bustle and colour and spotless Flemish
 
 GIFT OF BOOKS TO THE LIBRARY. 171 
 
 caps ; the whole scene possessed for one of the travellers 
 the ineffable charm of a first day abroad, while the other 
 was no less happy in the pleasure which he conferred. 
 From Bruges they went on to Ghent, where Bradshaw was 
 busy almost the whole day among his books ; but he found 
 time to take his friend to St Bavon, and to show him the 
 great Van Eyck, his favourite among all pictures. 
 
 A Christmas present which he received that year was 
 the " Memoir of Jane Austen," written by her nephew, Mr 
 Austen Leigh. Miss Austen's novels were among those 
 which gave him the most unmixed pleasure. As his way 
 was, he liked the book all the better because it was given 
 him by a son of the author. Writing to thank the giver, 
 he says, " I finished it the same evening that it arrived. 
 It was one o'clock before I went to bed, having just finished 
 it and made out a family pedigree, which, with the help of 
 the tabulated information I got from you some time ago, 
 will put me fairly in the way of getting a clear view of 
 the family connections on one side. I am really delighted 
 with the book." 
 
 I have already mentioned the gifts of books which 
 Bradshaw made to the library in 1867 and 1868. In both 
 of the two following years he repeated these donations. 
 Among the books which he gave in 1869 was a copy of 
 the first Prayer-book of Edward VI, and early in 1870 
 he added several more fifteenth-century books to the 
 museum of which he was so fond. But in March of that 
 year he outdid himself by presenting to the library the 
 whole of his Irish collection. It is described in the 
 Library Report as "a collection of books and papers, 
 pamphlets and broadsides, either (i) printed in Ireland, 
 or (2) written by Irish authors, or (3) relating generally 
 to Irish affairs, about 5000 in number." The offer of the 
 collection is contained in the following letter to Dr Atkin- 
 son, then vice-chancellor.
 
 172 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 " University Library, March 30, 1870. 
 
 " MY DEAR SIR, 
 
 " There is a matter which has been in my mind 
 for some time past, and which I. should be glad if you 
 could bring before the Library Syndicate before they 
 separate for the vacation. 
 
 " I have a considerable, collection of books, pamphlets, 
 and other printed papers relating to Ireland. The basis 
 of it is the Irish portion of my father's library, that portion 
 of it in which, as coming himself from the North of Ireland, 
 he took most interest, and which, at his death in 1845, he 
 left to me. For several years I did a good deal to increase 
 the collection, especially in the matter of pamphlets and 
 printed papers, though it is still, of course, very far from 
 having any claim to completeness. 
 
 " It would give me sincere pleasure if the Syndics would 
 accept this collection as a gift to the library. More than 
 forty years ago, when public libraries were less plentifully 
 supplied than they are now, literary men used to come to 
 my father's house to work at these books when engaged in 
 writing upon Irish affairs, and from the time that I was a 
 child, they have had a particular interest for me. Although 
 I have been able to give but little attention to them for 
 some few years past, yet I have by me a mass of biblio- 
 graphical notes on the subject, collected during the last 
 twenty years ; and if I could feel that these books and 
 papers were deposited in some more permanent resting- 
 place than my own library, I should more readily tiy to 
 put my notes in order so as to turn them to some practical 
 use. 
 
 "There are about 1000 bound volumes; and of the 
 pamphlets and other printed papers there are, speaking 
 roughly, about 2700 in octavo, 700 in quarto, and 500 in 
 folio, including proclamations, broadsides, and fly-sheets.
 
 GIFT OF BOOKS TO THE LIBRARY. 173 
 
 These, with a number of original signed petitions to the 
 Houses of Parliament (chiefly ranging from 1809 to 1819, 
 and relating to the so-called Catholic claims) and a few 
 other manuscripts, amount in all to about 5000 pieces. 
 There are necessarily many duplicates in such a collection, 
 and many also will be already in the University Library ; 
 but, after making all due allowance for these, there must 
 remain a considerable number which the library does not 
 possess, and which it would be difficult either to find else- 
 where or to bring together again. 
 
 "I should not wish to impose any terms whatever 
 upon the Syndicate, if they should think fit to accept the 
 books. I have no views about sacredness of duplicates, 
 or the necessity of keeping such a collection intact. My 
 whole wish is to enable the University to enrich its library 
 with a class of books with which, though possessing some 
 very precious things of the kind, it is on the whole but 
 poorly provided at present ; and I should therefore prefer 
 that any suggestion which I might be inclined to make 
 concerning their arrangement, should be made by me as 
 the librarian to whose charge they would be confided under 
 the control of the Syndicate, rather than that the gift should 
 be hampered with conditions such as in many cases serve 
 to hinder the very object for which the collection was 
 formed. 
 
 " It will not be easy for me to forget the liberal manner 
 in which the University, at the suggestion of the Library 
 Syndicate, enabled me for more than seven years to pursue 
 the studies which I had most at heart, and the confidence 
 implied in the fact that no report of my work during that 
 time was ever demanded of me. I hope that the con- 
 fidence was not wholly misplaced ; but I cannot express 
 strongly enough that the freedom of those seven years of 
 work, as it has produced results which I could not have
 
 1/4 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 foreseen, so it has given me a sense of debt to the Univer- 
 sity which nothing can remove. 
 
 " Yours most truly, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW. 
 
 " The Rev. The Vice-Chancellor, Clare Lodge." 
 
 The thanks of the Senate to Mr Bradshaw for this 
 munificent gift were expressed in a letter composed by the 
 public orator, Mr R. C. Jebb. The collection was kept 
 together, and was enlarged at Bradshaw's death by the 
 addition of such Irish books as he had acquired since 1870, 
 but had not yet presented to the library. 
 
 In the movement for the abolition of tests, which was 
 going on at this time, Henry Bradshaw took much interest. 
 He was strongly in favour of the removal of existing 
 restrictions, but in urging this he took, as usual, a distinct 
 line, and in this case, perhaps, one not generally taken by 
 supporters of the measure. What he objected to in the 
 maintenance of the test was not so much the exclusion 
 which it involved, as the nature of the test itself. While 
 maintaining that on general grounds it was both impolitic 
 and detrimental to the interests of the university that it 
 should be confined to members of any particular denomi- 
 nation, he refused to allow any weight to arguments derived 
 from abstract considerations of justice, equality, and the 
 like. The state, or the university under the state, was 
 justified, he believed, in making whatever limitations it 
 considered expedient. If the state thought fit to admit 
 none but members of the Church of England to university 
 honours, well and good ; he could not deny its legal and 
 moral right to do so. But he insisted that, at all events, 
 the means adopted to distinguish members of the Church 
 of England from members of any other body, or from free- 
 thinkers, should be unobjectionable in themselves. 
 
 The existing test he considered in the highest degree
 
 ABOLITION OF TESTS. 175 
 
 objectionable, because it imposed upon young men, at the 
 most critical period of their lives, the burden of making or 
 refusing to make a distinct confession of faith, the full 
 meaning of which the large majority of them could not 
 possibly comprehend. His intimate acquaintance with 
 generation after generation of undergraduates, his know- 
 ledge of the searchings of heart which most serious men go 
 through during their sojourn at the university, deepened in 
 him the conviction that the imposition of a religious test 
 was immoral. For the frivolous and thoughtless it degraded 
 a solemn asseveration to a mere form of words; while 
 many thoughtful men, in the very crisis of a spiritual and 
 intellectual conflict, were placed under an overpowering 
 temptation to swallow their doubts and to tell a lie. 
 
 In taking this line, Bradshaw was further influenced, on 
 the one hand, by his natural delicacy of feeling, and on the 
 other, by his general opinions regarding the Church. When 
 asked what test supposing it to be desirable to maintain 
 the existing restriction he would substitute for the declara- 
 tion of faith, he replied that none was required. According 
 to his notions, every English subject was a member of the 
 Church of England, unless and until he was proved to be 
 something else. Those who by birth, or by explicit and 
 voluntary declaration, belonged to any dissenting body, or 
 had cut themselves off from the Church, were obviously 
 excluded from taking degrees, and in their case no test 
 was needed ; all others were admissible, and no question 
 need be asked. If it were objected that dishonest persons, 
 not being members of the Church, would take advantage of 
 such a system to obtain admission to degrees, the answer 
 was clear : against such persons no test would be a barrier. 
 But what weighed with him, perhaps, more than anything 
 else was his dislike of public discussions or statements about 
 religion. It appeared to him, if one may so put it, a sort 
 of profanation to drag a man's doubts or convictions into
 
 176 LlBRARIANSHlF, 1867-75. 
 
 the light of day. For these reasons he supported the 
 abolition of tests with all his heart, and was opposed to all 
 the reservations, with regard to headships, clerical fellow- 
 ships, etc., which it was sought, in some cases successfully, 
 to introduce. When Lord Salisbury's committee was 
 sitting, in July, 1 870, he was requested by Lord Houghton, 
 as a leading university Liberal, to give evidence before it. 
 Whether he intended to do so or not, I am unable to ascer- 
 tain ; but the committee came to an end with the session, 
 after examining only four witnesses, of whom he was 
 not one. 
 
 In the autumn of 1870 Bradshaw was requested by one 
 of the leading Fellows of the college, in the name of a large 
 portion of that body, to allow himself to be nominated for 
 the office of vice-provost. The office is one which imposes 
 no very onerous duties ; but, as it involves representing the 
 head of the college whenever the latter is absent, as well as 
 a general superintendence of what may be called the social 
 side of the institution, it is one which demands considerable 
 tact, good sense, and social qualities, and is generally held 
 by one of the most prominent members of the resident 
 body. There can be little doubt that, had Bradshaw 
 allowed himself to be nominated, he would have been 
 elected to the post, but he firmly declined. On a subse- 
 quent occasion, when a similar proposal was made, he 
 returned the same answer. 
 
 It was at the close of this year that he migrated from 
 the rooms which he had occupied since his return to the 
 college in 1856, to those immediately below them on 
 the same staircase. In these rooms, which had formerly 
 belonged to Mr George Williams, he remained for the rest 
 of his life. This change of quarters was the cause of a 
 somewhat amusing incident. For some years past the 
 rooms in question had been held by a non-resident Fellow 
 of the college, now dead. This gentleman showed no
 
 CHANGE OF ROOMS. 177 
 
 intention of living in them ; and, except for two or three 
 pairs of old boots, left as a kind of symbol of occupation, 
 the rooms remained absolutely empty. So unreal a 
 tenancy could only be tolerated so long as there was no 
 demand for the rooms. Accordingly, when Bradshaw 
 applied for them, his application was at once granted, 
 much to the wrath of the quasi-occupant, who protested 
 loudly against his eviction. Finding written remonstrances 
 fruitless, he hurried up to Cambridge to see what he 
 could accomplish by a personal interview. As chance 
 would have it, he met the intruder issuing from the stair- 
 case, on his way out for a walk. Posting himself full in 
 Bradshaw's path, with the object of forcing a hearing, he 
 attacked him in a violent manner on the subject of the 
 rooms. To the flood of argument and invective which he 
 poured forth, Bradshaw made no reply, but walked straight 
 on, pushing his assailant backwards as he went. In this 
 way they traversed the court, the one silently and 
 steadily advancing, the other gesticulating and vociferating, 
 but constantly forced to give way. Bradshaw's superior 
 weight and self-control gave him the advantage at all 
 points, moral and physical, in this curious conflict, which, 
 however, was prolonged until the college gates were 
 reached. Then, and not till then, the enemy withdrew 
 baffled from the field, leaving the victor to continue his 
 walk unmolested and triumphant. The scene was observed 
 by several witnesses, who were much amused by the con- 
 trast at once ludicrous and instructive between his silent 
 but successful resistance and the futile vehemence of his 
 opponent. Had Bradshaw been a Quaker by profession, 
 instead of only by descent, he could not have more 
 pointedly exemplified his creed. 
 
 At Whitsuntide, 1871, he enjoyed a short visit to the 
 Lakes, and put up again at the hospitable little inn at 
 Thirlspot On this occasion he took with him, as a com- 
 
 N
 
 178 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 panion, one of the younger library assistants. "A more 
 delightful holiday," writes his friend, " I have never had. 
 Mr Bradshaw was in the best of moods, and full of playful 
 banter. I remember his remark that Cumberland was one 
 of the best places in the world to get cobwebs blown from 
 one's brain. He made me pass the waterfall at Lodore 
 without seeing it, in order to prove to him that I did not 
 want to ' tick it off' as done. He paid all the expenses of 
 the journey in the kindest and most generous way." This 
 was the first year in which the library was closed from the 
 Saturday before Whitsunday to the Tuesday after. For 
 several years after this he used the short holiday thus 
 afforded to pay a visit to the Lakes. No season pleased 
 him so much as this, when the oaks and birches were in 
 their first and freshest green. 
 
 In the autumn of 1871 he made a discovery of con- 
 siderable importance to Celtic scholars that of the Welsh 
 glosses, numbering about 140, in the manuscript of 
 Martian us Capella, preserved in the library of Corpus 
 Christi College, Cambridge. He communicated the dis- 
 covery, as he did all others of a like nature, to Mr Whitley 
 Stokes, who was then in India. These glosses formed a very 
 considerable addition to the materials for reconstructing 
 the grammar and philology of the early Celtic languages. 
 The existence of the manuscript was, of course, well 
 known, as it formed part of the famous collection left by 
 Archbishop Parker to the library of his own college ; but 
 no attention had previously been paid to it from this point 
 of view. Writing to Mr Stokes in November, 1871, 
 Bradshaw says, "The handwriting is so beautifully clear 
 that it is quite impossible to mistake the words, and I 
 shall therefore print them as accurately as I can, with 
 a photograph of a glossed page of the manuscript, to give 
 people an idea of the look of it. This will save you the 
 labour and risk of copying when time is precious, and will
 
 CELTIC GLOSSES-. NEW LECTIONARY. 179 
 
 leave you free to verify and revise my readings at your 
 pleasure. When printed, you must let me place the copies 
 at your disposal, as the least tribute I can give to one to 
 whom I owe so much." After mentioning a number of 
 interesting points, he continues, " As soon as I have done 
 these (I am now going carefully over the whole a second 
 and partly a third time), I must go carefully through the 
 Juvencus again, as I find that the view with which one 
 looks at these things is a good deal firmer (palaeographi- 
 cally) than it was some years ago. . . . My delight is that 
 I should have gone to Corpus absolutely with a deter- 
 mination to find something to welcome your return with, 
 thinking I might perhaps find a few Irish bits or early 
 glosses, but I little expected to light upon such a treasure 
 as this." Later on he speaks of his intention to print a 
 pamphlet about these glosses, but he never carried out this 
 plan, nor does he appear to have printed even the list. * 
 
 The new Lectionary, or Table of Lessons, which is now 
 in general use, came out in 1871. The Syndics of the 
 University Press were anxious to publish Bibles for use in 
 church, showing by some easy system of reference the 
 arrangement of the lessons. It was Bradshaw who devised 
 and carried out the plan of marking the beginnings and 
 ends of the lessons by means of capital letters in the 
 margin, referring to short notes at the foot of the page. 
 This method has the obvious practical advantage of 
 supplying marks which easily catch the eye, and directions 
 which, when once the lesson is found, obviate the necessity 
 of recurring to a table, while the text itself is left 
 untouched. It was adopted by the Syndicate, and has 
 been used in Cambridge Bibles ever since. The chairman 
 of the Press Syndicate, in conveying to Bradshaw the 
 thanks of that body, remarks, " The Syndics are very 
 
 * See above, pp. 72, 188 ; and Loth, " Vocabulaire Vieux- Breton," pp. ix , 
 22, etc.
 
 180 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 sensible that you have conferred a great benefit upon al 
 church-going people, as well as upon themselves." 
 
 In June, 1872, an incident occurred which caused a 
 good deal of feeling in the university, and roused Bradshaw 
 to such a pitch of indignation that he took the (for him) 
 very unusual step of publishing a letter of remonstrance 
 to the Senate on the subject. Mr Kerrich, university 
 librarian at the beginning of the century, had left a large 
 number of pictures, books, etc., to his son, the Rev. 
 R. E. Kerrich, of Christ's College. This collection was 
 bequeathed by the latter to the university in 1868, as " an 
 addition to the Fitzwilliam Collection," together with the 
 sum of ;iooo. That it contained some things of little or 
 no value is doubtless true. The same may be said of the 
 Fitzwilliam Collection itself, or of almost any collection 
 that was ever made. But the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndi- 
 cate were of opinion that the valuable part bore but a 
 small proportion to the whole. Accordingly, on the 
 ground that the museum would not contain the whole 
 collection, they recommended that "the bequest, including 
 the legacy of ^"1000, should be renounced, on the under- 
 standing that the representatives of Mr Kerrich should 
 allow the Syndicate to select any portion of the collection 
 which they might think desirable for the university." 
 
 The views which Bradshaw held with regard to the 
 treatment of benefactors, and the impolicy to put it on 
 the lowest ground of the attitude which the university 
 had too often taken up in such matters, were expressed 
 pretty strongly in his papers on the history of the library.* 
 The proposal of the Syndicate seemed to him only another 
 illustration of the system which he deprecated. To avert 
 what he considered as nothing less than a disaster, he 
 issued the following letter to the Senate : 
 
 * See above, p. 163.
 
 THE KERRICH BEQUEST. 18 1 
 
 " King's College, June 4, 1872. 
 
 " It was only this morning that most of us received the 
 news of Mr Kerrich's generous bequest of his whole col- 
 lection to the university, 'to form an addition to the 
 Fitzwilliam Collection.' But I am sure that many persons 
 besides myself will have experienced an unpleasant sensa- 
 tion in reading the Grace which was circulated at the same 
 time (though it escaped my notice till this afternoon), by 
 which the bequest is declined on the supposed ground of 
 want of accommodation at the museum. I hope it is not' 
 yet too late to urge upon the council of the Senate the 
 need of reconsidering such a decision, and to entreat that 
 the Grace may be withdrawn. 
 
 " The extract from Mr Kerrich's will closes thu.s : 
 4 ... trusting that, in consideration of the acknowledged 
 value of the larger portion of the bequest, the Syndics will 
 pay some respect to that portion of it which I well know 
 is of little or no value.' Few can have read these touching 
 words without being struck with the characteristic modesty 
 which dictated them. There are many here who knew 
 Mr Kerrich's generous and unselfish character far better 
 than I did ; many who knew the unparalleled devotion 
 which he had for the memory of his father, to whose know- 
 ledge and taste the present collection is mainly due, and 
 who for more than thirty years held an office of great 
 responsibility in the university. But it is impossible for 
 those who knew him at all well and I hope I may con- 
 sider myself among that number not to look upon it as 
 a natural and pardonable wish on his part, that his name 
 should be handed down among the benefactors of the 
 university in such a way as to keep the memory of his 
 father's labours fresh before our eyes. This result is pre- 
 cluded by the course now proposed, and the ' some re- 
 spect,' which Mr Kerrich fondly hoped the Syndicate 
 would pay, shows itself only in ungracious silence.
 
 1 82 LlBRARlANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 " It would have made the proposal a little less unpala- 
 table if the Syndicate had even taken the trouble to lay 
 before the Senate the principal results of their examination 
 of the collection in the form of a report, instead of dis- 
 missing the matter in the present summary manner. The 
 only satisfaction is, that we are now happily prevented 
 from knowing the names of the individual Syndics on 
 whose recommendation this ungenerous proposal has been 
 brought before us. 
 
 " I have spoken of the bequest being declined, because 
 it is clear that if the terms of the will are not accepted, any 
 such arrangement as that contemplated by the proposed 
 Grace is simply a bargain in which the university proposes 
 to renounce the entire bequest, as a bequest, if Mr Kerrich's 
 representatives will consent on their part to make a gift 
 of the more valuable portion of the collection to the uni- 
 versity. This mode of bargaining is at best unsatisfac- 
 tory ; it is a request which many must think we have 
 no right to make ; and it is doubly hard that one who 
 has lived so long amongst us, and has wished so well 
 to the university, should not be allowed a place among our 
 benefactors. 
 
 " It is a rare thing for the university to receive a bequest 
 of such value, and a very rare thing to receive one wholly 
 free from those vexatious stipulations by which the vanity 
 of the owner is sometimes but too apt to impair the value 
 of the gift. Knowing, as I do by some experience, how 
 often the churlish reception of one gift has damped the 
 enthusiasm of those who would gladly have offered their 
 good things, but have shrunk from the prospect of similar 
 treatment, I cannot but protest strongly against the pro- 
 posed mode of dealing with Mr Kerrich's bequest. In all 
 collections there must be a certain number of articles of 
 little value ; but all things need not have the same place 
 of honour, and it is difficult to believe that it would be
 
 THE KERRICH BEQUEST. \ 8 3 
 
 impossible to find sufficient accommodation for the whole 
 collection. 
 
 " It will be said by some that this is a case of sentiment 
 versus business ; but there are occasions and I should 
 not speak unless I believed this to be one where the hard- 
 headed men of business in the university, who carry every- 
 thing before them, are apt to overreach themselves, and 
 bring about results which they could not foresee, and which 
 they would be themselves among the first to deprecate. I 
 hope it may not be so now. 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 There were, perhaps, some remarks in this letter which 
 in cooler moments Bradshaw would have been inclined to 
 modify, but most persons will probably now agree that' a 
 protest of some kind was required. The shortness of the 
 notice given, and the apparent want of deliberation with 
 which the proposal was made, were, at all events, sufficient 
 reason for deferring action. The grace was accordingly 
 rejected by a majority of nearly three to one. The Syndi- 
 cate were, however, not to be beaten. During the long 
 vacation the pictures and engravings were exposed to view 
 in the Fitzwilliam Museum ; and early in the Michaelmas 
 Term the proposal was again brought forward, the only 
 modification being that "competent advice" should be 
 taken in the selection of the articles to be retained by the 
 university. This time there was no opposition, and the 
 proposal was accepted by the Senate. The legacy of 
 ,1000 was given up, together with the greater part of the 
 collection. Among the books thus rejected was one which 
 was sold shortly afterwards for the sum of 200, as well as 
 a complete collection of Stephen Weston's tracts, many 
 of them of the greatest rarity, given by the author himself 
 to Mr Kerrich. 
 
 In the autumn of this year Bradshaw was again at
 
 1 84 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 Bournemouth, with his eldest sister and two of her children. 
 One of his younger nieces was left at home, and while 
 they were away, he wrote her daily letters, full of enter- 
 taining news, to comfort her in her loneliness. Here are 
 two or three extracts, which show that it was as easy for 
 him to gossip with a child as it was to decipher a manu- 
 script or to puzzle out a problem in bibliography : 
 
 " MY DEAREST MAUD, 
 
 " I am very glad I did write yesterday, as in 
 the end our arrangements went all nohow or contrariwise 
 (as Tweedledee would say), and it ended by no more 
 letters being written. However, a good budget came this 
 morning from Fairchildes, and, desolate as you are, it is 
 a great comfort to think you are well and flourishing. It 
 is a great disappointment not to have Arthur, but it is 
 much happier to think of his taking care of you and father. 
 
 "... We saw Miss this morning after service, and 
 
 she walked home part of the way with us. I don't know 
 how to account for it, but her hair, which used to be snow- 
 white, is now a beautiful pale gold, in parts a shade darker 
 than Arthur's. . . . Tell father I have sent him, by this post, 
 the new Macmillan, which contains the next chapter of 
 the Phaeton story. I brought it away from Cambridge on 
 Saturday, with the new part of Middlemarch, which I am 
 reading aloud to [your] mother. . . . Write if you can find 
 time from Jenny Jones and its variations, and give my 
 kind regards to Miss Breguet. I must try and see you, even 
 if it be only for a few hours, before I go back to Cambridge 
 again. Best love to father and Arthur, and pray comfort 
 Nanna about the boy,* and tell her he is all right. 
 
 ". . . I needn't tell you what a pleasure it was to me to 
 get my first letter from you. I hope very much it won't be 
 the last ; but don't bother yourself to write when you don't 
 * A small nephew, who was in rather weak health.
 
 VISIT FROM PROFESSOR TEN BRINK. 185 
 
 feel inclined, for it is no trouble to sit down and talk to 
 you for a few minutes after tea. ... I am sorry to hear of 
 the death of poor Jenny Jones. I wonder whose turn it 
 will be next. I have that minor variation running in my 
 head now, going in and out all round the original tune in 
 the most doleful way. . . . Now good-bye, dearest Maud, 
 with best love from everybody, and especially Boykin [her 
 youngest brother], who is standing opposite to me at the 
 table in the study. 
 
 " Ever your most affectionate, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 Towards the end of the year 1872, he received a visit 
 from his friend Professor ten Brink, the well-known 
 Chaucer scholar. They had never met before, and the 
 pleasure which the meeting gave was mutual. I cannot 
 do better than let Professor ten Brink give his own account 
 of it* He writes as follows : "The unselfishness, gene- 
 rosity, and helpfulness which are displayed in Mr Brad- 
 shaw's letters were equally apparent in our personal 
 intercourse at Cambridge. For a whole week I enjoyed 
 his hospitality in King's College. I conversed with him 
 several hours every day ; we had our meals and took walks 
 together. He showed me over the chapel, the library, and 
 the gardens, both of his own and other colleges ; he made 
 me acquainted with the treasures of the University Library 
 and with the neighbourhood of the town. In his rooms 
 he read aloud to me his favourite passages from Brown- 
 ing's poems ; we talked about English literature and the 
 laws of Latin prosody. The conversation naturally turned 
 very often on Chaucer ; and one Sunday we made a pil- 
 grimage to Trumpington, without indeed seeing much trace 
 of Chaucer or his miller. We discussed many Chaucerian 
 
 * I translate from a letter to myself. For the origin of their acquaintance, 
 see below, chap. vii.
 
 1 86 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1567-75. 
 
 problems, and inspected a number of manuscripts and 
 ancient books. I had a great wish to see the Lichfield 
 manuscript of Chaucer, but had no time to visit that town. 
 He accordingly sent for the manuscript, and I was able to 
 examine it at my leisure in his rooms." 
 
 The companionship of so congenial a spirit was, perhaps, 
 the highest pleasure which ever fell to Bradshaw's lot, but 
 he was seldom able to secure it. Fortunately, he was not 
 without other friends, who made up for their incapacity to 
 enter fully into his intellectual pursuits by the warmth of 
 their personal attachment. The short Whitsuntide vaca- 
 tion of 1873 was spent in the Lakes, in company with one 
 of these friends, N. E. Muggeridge, then an undergraduate 
 at King's. I shall be pardoned, at any rate by members 
 of my college, for saying a few words in memory of this 
 young man, who will long be remembered by his contem- 
 poraries as one of the purest and brightest characters that 
 they have known. Modest and unassuming, but by no 
 means devoid of general ability, and endowed with remark- 
 able artistic gifts, he was not perhaps calculated to shine 
 in university competitions, but was capable of binding very 
 closely to him the affections of all who passed the barrier 
 of his natural shyness and reserve. His sweetness and 
 geniality of disposition, his transparent honesty, his steadi- 
 ness of purpose and capacity for self-devotion, were soon 
 discovered by Bradshaw, who had a unique gift for getting 
 at the best side of his friends, and for encouraging the 
 diffident into some belief in themselves. Of this kind of 
 support, Muggeridge was much in need, and his brief life 
 was rendered infinitely happier by the stimulating effect 
 of Bradshaw's friendship. After a short time of study 
 under Dr Vaughan at the Temple, he took orders, and 
 accepted a curacy in one of the poorest parishes in South 
 London. The devotion with which he threw himself into 
 his work was too much for his delicate system. He broke
 
 CELTIC STUDIES. 187 
 
 down in health, was ordered as a last hope to take a sea- 
 voyage round the world, and died at Hong-Kong in 1879. 
 The beginning of 1874 found Bradshaw at work on the 
 earliest traces of Breton, Welsh, and other Celtic languages, 
 and engaged in an active correspondence with Professor 
 Rhys and Mr Whitley Stokes on these subjects. To the 
 former he sent notes of Welsh words and proper names in 
 the manuscripts which he had been examining for the 
 purpose, in the " Liber Landavensis," the Book of St Chad 
 at Lichfield, the Black Book of Caermarthen, and others.* 
 In order to throw light on the age of the charters and 
 other matters contained in these books, and on that of the 
 manuscripts themselves, and so to elucidate the growth of 
 the Welsh language, he was working carefully at the early 
 records of British history. " I have been going through 
 Gildas and Nennius and Asser to some purpose," he says. 
 The fruits of this study, as shown in his knowledge of 
 Gildas and Nennius, astonished Professor Mommsen when 
 he visited Cambridge ten years later. Anxious to arrange 
 the different sources of knowledge on the subject in their 
 chronological order, he brought to bear on the problem his 
 knowledge of the language, of history, and of manuscripts 
 in general. " All materials," he says to Professor Rhys, 
 " existing as entries in books, whether charters, notes, or 
 glosses, earlier than this [the beginning of the twelfth 
 century], ought to be most carefully and systematically 
 collected and arranged ; and your stones {i.e. inscriptions] 
 form a parallel and invaluable series. . . . The ground is 
 clearing pleasantly, and I look forward to the results." 
 The charters in the " Liber Landavensis " puzzled him much. 
 They were evidently forged, but his knowledge of the 
 
 * The " Liber Landavensis " (Cartulary of Llandaff Cathedral) was edited 
 by Rev. W. J. Rees in 1840. It was compiled in the first quarter of the 
 1 2th century. For the Book of St. Chad, see below, p. 243. The Black 
 Book of Caermarthen, containing fragments of early Welsh poetry, has been 
 edited by Mr. J. G. Evans (1888). It belongs to the end of the I2th century.
 
 1 88 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 language showed him that there lay imbedded in- them 
 remains of Welsh much older than the date of the forgery, 
 so that they must have been based on some more ancient 
 originals. "There is an ample field here," he writes, "for 
 a good charter antiquary. It will be a good thing for 
 Wales when it begins to produce a few Joseph Robertsons." 
 At the same time he was puzzling out the barbarous 
 jargon of the " Hisperica Famina,"* a poem written in very 
 debased Latin, and full of words found nowhere else. This 
 poem being of Celtic origin, he made the Celtic glosses 
 from different manuscripts and the Latin of the " Famina " 
 throw mutual light on each other, and was eventually able 
 to construe the whole of the latter by this means. The 
 style of the " Famina " may be illustrated by the opening 
 
 line 
 
 " Ampla pectoralem suscitat vernia cavernam." 
 
 A gloss gives vernia as being equivalent to lcetitia y and 
 the line is shown to mean " Great joy agitates my breast." 
 But he had only a transcript of the Luxemburg fragment 
 of this poem, with a collection of glosses at the end, to 
 work from, and he could not trust the copy. " I am dying 
 to see the original," he writes. His wish was gratified in 
 the following year, when he visited Luxemburg, inspected 
 the fragment, and afterwards had it sent over to England 
 to examine at his leisure. 
 
 While carrying on this correspondence with Professor 
 Rhys, he was also helping Mr Stokes by sending him 
 photographs which he had had made of the Juvencus 
 manuscript and of other documents throwing light on the 
 development of the Irish language. In a long letter, too 
 technical to be quoted here, he works out the whole history 
 and construction of the Dunstan f manuscript preserved 
 
 * The chief manuscript of this poem is in the Vatican Library. Another 
 manuscript, containing a fragment only, is at Luxemburg. See below, chap. xi. 
 
 t Bodl. Auct. F. iv. 32. So called from its having come to the Bodleian 
 from Glastonbury, and from its containing a portrait of St Dunstan, who 
 was abbot of that monastery. Sec a paper on it in Hermes (1880), p. 425.
 
 MANAGEMENT OF UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. 189 
 
 in the Bodleian, showing of what parts it consists, and with 
 which branch of the Celtic family of languages each part 
 is connected. After filling three sheets with closely written 
 remarks on these and other kindred matters, he concludes, 
 " I cannot tell you what a relief it is to have some one to 
 pour out crude thoughts to as they come up." In the 
 same spirit he writes to Professor Rhys. " I cannot help 
 writing whatever comes uppermost in my mind, and as I 
 have no one else to write to [about Welsh subjects], you 
 are necessarily the victim." The desire to communicate 
 his pleasures and interests was at times quite overpowering 
 with him, while at others he would remain for months 
 without writing a word to old correspondents, who longed 
 in vain to know what he was doing. 
 
 These studies, and other work of a similar kind, must 
 have been a welcome relaxation to him when he could find 
 any leisure from his official labours. There is no doubt 
 that the care of the library lay very heavy upon him about 
 this time. The changes necessitated by the enlargement 
 of the library in 1867 had involved much labour in addi- 
 tion to the ordinary work of the institution, and the staff, 
 although more numerous than formerly, was not large 
 enough to meet the unusual pressure. A large number of 
 books had been shifted from one part of the library to 
 another, and the work of re-cataloguing had not kept pace 
 with the process of removal. The additional space which 
 had been gained a few years before, was almost imme- 
 diately filled, and the chronic congestion due to want of 
 room had reappeared. Bradshaw worked hard to over- 
 come these difficulties. In the summer months he was 
 constantly in the library for a couple of hours before most 
 people were out of bed ; he hardly enjoyed, on the average, 
 a month's holiday in the year. But he laboured under the 
 disadvantage of an insufficient staff, and it must be allowed 
 that he did not possess the knack of working through sub-
 
 IQO LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 ordinates. He never kept a secretary ; he never in his life, 
 so far as I am aware, dictated a letter to a shorthand 
 writer. When the early books and manuscripts were 
 moved to their new places, he carried them down, for the 
 most part, with his own hands. This was doubtless due to 
 his love of the books, and to a fear lest they should suffer 
 any damage by careless usage. But the action was 
 characteristic of his whole management of the library. 
 He could not confine himself sufficiently to the work of 
 direction and supervision, but spent much time on details 
 which others in his place would have left to an assistant. 
 Moreover, it must be said that, in the management of the 
 library, he now and then encountered difficulties, not of 
 his own making, which were extremely painful to a man 
 of his delicacy and sensitiveness, and which rendered 
 his position, already onerous enough, doubly difficult to 
 maintain. 
 
 In a library to which the public are not admitted, much 
 confusion may exist without any news of it reaching the 
 outer world. When readers have to wait patiently till an 
 assistant brings them the book they want, no one but the 
 assistant need know that it is absent from the spot assigned 
 to it by the catalogue. But the University Library at Cam- 
 bridge, alone among great libraries, is open to several 
 thousands of persons. This fact alone immensely increases 
 the difficulty of keeping things in order, and, what is more, 
 it ensures that any instance of disorder shall at once be 
 known. An occasion for grumbling is a luxury of which 
 few persons refuse to avail themselves, and university 
 society is no more exempt than other societies from a 
 tendency to exaggeration. In this case there was, no 
 doubt, some cause for complaint, and the Syndicate felt 
 compelled to listen to remonstrances from outside. In 
 December, 1872, they appointed a committee to inquire 
 into the state of the library and to report on the best
 
 MANAGEMENT OF UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. 191 
 
 measures for the remedy of " existing evils." The committee 
 reported early next year that, however desirable it might 
 be to arrange the books in the library according to their 
 subjects, the inconveniences involved in the process were 
 such that " they could not recommend any attempt to 
 develope further the principle of exact local classification." 
 An appendix furnished by the librarian himself showed 
 that confusion existed in many parts of the building. The 
 committee proposed certain regulations which were carried 
 into effect, but it was some time before the difficulties were 
 overcome. 
 
 During all this time it should not be supposed that 
 Bradshaw's relations with the Syndicate were anything but 
 consistently friendly and harmonious. The measures which 
 were adopted by the latter were adopted with the approval 
 of the librarian, and sometimes at his suggestion. He 
 even welcomed them, quite honestly, as a sort of support, 
 and as supplying a stimulus which he felt to be beneficial 
 to himself. But he cannot have been happy in the state 
 of things which rendered such steps desirable ; on the 
 contrary, it is clear that it weighed upon his mind, and 
 sometimes produced a feeling akin to despondency. The 
 fits of depression, to which he was always more or less 
 subject, grew upon him. For a time he seemed to be 
 losing his power of making new friends, while his craving 
 for companionship did not grow less. To a friend who 
 had sent him letters on Christmas Day (1873), and his 
 birthday (February 2, 1874), he wrote in terms which show 
 that he was not in the best of spirits. " I cannot thank you 
 enough for your two letters. There are so few now who 
 have any recollection of my birthday, that what do remain 
 are all the more precious." After mentioning the names 
 of one or two persons who still came now and then to see 
 him, he continues, " Otherwise almost nobody comes, and I 
 have no friends at all not one soul to whom I can talk, so
 
 192 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1867-75. 
 
 you can believe that your coming up will be a real blessing. 
 Most of the people in the place [King's] I hardly know to 
 speak to, many not even by sight, and the Sunday mornings 
 are quite a thing of the past." * 
 
 At Easter, 1874, he paid a flying visit to Bonchurch, 
 which he had never seen since he had lived there as a child. 
 In a letter to one of his nieces he laments the fact that 
 almost all the old landmarks were hopelessly swept away. 
 It was a very short holiday, and less enjoyable than it 
 might have been, for a most unusual thing he was quite 
 alone. The death of G. R. Crotch,f shortly after this, added 
 to his sense of loneliness. 
 
 He had just started for his Whitsuntide holiday in the 
 Lakes, when he heard of Crotch's illness, and at once 
 hurried to Liverpool to see the latter's brother and sister, 
 before their departure for Philadelphia. During the pre- 
 vious year he had received several letters from his friend, 
 full of life and vigour, and of hopes and plans for the future. 
 He was hard at work in Texas, California, and elsewhere, 
 adding to his collection of Coleoptera, and afterwards in 
 the museum of zoology at Harvard, sorting and cataloguing 
 his captures, till he was laid low by the fatal disease. Even 
 up to the last few weeks he wrote with such courage and 
 hopefulness as to conceal the real state of things from his 
 friends, and his brother and sister arrived too late to find 
 him alive. His death was a grievous loss to Bradshaw. 
 Writing shortly afterwards to a friend, he says, " You will 
 not, I know, believe that I have felt the kindness of your 
 letters any the less from my having written so little in 
 reply. I have been in no mood to write pleasant letters. 
 Crotch's illness upset me very much. His death, on the 
 other hand, has, I hope and believe, done more than upset 
 
 * The allusion in the last clause is to the Sunday breakfasts in his rooms, 
 at which some four or five intimate friends, graduate and undergraduate, used 
 for many years regularly to assemble. 
 
 t See above, p. 89.
 
 MELANCHOLY AND ILL-HEALTH. 193 
 
 me. It seems to have given me in many ways new views 
 of life, which I hope may be more lasting than such changes 
 are wont to be. It is not often I express my real thoughts 
 to any one, so you must not be surprised if, after all my 
 efforts, you find me still falling back. I have felt much in 
 the past few years the want of a friend to talk to. You 
 will say that a wife is the only such friend a man ought to 
 have when he comes to my age ; but as that is quite out 
 of the question, I cannot help sometimes, or indeed often, 
 feeling the want very keenly. It is the only thing to keep 
 one up to the mark." 
 
 Illness was added to other causes of depression. He 
 was ill both in 1872 and 1873. His constitution, naturally 
 robust and vigorous, was beginning to feel the effect of 
 continuous wear and tear. Relying upon his unusual 
 powers of endurance, he took no care of himself, but 
 worked on regardless of results. " During the whole 
 spring and summer" of 1874, as he tells a friend, he was 
 disabled by " a tedious illness." He attributed it himself 
 to want of holiday. Two days were all that he had at 
 Easter, 1874; his Whitsuntide holiday was cut down, as 
 I have already said, to one day, by the news of Mr 
 Crotch's illness. In July he went again to Liverpool, to 
 meet the brother and sister of his dead friend on their 
 return to England, and thence he went again for a few 
 days to the Lakes. He had been suffering in the interval, 
 but his short outing appeared to set him on his legs again 
 for a time. In August he writes, " I have managed to get 
 on wonderfully well this month ; not fit for anything but 
 my library work, but still able to do this to my satis- 
 faction." 
 
 In the summer of 1874 he was elected a member of the 
 committee of the Palaeographical Society, which had just 
 been established. Mr Bond, the late librarian of the British 
 Museum, had written to Bradshaw as far back as July 
 
 O
 
 194 LIBRARIANSIIIP, 1867-75. 
 
 1869, to consult him about the formation of such a society, 
 for the purpose of publishing facsimiles from manuscripts 
 illustrating the characteristics of mediaeval handwriting and 
 other matters connected with palaeography. The project 
 hung fire for three or four years, but was taken up again 
 actively in 1873. Bradshaw at first hesitated to join in it, 
 not knowing under whose management the publication of 
 facsimiles would be carried on. It was not till he felt 
 assured that the conduct of affairs would really be in the 
 hands of such competent authorities as Mr Bond and 
 Mr E. M. Thompson, that he consented to become a 
 member. Though elected a member of the committee 
 of management, he seems to have taken but little share 
 in the working of the society, and his own contributions 
 were confined to descriptions of two of the manuscripts * 
 of which facsimiles were published. 
 
 He was, indeed, in no condition to throw himself actively 
 into such employment. He was still ailing and depressed. 
 The solitude of September weighed heavily upon him. In 
 answer to a letter from a friend, he writes, " You don't know 
 what a luxury it [the letter] was in that most lonely of all 
 months at Cambridge. ... In spite of all my expectations, 
 I was actually alone in college only for half an hour one 
 day, but it felt sufficiently dismal nevertheless." A visit 
 from Dr Murray, editor of the " Philological Dictionary," 
 towards the end of the Long Vacation, was a great delight. 
 " I enjoyed more than I can well describe," he says, " the 
 pleasure of having Dr Murray here for some days. I re- 
 lieved him of his journey to Blickling, as he found so much 
 more than he expected to do here ; and the gain to me of 
 meeting such a real scholar was untold." A short ex- 
 cursion to Scotland, and some pleasant days spent at 
 
 * These two manuscripts were (l) the manuscript of Bede's " Ecclesiastical 
 History" (Camb. Kk. v. 16 : Pal. Soc. Publ., vol. ii., plates 139, 140 ; and 
 (2) the " Book of Deer " (Camb. Ii. vi. 32: Pal. Soc. Publ., vol. ii., plates 
 210, 21 1).
 
 RECOVERY OF HEALTH. 195 
 
 Longlcat and Blickling, in exploring the treasures of those 
 famous libraries, made him happy for the time, but did him 
 no permanent good. Early in 1875 he writes, " I am not 
 up to much at present ; " and again, in a fragment of a 
 diary, "March 9-16. Hardly any regular work done; 
 incessant interruptions and illness." At Easter he took 
 a longer holiday than he had enjoyed for years, spending 
 nearly a fortnight with a junior Fellow of his college in 
 Milan and the Italian lakes. He was not well at the time, 
 and an attempt to walk up the Monte Motterone near Strcsa 
 showed that his strength was not great. But travelling 
 always revived him, and he was in good spirits all the time. 
 On the way home he visited Freiburg-im-Breisgau, to see 
 the copy of the Mentelin Bible preserved there, and spent 
 half a day at Luxemburg in company with the fragment 
 of the " Hisperica Famina" which he had been so eager to 
 see. On his return to England he was again laid up. He 
 hated calling in a doctor, but he did so on this occasion, 
 and was completely cured. A little later he was able to 
 write, " Since the end of May I have been at work, and 
 better than I have been for years." A more careful 
 regimen, and more attention to exercise and relaxation, 
 kept him from falling back into his former state. From 
 this time to the end of his life he was never, except on 
 one occasion in 1885, prevented by illness for more than 
 a day or two from doing his work.
 
 ( 196 ) 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 I HAVE thought it best to put together in a separate chapter 
 some continuous account of Bradshavv's work on typo- 
 graphy and Chaucer during the first eight years of his 
 librarianship, as these were the subjects which most fully 
 occupied his attention during, at any rate, the earlier part 
 of that time. 
 
 It was in February, 1868, that he published the first 
 of his " Memoranda," a title which he gave to a series of 
 little pamphlets, or brochures, intended to contain such 
 outcome of his studies as he thought likely to interest 
 others concerned in the same pursuits. The project of 
 issuing such a series had been for some time in his mind. 
 The germ of it may perhaps be detected in the series of 
 "Literary Remains" which he contemplated in 1858, or 
 in the fortnightly bulletin which he promised M. Holtrop 
 in 1866.* In the latter year he printed what was meant 
 to be the first instalment, but this particular paper never 
 went further than a proof in slips. The proof before me, 
 which belongs to Mr Blades, is headed as follows : 
 " Memoranda chiefly concerning early printed books and 
 manuscripts and the older literature of different nations ; 
 collected by Henry Bradshaw." The paper deals with the 
 history of printing at Bruges in the fifteenth century, but 
 only embraces the work of Colard Mansion, Caxton's 
 master, and of the successor who used his type after 
 
 * See above, pp. 71, 141.
 
 THE PRINTER OF THE HISTORIA S. ALBANI. 197 
 
 Mansion's flight from Bruges in 1484. Bradshaw evidently 
 intended to go on with other printers at Bruges, and with 
 the history of Belgian typography in general. But he felt 
 that his views on these subjects were not ripe for publica- 
 tion, arid he therefore suppressed them. In his own hand- 
 writing at the head of the proof are the words, " This was 
 done before I went to Bruges [in 1866], and must not 
 now be taken as any authority.* No more was ever done 
 to it." 
 
 Unfortunately, the project of a continuous series of 
 publications was not adhered to long. Only eight numbers 
 of the " Memoranda " were ever issued, and of these only 
 six are on subjects connected with the original plan. The 
 first number actually published is entitled " The Printer of 
 the Historia S. Albani," and was issued in February, 1868. 
 The books attributed to Ulric Zel which he bought in 
 December, 1867, may have stimulated him to the production 
 of this little tract, but the work of which it is the result was 
 mainly done at Oxford in 1866. On that occasion, he says 
 in the preface, he made "a catalogue of about one hundred 
 quarto books, all printed (apparently) at Cologne." With 
 respect to this paper, I will only say here, by way of explana- 
 tion, that " The Printer of the Historia S. Albani " is the 
 title which he gives to a nameless and hitherto unknown 
 worker, whom he shows to have printed several of the books 
 attributed, but wrongly, to Ulric Zel. Far from wishing 
 to keep his results to himself, he states that his object in 
 publishing these notes is to induce others to follow up the 
 same line of research, and to add to his discoveries. Not 
 that he expected much in this way, for in requesting Mr 
 Macmillan to allow his name as publisher to appear on the 
 title-page, he says, " I do not want it [the paper] advertised 
 or anything of that kind, for there are but three people in 
 
 * I have consulted Mr Blades on this point. He informs me that the 
 results ariived at in the paper are not to be considered as final, and that he 
 cannot recommend its publication.
 
 198 . LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 the United Kingdom who would care to see it, and they 
 will see it anyhow. There are some persons abroad, how- 
 ever, who interest themselves in these matters, and if there 
 is a London address visible it can be ordered without any 
 difficulty." 
 
 For the next few years most of Bradshaw's leisure, 
 which was little enough, was occupied with the subject 
 of early printing in England and in foreign countries. 
 Writing to M. Holtrop in April, 1868, he says, ' You 
 will wonder what it is that has suddenly made me put 
 away my bad habit of silence and take up my pen to 
 write to you. It is the unexpected discovery yesterday 
 of what I believe to be a new fact in our common subject." 
 After describing his discovery, he goes on, " Since my 
 election I have hardly had a day to give to the matter 
 of early printed books, I have had such a multiplicity of 
 details of other kinds to attend to. ... You must not 
 think that I have forgotten your ' Thierry Martens.' I 
 don't know how I can thank you sufficiently for the honour 
 that you do me by dedicating it to me. It is an honour 
 which I little deserve, and a recognition of fellow-working 
 which I am never likely to receive from any one else. The 
 book is a true Etude bibliographique. . . . You have in- 
 augurated a new era in the bibliography of incunabula, 
 and I hope you may yet live long to see the spread of 
 your ideas." The hope was not to be gratified. It was 
 the last letter which Bradshaw wrote to his old friend. 
 
 Not long after this, another recognition of Bradshaw's 
 services to bibliography came from the Continent. In 
 November, 1869, he was made a " corresponding member " 
 of the Societe des Bibliophiles de Belgique. Meanwhile, 
 in the University Library he was putting his " museum," 
 as he called it, into order ; that is, he was arranging the 
 early printed books in the new part of the library where 
 he himself mostly lived and worked. He placed them
 
 INDEX TO THE MEYER COLLECTION. 199 
 
 on the shelves according to the same plan on which he 
 made his catalogues, that is to say, on a plan which would 
 at once display their affinities and lines of development. 
 In a note-book for November, 1869, he writes, "Since I 
 was at Ghent I have fairly begun to arrange my museum 
 of early printing under countries, towns, and printers, and 
 I have done England, Belgium and Holland very satis- 
 factorily." In the autumn of the same year he made 
 an excursion to Ghent to view the Meyer Collection, which 
 was to be sold shortly afterwards. Before starting he drew 
 up a complete list of all the fifteenth-century books in 
 the sale catalogue, rearranging them according to the plan 
 which he followed in his own collection. This list he took 
 with him, and with its aid he worked for a whole day in 
 the sale-room, seeing with his own eyes everything "he 
 wanted to buy. The Syndicate placed 100 at his dis- 
 posal for the purchase of books. The books which he 
 bought came to nearly double the money, but the Syndics 
 had such confidence in his judgment that they sanctioned 
 the whole of the expenditure. 
 
 His "classified index," as he called it, of the fifteenth- 
 century books in the Meyer Collection was published in 
 April, 1870, as the second number of his " Memoranda," 
 with a preface and notes on disputed points. In the 
 preface he draws a sharp contrast between the condition 
 of typographical knowlege in Belgium and elsewhere. 
 " It very rarely happens," he says, " that a sale catalogue 
 is drawn up with such care and knowledge as regards 
 early printed books as to render the formation of such 
 an index as the present in any way possible, unless after 
 a careful verification by the books themselves. Indeed, 
 Ghent is almost the only place where there seems to 
 be any attempt to give the attention to this subject which 
 nevertheless is rendered all the more necessary from the 
 very high prices which almost any good specimens of
 
 200 LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 early printing are sure to bring. The auction catalogues 
 issued by the first houses in England and France are a 
 standing disgrace to the two countries so far as this class 
 of books is concerned, and yet there are no signs of a 
 change for the better. The present index was drawn up 
 at first simply for my own convenience. It is now at 
 the service of any persons who take an interest in the 
 subject." 
 
 Shortly before the publication of this index, M. Holtrop, 
 librarian of the Royal Library at the Hague, had died 
 (February 13, 1870). At the conclusion of his preface, 
 Bradshaw pays a graceful tribute to his memory in the 
 following words : " I little thought, when these pages were 
 sent to the press, that death would deprive me of one 
 of the greatest pleasures which I anticipated from printing 
 them. It is not for me to speak of that combination of 
 gentleness and modesty, combined with deep research, 
 which characterized everything which came from M. 
 Holtrop's pen, so far as I ever had the privilege of knowing 
 him. Those who knew him while he lived will readily 
 understand the keen pleasure with which I looked forward 
 to bringing him this year the firstfruits of my attempts 
 to follow in his footsteps, and to becoming personally 
 acquainted with one whom I had so long known only 
 by correspondence. My desire in these studies was to 
 be a willing pupil of his ; my pleasure, to prove to him 
 that his work was the solid foundation on which others 
 could stand to pursue the same inquiries to still further 
 and clearer results." 
 
 In February, 1870, occurred a still more important sale 
 than that of M. de Meyer namely, that of the Culemann 
 Library. This collection contained upwards of seven 
 hundred fifteenth-century books, of which Bradshaw made 
 a classified list similar to that which he had made of the 
 Meyer Collection. " Of course, it is only in certain groups,"
 
 INDEX TO THE CULEMANN COLLECTION. 201 
 
 he writes to a friend, " that I am familiar enough with 
 them to correct the mistakes [in the sale catalogue], but 
 it is a very interesting collection, and I hope very much 
 I may be allowed to buy something of interest." The 
 Syndics placed 300 at his disposal, and he obtained 
 almost everything that he wanted. Unfortunately, the index 
 was never printed, probably because points were involved 
 which Bradshaw was unable at the time to settle to his 
 satisfaction. The manuscript is, however, preserved among 
 his papers. To some readers it may appear that the 
 making of these classified lists, to which Bradshaw devoted 
 so much of his time, is a mere matter of arrangement, 
 a work which any clerk would be capable of doing. But 
 this is far from being the case. Not to mention the 
 invention of a system of classification, which substitutes 
 order for disorder, and elevates into the rank of a science 
 what would otherwise be a mass of disconnected facts, 
 the making of such lists involves not only a wide knowledge 
 of typographical history, and a minute acquaintance with 
 the habits and characteristics of different printers, but 
 the power of putting facts together and making correct 
 deductions from them. Such lists are necessarily the 
 materials out of which any general history of typography 
 must be built. 
 
 These two were by no means the only catalogues which 
 he made about this time. He compiled another of the 
 English fifteenth-century books at the Bodleian Library, 
 which appears to have been only part of a much larger plan. 
 Two letters to Mr Blades, written in April, 1870, throw 
 light on his intentions. Speaking of his index to the 
 Meyer Collection, he says, "The notes you will perhaps 
 find some interest in, as I have propounded my views 
 of the classification of such books as strongly as I can, 
 and I do not despair of eventually working upon that 
 most hopeless of all places, the British Museum. On
 
 202 LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 Saturday last, being unable to leave Cambridge, I spent 
 fifteen hours in constructing a complete list of all the 
 books and fragments of any kind printed in England in 
 the fifteenth century which are in the Bodleian Library, 
 with all the library-marks carefully given. ... In the case 
 of all except W. de Machlinia, Pynson, and W. de Worde, 
 I have given references to my own complete classified 
 lists of the English presses, which I have very nearly ready 
 for printing. . . . You have not seen my museum of early 
 printing in the University Library, where I have all the 
 fifteenth-century books arranged by countries, towns, and 
 printers. I have finished Holland, Belgium, and England, 
 and have my brief hand-lists ready made. I think I shall 
 print these for convenience before I print a regular 
 catalogue. When you are able to come down here again, 
 I shall have great pleasure in showing you our Colard 
 Mansion's 'Boece' of 1477, with a miniature to each of the 
 five books by a contemporary Bruges artist. How little 
 I dreamt three years ago of ever getting or being able 
 to get such a thing ! 
 
 " As soon as I have done the Bodleian, I think I shall 
 make bold and attack the British Museum. ... If I can 
 persuade the people at the Hague to publish annual 
 supplementary catalogues of their additions for Holland, 
 and the Royal Library at Brussels to do the same for 
 Belgium, then I think there will be little difficulty in 
 doing the same for England, and with these three countries 
 thus done, we may be able to shame France, and eventually 
 Italy and Germany, into doing something at least for 
 themselves. . . . When I have got the types all settled, 
 I want to attack the woodcuts, and to give an account of 
 all the series cut, stating for what books they were cut, 
 and where they were used afterwards for other books. 
 Some very curious things would come out in this way. 
 I have got a good mass of material ready. I shall be
 
 INDEX TO THE BODLEIAN COLLECTION. 203 
 
 very glad to see you whenever you can come down, though 
 you will necessarily think my poor museum very pre- 
 tentious, seeing how poorly provided we are in every- 
 thing almost, as compared with either Oxford or the 
 British Museum." 
 
 Writing to Mr G. I. F. Tupper about the same time, 
 he says, " Having got my types pretty fairly sorted, I 
 want to attack the woodcuts, and first those produced 
 in England. All I can do myself is to make lists of 
 them, and trace out what the series in each case consists 
 of, and what book they were cut for. This is most im- 
 portant, but it is not enough. Now, to have a regular 
 lithographed series would cost very far more than I or 
 any one I know could afford, but if I could get even 
 less elaborate tracings of them, which I could place side 
 by side and use, I think a great deal might be done. 
 The album would, of course, be a unique collection ; but 
 then, after having had the benefit of seeing the things 
 side by side, and so educing results which can only be 
 obtained by that process, a selection might perhaps be 
 made, or something in the nature of a typical collection, 
 which might be published. . . . The danger with me is, 
 as you know only too well, my stopping midway from 
 some fastidiousness, and this is just what I wish to avoid, 
 for in the case I mention, what was done would be, so 
 far as it went, whole and complete in itself." This project 
 was, unfortunately, never carried out. 
 
 The list of fifteenth-century books in the Bodleian 
 alluded to above came to an untimely end, having been 
 the unlucky cause of almost the only unpleasant episode 
 which, so far as I am aware, marred the general harmony 
 of Bradshaw's relations with other learned men. He 
 had paid a short visit to Oxford in the autumn of 1868 
 and in a final search in the Bodleian had discovered 
 a new Caxton, entitled "Ars moriendi, that is to saye
 
 204 LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 the crafte for to deye for the helthe of marines sowle." * 
 He found this little work in the middle of a thick volume, 
 lettered on the back " Tracts," and belonging to the 
 Tanner Collection. He now apparently felt that he 
 had mastered the contents of the Bodleian in this depart- 
 ment, and accordingly drew up from his own notes a 
 classified list of all the books printed in England in the 
 fifteenth century preserved in that library. He sent it 
 to Mr Coxe in April, 1870, with a letter, in which he says, 
 " Being disgusted at not being able to get home for Easter, 
 I spent my Easter Eve in constructing a list of your 
 fifteenth-century books in the Bodleian from my pencil 
 notes taken when I was with you in 1866. It took me 
 between fifteen and sixteen hours hard writing, and I was 
 pretty well tired when I went to bed. On Monday I gave 
 it to my binder, who has just brought it back. I send it 
 you for your instruction and amusement, . . . but please 
 take care of it, as I have no other copy. ... If you allow 
 me to print the list, ... I would come over and verify the 
 references without wasting more of your Assistants' time 
 than I can help. ... I have no leisure for any work of this 
 kind now except at odd moments or in holiday time, but I 
 want to stir up our leading libraries to take some interest 
 in the matter. People give enormous prices for books 
 simply because they are printed by this or that man, 
 but no one takes the trouble to put the knowledge of 
 these things on a sound footing." A few days later 
 he wrote again, " It would be a great convenience if you 
 could print [the list], because it is not elaborate, and any 
 brief list of the contents of a great library is such a great 
 help towards seeing best how to make a fuller list if 
 needed." The list was intended (though perhaps this is 
 
 * This book is not to be confused with another work from Caxton's press, 
 "The arte and crafte to knowe well to dye." The discovery was reported, 
 not, we may be sure, by Bradshaw himself, in the Guardian and the Bookworm,
 
 INDEX TO THE BODLEIAN COLLECTION. 205 
 
 not clear from the above letters), as a gift to the Bodleian. 
 " I thought," Bradshaw wrote years later, " that I was 
 offering a little return for much kindness." 
 
 Unfortunately, the introductory remarks which he pre- 
 fixed to his list appear to have contained some words 
 reflecting on the management of the Bodleian * in regard 
 to early printed books, which not unnaturally produced 
 some resentment. Mr Coxe received the catalogue coldly, 
 hinted that it was superfluous, and demurred to publishing 
 it, at all events as it stood. " All this may be true," he 
 said, " but you must not expect me to thong the whip 
 wherewith we may be lashed." Bradshaw had not in the 
 least anticipated this reception, and no one ever felt a 
 snub more keenly than he. In a fit of discouragement 
 and vexation, he sent for the list again, and no sooner 
 received it than he tore it up and threw it into the fire. 
 It was the only copy that he had ; he never made another, 
 nor has any one hitherto attempted to make good the 
 loss. It was an unfortunate incident, not only for the 
 destruction of a valuable piece of work, but still more for 
 the estrangement which it produced between two excellent 
 men, who mutually liked and respected one another, and 
 neither of whom, we may be sure, had the smallest in- 
 tention of inflicting a wound. It is pleasant to reflect 
 that within a short time Bradshaw's relations with Mr Coxe 
 were again to all appearance as friendly as before. Never- 
 theless, on one side at least, the wound was never com- 
 pletely healed. Twelve years after the event, Bradshaw 
 was still obliged to write, " I have never enjoyed the 
 Bodleian since." 
 
 What was in Bradshaw's mind at this time is illustrated 
 by a letter which he wrote to Mr Winter Jones, librarian 
 of the British Museum, in April of this year. " Dear Mr 
 
 * The only fragment of the list which I have been able to discover is a 
 page which clearly forms part of a draft of the introduction.
 
 206 LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 Jones, for nearly two years past I have been most unfor- 
 tunate in not being able to see you. ... I was at the 
 Museum for a few hours yesterday, and had a long conver- 
 sation with Mr Rye on a subject which interests me very 
 much, and I am induced to write to you on the subject. 
 What I want is to ask if you can give me any encourage- 
 ment to hope that some steps will be taken towards a 
 systematic method of dealing with the vast treasures which 
 the Museum contains in the way of fifteenth-century books. 
 ... Of all the national libraries I have any knowledge of 
 Paris, Brussels, the Hague, Copenhagen, Vienna, and our 
 own the Museum is the only one where one can get no 
 information, except as it were by accident, as to what speci- 
 mens of early presses are to be seen there. ... I cannot 
 help feeling that it would be real economy of power, as 
 well as of funds, if you could have one of your staff told off 
 to this branch of work, some one whose business it should 
 be to deal with this class of books books which belong to 
 a period when printing ranks rather with the fine arts ; 
 when, from so many printers being their own type-founders, 
 the schools of type and woodcut are as capable of being 
 grouped by locality or country as pictures or engravings ; 
 and, as it is sometimes of great importance to know where 
 and when a particular book is printed, it often happens 
 that the volume which alone gives the clue is itself of no 
 importance or interest from a literary point of view. For 
 instance, in turning over a volume of fragments yesterday, 
 I found a bull of Sixtus IV, dated 1478, in the type of 
 the famous ' R ' printer, so often confounded with Mentelin. 
 His books are commonly put down to 1470, or earlier ; 
 and I believe no one ever thought of putting his books so 
 late as 1478. Yet this little piece is almost the only certain 
 date which is known in connection with this whole series of 
 books. This is only one instance of a thousand. I have 
 been at work for years trying to reduce the matter to a
 
 LETTER ON 7 HE BRITISH MUSEUM. 207 
 
 more scientific basis ; to be able to look at the treatment 
 of these books from a natural history point of view and 
 here your own little blue lists of genera in the zoological 
 department have been of material service to me my 
 object being to avoid the enormous amount of talk which 
 has for years past been associated with descriptions of early 
 printed books, and, by putting facts side by side in their 
 natural order, to let facts speak for themselves." He then 
 goes on to say that if the work were to be done, Mr J. H. 
 Hessels, "who has been aiding me, as well as working 
 under me, for several years past," would be the best man 
 to do it. He had lately been employing Mr Hessels to 
 make " a skeleton list of the fifteenth-century books in the 
 Grenville Collection, arranged according to the method I 
 always adopt [countries, towns, presses, etc.], and he has 
 succeeded beyond my expectations. All sorts of interest- 
 ing results have turned up already. Every collection I can 
 do like this is so much experience gained ; and I should 
 be glad to print the Grenville list as a specimen for 
 criticism, unless there was a chance of seeing the work 
 seriously undertaken at the Museum." This letter, unfor- 
 tunately, produced no effect. Mr Winter Jones regretted 
 that, owing to want of funds, its suggestions could not be 
 carried out. 
 
 The rebuff which he had received in a quarter where he 
 did not expect it, sharpened, no doubt, his sense of the loss 
 which he had sustained in M. Holtrop's death. He felt 
 himself lonely and unsupported in the pursuit of his 
 favourite studies. Writing to M. Campbell, who succeeded 
 M. Holtrop at the Hague, he says, " I cannot help feeling 
 a sort of loyalty to him as my chief in these things, in a 
 way that I feel towards no one at all in England or else- 
 where, because there is no one, except yourself, to whom I 
 can look for the least help and sympathy in these studies 
 in the way that they really demand. . . . Pray be good
 
 208 LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 enough to present my sincere condolence to Madame 
 Holtrop. I hope I may yet be enabled to express to her 
 in words some of the debt which I owe to her husband, 
 whose memory will always be sacred with me." The 
 answer which he received from M. Campbell contained 
 welcome expressions of sympathy. " Your letter," says 
 Bradshavv in reply, "has given me more pleasure than I 
 can find words to express that assurance of sympathy in 
 work as well as personal friendship, which is enough to 
 encourage the dullest to take heart and go on working." 
 He was still anxious to obtain the co-operation of other 
 libraries, in furthering the study of bibliography. Writing 
 to M. Campbell in May, 1870, he says, " I wish very much 
 that it were practicable to publish what the Germans call a 
 Jahresbericht, giving an account of what has turned up 
 during the year past in relation to these fifteenth-century 
 books. Of course, it would be impossible for any one to do 
 all the countries, but I cannot help thinking that something 
 might be done for one or two countries in the national 
 library of that country ; and by thus registering our know- 
 ledge, there would be some chance of turning it to better 
 account afterwards." He concludes a long letter of 
 remarks and queries about their common subject with the 
 words, " As all these things are now only the amusement 
 of my leisure hours, you can believe that I cannot give 
 very much attention to them ; and I am sure that you 
 cannot afford much time to read half what I should like to 
 write. Still, for all that concerns your own country, I am 
 bound to report to you any news that I have, as you are 
 my natural chief in this subject, and I feel bound to report 
 all new facts to head-quarters. Meantime, command my 
 services when you will, but do not let my letters become a 
 burden to you." 
 
 In June, 1871, Bradshaw published the third of his 
 "Memoranda," a pamphlet entitled, "A list of the founts
 
 LIST OF FOUNTS OF TYPE, ETC. 209 
 
 of type and woodcut devices used by printers in Holland 
 in the fifteenth century." This list was based on the 
 " Monuments Typographiques " of M. -Holtrop. It begins 
 with a table showing the order in which the different 
 countries of Europe, and Holland among them, adopted 
 the invention of printing in the fifteenth century. Then 
 follows a list of the towns of Holland at which books were 
 printed before 1500; and, finally, a list of the different 
 presses, and of the types and devices (if any) used at each 
 press, with the name of a specimen book in which each 
 type is used. Four facsimiles of leaves from books, not 
 given in the " Monuments," are added as an appendix to 
 this little pamphlet of four and twenty pages, into which an 
 enormous amount of labour and knowledge is compressed. 
 The list, in fact, gives a complete outline of the history of 
 typography in Holland during the first thirty years of its 
 existence. It is only an outline, it is true ; but in order to 
 draw it, every book, and every fragment of a book, printed 
 in Holland during that period had to be examined, either 
 in the original or in facsimile, and placed in its proper 
 position in the full catalogue of books, of which this is only 
 the essence or the skeleton. The whole development of 
 the art in this one country is here for any one at all con- 
 versant with the subject, the life and death or retirement 
 of each printer, the work of each fount of type, and its 
 transfer from one press or one master-printer to another. 
 
 With the exception of a " Notice of a fragment of the 
 Fifteen Oes and other prayers printed at Westminster by 
 W. Caxton about 1490-1491," published as a "Memo- 
 randum" in 1877, the list mentioned above was the last 
 piece of work on the subject of early typography which 
 Bradshaw completed. The intervals of leisure which he 
 could spare for working at the subject became shorter 
 and shorter. The appearance of M. Campbell's book, 
 " Annales de la typographic neerlandaise au xv me siecle," 
 
 P
 
 2io LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 stimulated him for a short time to fresh activity. He had 
 anxiously awaited the appearance of this book. Writing 
 to M. Campbell in June, 1873, he says, "I am delighted to 
 hear that you are really going to press this autumn with 
 your account of Dutch and Belgian fifteenth-century books. 
 I believe I have never looked forward to a book with so 
 much interest and anxiety. . . . What would I give for a 
 month at the Hague ! only I should tire you to death." 
 
 The book appeared in the autumn of 1874, and Brad- 
 shaw, having devoured it with his accustomed avidity, at 
 once sent off a letter of congratulation and criticism to 
 M. Campbell. " I indeed congratulate you heartily," he 
 writes, " on having brought out your book. In publishing 
 it you have presented me with what I have desired with a 
 greater desire than any book that I could name during all 
 my previous life ; so please accept my warmest thanks as 
 one of the public. I received it on Tuesday morning, and 
 I read it straight through, from title-page to errata, by 
 Saturday, and during the last week I have been going 
 through it backwards and forwards in search of all sorts 
 of things. I have never in my life written a notice of any 
 book in a periodical, but I must try and write some notice 
 of this before long. ... I have felt always that any work 
 of mine upon this subject was fruitless unless I had all the 
 facts before me, or at least the means of placing them 
 before me as you have at the Hague ; but now your book 
 gives me a fresh starting-point, and my only regret is that 
 I have so little leisure to work the subject. ... I have 
 delayed doing anything towards regularly cataloguing our 
 fifteenth-century books till your book came out, but now I 
 shall soon hope to undertake it." 
 
 The catalogue alluded to in this letter was never com- 
 pleted. Indeed, from this time onward Bradshaw did 
 but little work on early typography. Not that he lost 
 interest in the study, for a subject once taken up never
 
 CONNECTION WITH EARLY ENGLISH TEXT SOCIETY. 21 1 
 
 ceased to interest him ; but leisure was wanting. The 
 attractions of other studies especially that of Chaucer the 
 lack of sympathy and co-operation in his typographical 
 researches, and, more than all, the growing pressure of his 
 official engagements at the library, combined to make him 
 gradually give up a subject on which, under more favour- 
 able circumstances, he might have produced a great and 
 exhaustive work. 
 
 The history of early printing, although it occupied 
 most of Bradshaw's leisure, did not engross the whole of it 
 during the years immediately following his promotion in 
 the library. For several years in fact, ever since they first 
 became acquainted he had carried on a correspondence 
 with Dr Furnivall. Hitherto the chief subject of this cor- 
 respondence had been the selection and editing of works 
 for the Early English Text Society. This society was 
 founded in 1864, for the purpose of printing and publishing 
 the less-known remnants of early English literature. Dr 
 Furnivall submitted the prospectus of the society to Brad- 
 shaw in February, 1864, and received his assistance in 
 arranging a plan of publication. He also frequently con- 
 sulted him on points connected with the works to be 
 published, and the latter went so far as to promise to edit 
 " William of Palerne." * But other engagements, as usual, 
 interfered. In vain Dr Furnivall wrote, truly enough, in 
 May, 1865, "You can edit 'William of Palerne' quite 
 well, and you know you can ; only you like doing bits of 
 twenty-five things instead of finishing one ; and so you 
 must be bullied and taunted till you stick to your William, 
 and do what you have promised." As, however, no one 
 ever lived on whom pressure of this kind had less effect 
 than Bradshaw, Dr Furnivall's efforts were fruitless, and 
 he was forced to look for an editor elsewhere. 
 
 * This work, also known as " William and the Werewolf," was afterwards 
 edited by Professor Skeat, for the Early English Text Society.
 
 212 LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 From 1867 onwards the correspondence was chiefly 
 about Chaucer. That Bradshaw had been devoting a great 
 deal of his spare time to the study of Chaucer is clear 
 from the contents of his note-books. In August, 1867, for 
 instance, he notes the results of reading through Chaucer's 
 " Boecius." He found in this work the source of the balade 
 of " Fortune and the Pleyntyf," " almost the whole of which 
 is here in substance." Here, too, he discovered the origin 
 of the " Etas prima," and of the " sixteen stanzas of argu- 
 ment on predestination which Chaucer puts into the mouth 
 of Troilus." His note-books during this period abound 
 with remarks about the rhyme-endings, pronunciation, and 
 orthography of the poet 
 
 On the question of orthography, he writes to Dr Fur- 
 nivall (August, 1867) as follows: "About the Chaucer 
 affairs, of course my whole object is to be upset or con- 
 firmed by Morris, Ellis, and others. What I insist on is 
 that until some of you begin to edit books, there is no 
 chance for any of us learning anything. When I give you 
 my skeleton of the ' Canterbury Tales,' in my spelling, 
 you will be able to say, ' What gross ignorance ! He 
 doesn't even know that the imperative singular in that 
 verb has no e at the end ; ' and so on. For instance 
 
 " ' Stryve not as doth the crokke with the vval.' 
 
 Out of seventeen copies, sixteen read stryve and one reads 
 stryf (which Morris says is the right form), and that not 
 one of the oldest manuscripts of the poem. This is only 
 one instance in a thousand to show that you cannot trust 
 the best manuscripts for spelling rightly. . . . What do 
 you think of this ? Suppose, to begin with, I take particular 
 terminations, as ee, y, ay, ey, 6y, ye, aye, eye, dye, and 
 extract all the words in order as I find them in Chaucer, 
 then group them according to their origin, and give the 
 references, arranging the words in grammatical and alpha-
 
 CHAUCER ORTHOGRAPHY, CANTERBURY TALES, ETC. 213 
 
 betical order. Then, beginning with these endings, one 
 might go on to the others, and by means of "a series of 
 papers at the Philological Society, with discussions thereon, 
 we might come to some determination. The Philological 
 Society is the only place I can think of where one would 
 be able to meet Ellis and Morris, and others sufficiently 
 interested to take part in the discussion. It seems to me 
 that by some such process we might make some solid 
 advance in English grammar, and I should be very glad to 
 bear my part in the work." His theory was that by a 
 close analysis and comparison of Chaucer's rhymes it 
 would be possible to ascertain the contemporary pronun- 
 ciation of many doubtful words. The pronunciation would 
 throw light on the derivation, showing whether the words 
 came direct from the Latin, or through the French, 
 or from some other source ; and this in its turn would go 
 far to fix the orthography and give a philological explana- 
 tion of the growth of the language. 
 
 In 1867 he had gone far enough with his Chaucer work 
 to feel himself justified in putting something into type. He 
 accordingly printed a short paper, entitled, " The Skeleton 
 of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales : an attempt to distinguish 
 the several fragments of the work as left by the author." 
 In the preface to this paper, dated September 8, 1867, he 
 says, " My purpose in printing these sheets is purely tem- 
 porary ; but it has struck me that by printing a few more 
 copies than were necessary for my immediate object, and 
 circulating them among those who take an interest in the 
 textual criticism of our early authors, and especially of 
 Chaucer, they might see how very far we are as yet from 
 the possibility of a satisfactory edition of Chaucer, and 
 how much it lies in any scholar's power to lend a helping 
 hand." But he still hesitated to publish what he had 
 written. " I came to the conclusion," he says later, " that 
 the remarks were too crude even for such a temporary
 
 214 LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 publication as I then contemplated." He accordingly 
 suppressed it for several years, and when at length, in 
 November, 1871, he published the paper as No. 4 of the 
 Memoranda, it was with a sort of apology for its appear- 
 ance. I reserve an account of the contents of the paper 
 for another place.* 
 
 In the autumn of 1867 the Chaucer Society was 
 founded. In his own mind, Dr Furnivall tells me, one 
 of its principal objects was to collect the materials on 
 which Bradshaw might base a standard edition of the poet 
 Writing to him in September, 1867, Dr Furnivall says, 
 " The more I think of the Chaucer Society the more I like 
 it, and if you'd say that you'd help, in choice of texts, etc., 
 and on committee, I should start it at once." The circular 
 proposing to issue the six best texts of the " Canterbury 
 Tales" in parallel columns, was submitted to Bradshaw, and 
 received his criticisms. His opinion was distinctly against 
 the six-text edition, and in favour of editing each of the 
 selected manuscripts separately, f Writing to Dr Furnivall 
 nearly a year later, he says, " When you determined to 
 start a Chaucer Society, you remember we discussed the 
 way of printing. You were for doing what you still insist 
 on doing printing six copies parallel. I urged what I still 
 consider the only rational way printing a manuscript as it 
 stands, only with all the divisions and subdivisions marked." 
 
 In September, 1868, Dr Furnivall visited Cambridge, 
 and apparently induced Bradshaw to promise regular 
 assistance. During the rest of this year their corre- 
 spondence was very active, and under the stimulus of Dr 
 Furnivall's sympathy and enthusiasm, Bradshaw for some 
 time threw himself warmly into the work of the Chaucer 
 Society. Letter followed letter in rapid succession, as was 
 his wont when he was in the mood for writing. In one 
 
 * See below, p. 221, and chap. xi. 
 
 t The six texts were first published collectively, afterwards separately.
 
 CHAUCERS CANTERBURY TALES. 215 
 
 of these letters he visualises the whole of the journey to 
 Canterbury in his mind's eye. Speaking of the hill above 
 Boughton, on the Canterbury Road, he says, " It is the 
 difficulty of this hill which no doubt caused the danger to 
 the sleepy Cook * which causes the fun of the Manciple's 
 prologue, just as it caused the break of the narrative 
 between the Chanoun's Yeman and the Doctor, on the 
 journey to Canterbury the day before. No doubt you 
 will say this is carrying the matter much too far. But all 
 I want is to picture to myself the thing as it was, and 
 anything which helps me to do this interests me." In 
 another letter, he quotes a contemporary description of what 
 the pilgrims do at Canterbury.! "You will see that the 
 pilgrims arrive at Canterbury 'at mydmorowe.' They go 
 straight to the inn the Checker or the Hope see to their 
 lodging, take rooms, etc., and at once go off to the shrine 
 in their travelling-dress, and are duly anointed by the 
 monks at the cathedral. This must have been in the fore- 
 noon ; at any rate, not late. Then they go back to the inn 
 and have their midday meal, the gentles putting on a 
 change of clothes, and all of them spending the afternoon 
 and evening to their hearts' content, only taking care to 
 get to bed in very good time so as to be ready to start 
 off on the return journey at the first approach of dawn." 
 The imaginative sympathy which these passages display 
 must have been of great use to Bradshaw in dealing with 
 such problems as those connected with the reconstruction 
 of the " Canterbury Tales." Dr Furnivall was quite right 
 
 * An allusion to the host's words : 
 
 " Is ther no man for prayer ne for hyre, 
 That wol awake our felawe al behynde ? 
 A theef him might ful lightly robbe and bynde. 
 Se how he nappith, se, for Goddes boones ! 
 That he wol falle fro his hors at ones." 
 
 " Manciple's Prologue," lines 6-ro. 
 
 t From the Prologue to the "Tale of Beryn " (Chaucer Soc. Publ., 2nd 
 series, 1876).
 
 216 LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 in saying to him, " cares for language, for metre, 
 
 I for neither, only story and social life and opinion ; you 
 for all, and that's best." 
 
 During part of the time while this interchange of letters 
 was going on, Bradshaw was also corresponding with Mr 
 W. M. Rossetti. One of the questions on which their 
 discussion turned was the meaning of Chaucer's phrase in 
 the Troilus, " myn auctour Lollius." * Whom did Chaucer 
 mean by Lollius ? Mr Rossetti believed him to mean 
 Petrarch, who was familiarly called Laelius. Bradshaw, 
 on the other hand, maintained that Chaucer, in naming 
 " Lollius " as his authority, was merely carrying out his 
 habitual practice of concealing his real authority and sub- 
 stituting the name of some other author, often, as in this 
 case, one whose works were entirely lost. Similarly, in a 
 passage in the " Monk's Tale," t when he introduces an 
 incident not found in either of the sources whence the rest 
 of the tale is drawn, he supports it by citing another lost 
 author, " as seyth Trophee." This, says Bradshaw, has 
 nothing to do with " trophy," or, in other words, Filostrato. 
 who is defined by Boccaccio as " a man conquered or made 
 a trophy of by love," but refers to " ille vates Chaldaeorum 
 Trophseus." " Later people," he remarks, " have been 
 bitten with a taste for a library of lost authors, and I think 
 Chaucer may fairly be said to have led the way in this 
 kind of work." 
 
 In proving his point, Bradshaw spared no pains to 
 convince his correspondent. " I am quite ashamed," he 
 says, "of making you read so much, but I cannot help 
 myself when I am deeply interested in a question." With 
 
 * "Troilus and Criseide," book i., line 394. The passage in question is 
 undoubtedly translated from Boccaccio's " Filostrato," which, according to Mr 
 Rossetti, was in early times attributed to Petrarch (See Chaucer Soc. Publ., 
 xliv., Ixv.). 
 
 t " At both the worldes endes, as saith Trophee, 
 In stede of boundes he [Hercules] a piler sette." 
 
 " Monk's Tale," lines 127, 128.
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH ROSSETTI AND FURNIVALL. 217 
 
 Dr Furnivall there was always the work of the Chaucer 
 Society or some proposal for publication to discuss. But 
 when urged to publish something, Bradshaw persistently 
 hung back, and pleaded for delay till something certain 
 and final could be produced. " There is one thing which 
 is always present with me," he writes : " I look forward to 
 a standard edition of Chaucer's works, which now does not 
 exist ; and if one's work is so far advanced that it is pos- 
 sible to anticipate conclusions now, I am, of course, for 
 adopting those conclusions in whatever work of the kind 
 the society does ; for it is a great evil in my mind to have 
 all the editions, or quasi-editions, different. ... It is this 
 that makes me anxious to discuss with Rossetti and you 
 and others before going to press. In plain words, I cannot 
 bear the thought of any publication coming forth with 
 authority, when it is merely the result of a few hasty and 
 crude speculations, which a little fair preliminary discus- 
 sion would get rid of." 
 
 This fundamental divergence on the principles of pub- 
 lication led to some harmless passages of arms between 
 the two friends. Dr Furnivall came in for a good deal of 
 scolding, which, it must be allowed, he accepted with 
 admirable good temper. Not unfrequently Bradshaw ex- 
 pressed his opinion of Dr Furnivall's ways with remarkable 
 plain-spokenness. For instance, in April, 1869, he writes : 
 
 "DEAR FURNIVALL, 
 
 " You are very aggravating sometimes, particu- 
 larly about the poisonous way in which you insist on 
 editing and prefacing your books, but I am afraid I cannot 
 take away my subscription from you. I shall want all 
 my four Chaucers. I must have two myself ; and of the 
 other two, one goes off to Sweden, and the other some- 
 where else. . . . 
 
 " Ever yours, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW."
 
 218 LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 Dr Furnivall was anxious enough to get him to do the 
 work which he found fault with. " I wish to goodness," he 
 says, " you would write the temporary prefaces to the six 
 texts ; it would be no end of a relief to me. ... If you 
 did but live in St George's Square, or we at Cambridge, 
 things would go on smoothly. And if you were producing, 
 and getting produced, as much as I am, and getting as 
 much pitched into, you'd be less particular about little 
 matters, and more tolerant. It's wearing boots and coats, 
 I suppose.* If you'd leave 'em off again, you'd be all right. 
 
 " Yours ever, 
 
 " F. J. F." 
 
 But Bradshaw could not work to time. It was not his 
 way, and if it had been, he had not leisure enough. " I 
 wish I had head to work at this now," he writes at Easter, 
 1869, "but it is out of the question. I looked for peace 
 this vacation, but I have been more incessantly at work 
 than during the last two terms. ... I have begun again 
 to-day going to the library at a quarter to six, so as to get 
 a good two hours before breakfast. I got through a great 
 deal in three months last year by doing so. I hope I may 
 be able to continue it now." Under such circumstances it 
 was no wonder that he was forced to allow others to go on 
 without him. The editor of the Edinburgh Review wished 
 to have an article from him on Chaucer ; he had no time 
 to write it. The Philological Society wanted to make him 
 a member of their council, but he could not have attended 
 meetings, and would not undertake duties which he could 
 not discharge. It was not surprising if he was sometimes 
 despondent, and talked of giving up his Chaucer work. 
 But he still looked forward to taking it up again by-and- 
 by. " As soon as I can get my museum in order," he 
 writes in April, 1870, " I shall take to manuscripts again, 
 * This refers to the incident narrated on p. 109.
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH DR TEN BRINK. 219 
 
 and work at my Chaucer. I find I cannot do two things 
 heartily at the same time, and it has been absolutely neces- 
 sary for me to work at these things lately." 
 
 It might have been expected that he would have mani- 
 fested some disappointment when others stepped into the 
 place that might have been his. But when Dr Bernhard 
 ten Brink, then Professor at Marburg, brought out his 
 " Chaucer-Studien," * there is not the slightest atom of 
 bitterness or jealousy in the single-hearted welcome which 
 he gave to the book. Writing to Dr ten Brink, on July I, 
 1870, he says : 
 
 "MY DEAR SIR, 
 
 "At last I have found in yourself the man 
 whom I have been longing to see for many years past, and 
 I feel sure that you will forgive me for my boldness in 
 writing to you direct, to thank you most warmly for the 
 first part of your ' Studien ' on Chaucer, which I have been 
 feasting on for a week or more. You have taken up so 
 entirely the lines of investigation which I had marked out, 
 and your preface so thoroughly expresses my own feelings 
 on the subject, that I am anxious to persuade you, if 
 possible, to come over to England, even for a week or a 
 fortnight, this summer, and see with your own eyes many 
 things which now you can only learn at second-hand. For 
 the most part, as you know, people content themselves 
 with criticisms on the ' Canterbury Tales/ and all those who 
 have touched the other poems have shrunk from anything 
 but a superficial study of them. Your division into periods 
 marked out by the first Italian journey, and the composi- 
 tion of the ' Legende,' shows at once the hold you have upon 
 the subject. Some years ago I announced a book called, 
 1 An attempt to ascertain the state of Chaucer's Works at 
 
 * This work was published in 1870. Dr ten Brink's work on "Chaucer's- 
 Sprache und Verskunst " was published in 1884.
 
 22O LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 his death, with some account of their subsequent history,' 
 but since I became librarian here, at the commencement of 
 1867, my leisure has been so limited that I have found it 
 quite impossible to put what I wish to say into print, and 
 I must content myself with the humbler duty which 
 belongs to a librarian of helping those who write. There 
 are many papers which I would gladly place at your 
 disposal, and there is much I should like to say, and I 
 want you also to see the manuscripts yourself, and so get 
 additional ideas, which, if they modify at all your present 
 conclusions, will only confirm them in the main. . . . But 
 I must write no more to-day. I hope you will be able to 
 come and satisfy 
 
 " Yours most sincerely, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 I cannot refrain from giving part of the letter with 
 which Dr ten Brink answered this unselfish recognition of 
 his work* 
 
 " MY DEAR SIR, 
 
 " Your friendly letter of July I was longer on 
 the way than might have been expected, as it had to 
 follow me from Minister to Marburg. This is one of the 
 reasons why my answer has been delayed one of the 
 reasons, but not the only one, for I must confess that, after 
 reading through your letter, I took some time to collect 
 myself, so great was my surprise and delight at receiving 
 it. To find on the other side of the Channel such a recog- 
 nition, so warm a sympathy for my studies, such a friendly 
 welcome at the hands of one of the most thorough, or 
 rather, the most thorough, of all living Chaucer scholars 
 this was more than in my boldest moments I dared to 
 hope for in connection with my book. I had good reason 
 
 * Dr ten Brink's letter is in German, which I have ventured to translate.
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH DR TEN BRINK:. 22 1 
 
 to be proud, and, more than that, I had good reason to 
 rejoice, that my literary efforts had won me the friendship 
 of so noble a character. For it is friendship which you 
 offer me, and that, too, a friendship of the highest kind, 
 resting on affinity of scientific aims and common admira- 
 tion for your great old poet With all my heart I clasp 
 the hand you hold out to me, and wish only that I may be 
 able to make the one return for your goodness which is 
 worthy of you, I mean by actively promoting the know- 
 ledge of Chaucer, and making the right use of the abundant 
 help you offer me. I cannot indeed avoid regretting that 
 want of leisure hinders you from drawing out of the 
 fulness of your knowledge and the depth of your research 
 instruction for the literary world, and from doing the work 
 which in its defective foreign shape you judge worthy of 
 your generous approbation, but which you could do far 
 better. On the other hand, I am compelled all the more 
 to admire a spirit so entirely free from egotism a spirit so 
 careless of thanks and rewards, and so wholly devoted to 
 furthering the cause of science. ... In conclusion, my dear 
 sir, be assured of the hearty admiration and gratitude of 
 your friend, 
 
 "BERNHARD TEN BRINK." 
 
 More than a year after this episode, in November, 1871, 
 Bradshaw published his " Skeleton of the Canterbury 
 Tales," which had been written as far back as 1867. In a 
 note appended to it he says, " Four years have witnessed 
 a considerable advance in the study of Chaucer, both in this 
 country and elsewhere ; and Dr Furnivall's labours during 
 that period have put far out of date any work that I have 
 done upon this subject. Nevertheless, as the sheets are 
 still standing in type, and as they represent a certain 
 amount of thought and labour and the views which I held 
 at that time (since, of course, very much modified), I have
 
 222' LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 thought it worth while to have a few copies struck off, 
 rather as a memorial of past work than as an earnest of 
 what is to come. Every day seems to render it less likely 
 that I shall ever put my hand again to any work of the 
 kind." It was in vain that Dr Furnivall and other friends 
 urged him to set to work and publish his results. The 
 following letter from Dr Furnivall, dated March, 1872, 
 has a melancholy significance in the light of after-events : 
 
 " MY DEAR B., 
 
 " Goldstucker's death,* with none of his powers, 
 none of the produce of his work, put into print for the help 
 of others to follow him, makes me write to you once again 
 to urge you to edit your Globe Chaucer at once, and do 
 justice to your work, that people may know it and be helpt 
 along by it. Not that you're likely to die, or that strong 
 you won't see weak me into the grave ; but if you go on 
 refusing to set down and produce your results, you'll leave 
 friends to lament, when you do die, the waste of power in 
 you. You can help, as Goldstucker could have helpt, this 
 time and after-times along. Why shouldn't you? You 
 are something more than a librarian. Do leave a record 
 of it. 
 
 " Yours always, 
 
 " F. J. F." 
 
 But it was not to be. The pressure of work in the 
 library prevented Bradshaw from continuing his researches, 
 except at rare intervals, and still more from maturing his 
 conclusions for publication, while incompatibility of tem- 
 perament and principles hindered him from taking much 
 part in the work of the Chaucer Society. The correspond- 
 ence with Dr Furnivall never ceased during Bradshaw's 
 life. Now and then, when anything struck him, or when 
 
 * Dr Goldstiicker, Professor of Sanscrit at University College, London, 
 died early in 1872.
 
 PROPOSALS FOR AX EDITION OF ClIAUCER. 22$ 
 
 any circumstance led him to recur to his old studies, he 
 would communicate it to his friend ; but letters after about 
 the year 1873 were comparatively few and far between. 
 After that time, though for several years more he con- 
 templated an edition of Chaucer, Bradshaw practically 
 relinquished the study of the poet 
 
 It will not be amiss, perhaps, to bring together here all 
 that passed between Bradshaw and various persons respect- 
 ing an edition of his favourite poet. In 1864 Professor 
 Earle undertook to edit for the Clarendon Press a standard 
 edition of Chaucer, to range with that of Shakespeare. It 
 was proposed that Mr Aldis Wright and Mr Bradshaw 
 should act as his collaborators. At first the latter hesitated, 
 according to his wont ; but he eventually acceded to the 
 proposal. Mr Earle paid him a visit at Cambridge 'in 
 1866, and induced him to promise to collate the Cambridge 
 manuscripts for the work. In March, 1866, Mr Macmillan 
 writes to him, " I am really delighted to hear that the great 
 Chaucer is in so prosperous a condition, and very willingly 
 abandon my idea till after the completion of that." The 
 idea alluded to was that of publishing a small edition of 
 the poet, to form part of the well-known Globe series. 
 A year or two later it became apparent that the prospect 
 of a large edition was becoming very uncertain, and the 
 idea of a Globe Chaucer was revived. Bradshaw under- 
 took to edit it. " There is no doubt," writes Mr Macmillan 
 in March, 1866, "that your decision to do this Globe 
 edition is the right one. No pamphlets or partial publica- 
 tions will do anything at all to give you your right position 
 as the Chaucer scholar, and the true Chaucer to the public, 
 like this." 
 
 In 1870 Professor Earle resigned the task which he 
 had undertaken. Professor Bartholomew Price, acting on 
 behalf of the delegates of the Clarendon Press, applied to 
 Mr Aldis Wright, who, however, declined the offer. An
 
 224 LITERARY WORK, 1867-75. 
 
 application to Professor (then Mr) Skeat was equally unsuc- 
 cessful. Professor Skeat, in his reply, wrote, " I have little 
 doubt that the man who knows the subject most thoroughly 
 is Mr Bradshaw, and I should not be justified in putting 
 myself before him." Thereupon Professor Price applied 
 to Mr Bradshaw, who, having first obtained a promise of 
 assistance from Mr Aldis Wright and Professor Skeat, wrote 
 immediately to accept the offer. Together with his answer 
 he sent a scheme of the edition as it seemed to him that it 
 ought to be. It was to be in six volumes, the first five 
 containing the text, the last consisting of excursuses, 
 indices, glossary, etc. The works of Chaucer were to be 
 arranged under the following heads : (i) the larger un- 
 doubted works, in chronological order ; (2) the minor 
 poems ; (3) doubtful works, that is, pieces doubtfully iden- 
 tified with works known to have been written by Chaucer ; 
 (4) works attributed to Chaucer in manuscripts of the 
 fifteenth century, but yet of questionable authority. The 
 plan appears to exclude several works attributed to Chaucer, 
 about the spuriousness of which Bradshaw had no doubt. 
 The " Canterbury Tales " are called in this scheme, " Twelve 
 Fragments of the Unfinished Canterbury Tales." The 
 " Romaunt of the Rose " is included under the head of 
 doubtful works. 
 
 He had, however, no sooner accepted the offer than he 
 began to draw back. A week later he wrote to say that 
 he was afraid he had promised too much. He was un- 
 willing to undertake so large a work without at least a 
 year's preparation ; he thought it would be better to publish 
 the Globe edition first ; and lastly, " If I were free for the 
 bulk of the day, I should like nothing better ; but the best 
 seven hours of the day are devoted to university work. . . . 
 The fact is, the work would require an amount of daylight 
 leisure which I can't give, and which no amount of money 
 could enable me to buy." A few more letters passed, and
 
 PROPOSALS FOR AN EDITION OF CHAUCER. 225 
 
 then the matter dropped. The edition was supposed to be 
 only temporarily deferred, but the project was not revived, 
 so far as I am aware, during Bradshaw's lifetime. 
 
 Nor did it fare better with the Globe edition. From 
 time to time Mr Macmillan and Dr Furnivall stirred Brad- 
 shaw up, but to no purpose. At length, in 1879, it was 
 suggested that Bradshaw and Furnivall should do the 
 edition together, and Bradshaw assented. They got as far 
 as discussing the title-page, on which Bradshaw wanted 
 his partner's name to stand first ; some specimen pages 
 were put in type, and the heads of an agreement with the 
 publishers were drawn up. A library edition, to be pub- 
 lished by the same firm, was also discussed. The plan of 
 this, as made out by Bradshaw, does not differ essentially 
 from that laid down for the Oxford edition. But, alas ! 
 nothing came of it, and neither Globe nor library edition 
 is yet in existence. Bradshaw could not even find time for 
 an article on Chaucer in the " Encyclopaedia Britannica," 
 though repeatedly pressed by the editor to write one.* His 
 only publication on the subject is, therefore, a solitary 
 " Memorandum."! 
 
 * The article was eventually undertaken by Professor Hales. 
 
 t Mr Aldis Wright tells me that he believes one of his reasons for stopping 
 short in his project was his inability to account for the wide divergences which 
 distinguish the Harleian manuscript (7334) of the " Canterbury Tales" from 
 all the other manuscripts.
 
 ( 226 ) 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE later portion of Henry Bradshaw's librarianship was, 
 it can hardly be doubted, happier than the earlier. His 
 health was improved ; the condition of things in the library 
 was more satisfactory ; he was becoming better known and 
 more widely appreciated in the university at large. Events 
 occurred which gave him more confidence in himself; as 
 president of the Library Association, as a member of the 
 Council of the University and the General Board of Studies, 
 he gained a reputation which he had not hitherto antici- 
 pated, and friends seemed to multiply as these causes led 
 him to abandon more and more his former position of 
 reserve. In one respect only had he reason for regret to 
 the day of his death he never obtained the leisure which 
 he craved, and without which it was impossible for him to 
 lay the results of his literary researches before the world. 
 He never ceased working at his favourite subjects, but the 
 calls of public duty grew more exacting every year, and 
 when at last he began to shuffle off the encumbrances of 
 office it was too late. 
 
 At the time of which I am speaking, about the year 
 1876, his Celtic studies were uppermost in his mind. Re- 
 turning health, and the conviction that a fruitful field lay 
 open here, stimulated him to new exertions. A letter to 
 M. Vanderhaeghen, of the University Library at Ghent, 
 written in November, 1875, shows that he was on the track of
 
 THE MARTYROLOGY OF ECHTERNACH. 227 
 
 another discovery, that of the " Echternach * Martyrology." 
 " I am very much interested," he writes, " in the Plantin 
 Library,f from many points of view. . . . One thing espe- 
 cially I am anxious about. Herbert Rosweyd was engaged 
 upon a facsimile reproduction (engraved on copper) of an 
 eighth-century manuscript ' Martyrologium,' borrowed by 
 Bollandus from the Abbey of Echternach. On Rosweyd's 
 death the work must have been suspended, when it had 
 proceeded as far as July. D'Achery obtained (about 1662) 
 from Moretus a copy of the facsimile sheets as far as July 
 from the unpublished stock at Antwerp, and Bollandus sent 
 him a transcript of the remainder from the original manu- 
 script, which was still in his keeping. The original manu- 
 script did not go back to Echternach and with the rest 
 of that collection to Luxemburg, and it is now probably 
 lying buried in some library. . . . The manuscript was the 
 earliest known copy of the ' Martyrology,' and must have 
 come from Ireland, as is clear both from the handwriting 
 (which is to be seen in the ' Acta Sanctorum '), and from the 
 mention of Irish saints otherwise unknown." 
 
 His object in writing to M. Vanderhaeghen was to see if 
 he could discover, in the Plantin collection, the stock of 
 plates whence the facsimile of the manuscript was printed, 
 but he had little expectation of lighting on the manuscript 
 itself. An accident, it would appear, led to his doing so. 
 In March, 1876, he remarks in his note-book that Dr 
 Wasserschleben's " Irische Kanonensammlung " \ has just 
 come. " I see at once that his manuscript 3 (at Paris) is 
 clearly from Brittany, and that it contains two Breton 
 glosses." He resolved to go to Paris to see the book in 
 
 * Sometimes spelt " Epternach." Echternach is a place on the eastern 
 frontier of the Duchy of Luxemburg. 
 
 t In the Musee Plantin at Antwerp. The family of Plantin is distinguished 
 in the history of typography. Christopher Plantin, the well-known printer, 
 lived in the middle of the sixteenth century. 
 
 + Published in 1874.
 
 228 LlBRARIANSHlP, 1875-82. 
 
 question, and not only examined it thoroughly, but dis- 
 covered in the Bibliotheque Nationale the " Echternach 
 Martyrology " which he had so long been in search of.* He 
 at once communicated the discovery to his old friend, Dr 
 Reeves, who says in his reply, " I am rejoiced to learn that 
 you have hunted down the ' Epternach Martyrology/ and I 
 feel intense satisfaction in having set you upon the pursuit. 
 Great value will, I hope, result from the discovery under 
 your able development. . . . For years and years I have 
 longed to know something substantial about this precious 
 document, and the more of its Irish character you can 
 establish the more dear will it be to my heart. It is, I 
 should suppose, the most venerable and important Christian 
 calendar in existence, even on common grounds ; but if its 
 extreme value can be associated with the Irish element, its 
 interest will be vastly enhanced." 
 
 From Paris Bradshaw went on to Brittany, where he 
 enjoyed the company of his friends Mr and Mrs F. W. 
 Cornish. On the way he called at Chartres, but could see 
 nothing in the library there, every one in authority being 
 away. He visited Quimper, and at Rennes he with great 
 difficulty obtained a sight of the cartulary of Redon. I 
 quote from his note-book an account of how he overcame 
 the obstacles that stood between him and this object of his 
 affections. " I went to the secretariat directly after ten, 
 and saw the under-secretary, M. 1'Abbe Querard. He was 
 very busy and very kind ; told me he could do nothing ; 
 recommended me to call on M. 1'Abbe Houet, of the Orato- 
 rians, in the Rue des Dames. I went, but he was at the 
 great funeral in the cathedral. I went again after dejeuner, 
 but could not get in ; then to the public library for a few 
 
 * The manuscript is No. 10,837 Lat. in the Bibliotheque Nationale at 
 Paris. It was briefly described by M. Delisle in a catalogue published in the 
 fiibliothtqne de f Ecole des Charles (1863^, where it is called " Martyrologie 
 cle S. Jerome ; " the date is said to be eighth century, and the writing 
 "Ecriture saxonne." Bradshaw's "discovery" appears to be the identifica- 
 tion of this manuscript with the " Echternach Martyrology."
 
 CEL'UC RESEARCHES. 229 
 
 minutes ; . . . then to the Oratorians. Houet simply charm- 
 ing. He told me to go and ask for M. Combes, one of the 
 grands vicaires, and entreat to see Monseigneur even for 
 an instant. The porter went and brought him [M. Combes]. 
 Could I see Monseigneur ? Quite impossible ; quite. No 
 reception to-day ; no seeing the archbishop otherwise. I 
 was miserable ; my whole journey fruitless. Write ever 
 such a scrap. Where ? At the porter's lodge. Tore a 
 leaf out of his register and began a letter humbly, when 
 M. Combes came in and said Monseigneur had given him 
 the manuscript, and I might use it in his chamber. He 
 had deposited it on the gravel walk (drizzling rain !) while 
 he came to tell me ; would see what I had written ; amused 
 enough. Went upstairs. After a few minutes Houet came 
 and sat by me while I went through it. He is better than 
 any English ambassador's letter. Come in the summer ; 
 ' good-bye.' And so in easy time to the Hotel de France 
 to be off by the train to St Malo, to meet the boat for 
 Southampton." His successes on this short expedition, 
 and the pleasant company of his friends, made him very 
 happy. " The weather was mostly very bad," he writes ; 
 " but I enjoyed my time immensely and did good work 
 (what I had to do), and saw many quite fresh places and 
 people. Brittany is so different from ordinary France : no 
 endless rows of poplars by the roadsides ; and the gorse 
 was out for acres in a way that T never saw anywhere 
 before in my life." 
 
 He had for some time had it in his mind to publish the 
 results of his Celtic researches, and he was now on the 
 point of putting this plan into execution. " I am really 
 printing my paper at last," he writes to Professor Rhys in 
 September, 1876. " I give an account of all my harvesting 
 up to now, including all my Breton discoveries made in 
 March and April. Besides the new Bodleian Cornish 
 glosses, and the new Bodleian and Corpus manuscripts
 
 230 LlBRARIANSHlP, 1875-82. 
 
 with Breton glosses, I have got two Paris manuscripts, one 
 ninth to tenth, the other eleventh century, with Breton 
 glosses ; also one in the British Museum with ditto. Also 
 I have been to Rennes and seen the cartulary of Redon, 
 and been to Quimper and seen the ' Book of Landevennech.' 
 Did I tell you all this ? Meantime I am glad to hear you 
 are likely to allow the Breton origin of the Luxemburg 
 ' Hisperica Famina ' * and of the Oxford ' Eutychius.' " f 
 A month or two later, however, found him apparently no 
 nearer publication. " I am determined to do what I can," 
 he says ; " but this term is always so frightfully full of 
 work that I am afraid to promise anything." He actually 
 went so far as to put a sheet or two into type, but no trace 
 of what he printed is now to be found. 
 
 His correspondence about this time shows that he was 
 in a happier mood than he had been in for some years. 
 The following is from a letter to a friend in Scotland : 
 " Scotch air must be most delicious. I have no cause, how- 
 ever, for complaining, as I now work at the far end of the 
 big room in the library, looking down over our lawn to the 
 bridge and the trees beyond, while the open window brings 
 in all the air that could be wished. Still, my correspon- 
 dence is a little oppressive at times. What is to be done 
 with a lady who writes poetry and calls herself an authoress, 
 and takes the opportunity of enlarging to me about ' the 
 flowers and foliage of her glorious youth lying folded up 
 deep down in the innermost strata of the palaeozoic days 
 of the golden past, ere genius meant sorrow, and life was 
 but the veil of death ' ? I give it you word for word before 
 tearing it up ; but really one ought not to have to deal 
 with such stuff in this hot and melting weather." Some- 
 times, but rarely, he speaks of the lack of friends. " Now 
 
 * This is not incompatible with what he says later on about the " Hisperica 
 Famina " in a letter to Mr Hessels (March 9, 1874) : " It [the poem] is by an 
 Irishman." See below, chap. xi. t Bodl. Auct.
 
 SHORT H OLID A vs. 23 1 
 
 that I am growing old," he says in another letter, " I am 
 almost out of all acquaintance with the undergraduates ; 
 and the greater part of them I don't know even by sight, 
 and very few indeed to speak to." But, in spite of occa- 
 sional remarks of this kind, the sequence of friends among 
 the younger members of the college was never altogether 
 broken. 
 
 Soon after this Bradshaw was again at his old haunts 
 in the Lakes, with an undergraduate friend. Writing from 
 his favourite halting-place at Thirlspot, as he made a 
 practice of doing, to the friend who was with him there 
 on his first visit in 1869, he says, "You cannot really 
 imagine how lovely everything is. The sky is and has 
 been perfectly cloudless, and the lakes one and all are as 
 blue and sparkling as sky and light airs can make them. 
 Yesterday morning we went in from Grasmere to Amble- 
 side, and then back the old way along the other side of 
 Rydal ; and here we sat under the birch trees for many 
 hours, while I read my ' Mezelie,' and Newton sketched. 
 . . . Fancy my delight, in the middle of all this heat, at 
 finding no flies at all ! " 
 
 He came back to London to be present at the wedding 
 of Mr and Mrs R. T. Ritchie, both old friends of his. " There 
 was no ceremony," he writes, " no wedding breakfast, and 
 the result was that, instead of being a dull and miserable 
 affair, as weddings too often are, it was one of the liveliest 
 I have ever known. Having been ' best man ' four times 
 in one year, I have had some little experience." From 
 London he went on a short visit to Mr and Mrs Tenny- 
 son at Aldworth. " I have had a delightful time there," 
 he writes. " I never breathed such delicious air in Eng- 
 land." And in another letter, " Mr Tennyson is very fond 
 of walking, fortunately for me, and we were on the downs 
 the better part of the day. ... I don't talk to him about 
 his poems, not being myself up to the high level in such
 
 232 LlBRARlANSHlP, 1875-82. 
 
 matters. Still, I was very glad when he read me several 
 things which he is going to publish in his next volume." 
 Though too shy to talk to the laureate about his own 
 works, there were few who knew them better or admired 
 them more than Bradshaw. 
 
 In the autumn of 1877 was celebrated the four hun- 
 dredth anniversary of the beginning of printing in England. 
 It was in November, 1477, that Caxton published "The 
 Dictes and Sayings," the first book, so far as we know, 
 that was ever printed on English soil. Bradshaw was 
 naturally one of the first persons consulted by the pro- 
 moters of the " Caxton Celebration." Writing in Novem- 
 ber, 1876, Mr Blades asks him to become a member of 
 the committee. " I hope you will accede to the request," 
 he says, " as it [the committee] will be incomplete without 
 the presence of the chief apostle of palaeotypography." 
 Bradshaw did not, however, become a member of the com- 
 mittee, but he was much interested in the exhibition, and 
 sent several of his treasures from the University Library to 
 be exhibited. 
 
 A mistake in returning the books, through which one 
 belonging to the library of the Baptist College at Bristol 
 fell into Bradshaw's hands, led to the publication of his 
 fifth "Memorandum," entitled "Notice of a fragment of 
 the Fifteen Oes and other prayers printed at Westminster 
 by W. Caxton about 1490-1491." This little paper fur- 
 nishes a good illustration of the methods which he followed 
 in the study of early printing. In the binding of the 
 Bristol book, a copy of Caxton's translation of the " Mirror 
 of the World," was a fragment of printed matter, which 
 had been used as a lining for the boards with which the 
 book was bound. This fragment he soaked off and ex- 
 amined. It proved to be a portion two quarto leaves 
 of Caxton's " Fifteen Oes and other prayers," of which a 
 unique copy is in the British Museum. It was not, how-
 
 CAXTON^S FIFTEEN OES. 233 
 
 ever, the nature of the scrap in itself, but the deductions 
 which he was able to make from it, which gave it a special 
 value in his eyes. " The Bristol fragment," he writes, 
 " affords so much interesting evidence of the way in which 
 compositors of that day worked, and illustrates so many 
 points in connexion with early printing in England, that 
 I have thought it worth while to put down a few notes 
 on the subject." Among other things, this fragment, only 
 the half of an ordinary folio sheet of paper, is made 
 to show how rudimentary in some respects the art of 
 printing was in Caxton's time. Nowadays, a printer thinks 
 nothing of having a whole book standing in type at the 
 same time, before the sheets are finally printed off, but 
 " Caxton had been fifteen years at work before he arrived 
 at the point of printing four pages at once." Further, the 
 fragment in question appears to have been a bit of 
 "printer's waste," that is, a piece of work in some way 
 defective, which was therefore thrown aside as useless for 
 its original purpose. But it was not useless altogether ; if 
 it could not form part of a book, it might be turned to 
 account for binding. This is what happened to the frag- 
 ment it was used to line the binding of another of 
 Caxton's books. Hence it is clear that Caxton, like many 
 other early printers, was his own binder, a fact which may 
 often enable the bibliographer to fix the date of a book or 
 to name its printer when all other indications are wanting. 
 Again, on both sides of the fragment Bradshaw found 
 what is called a " set-off," that is, the marks of printer's ink 
 from wet pages of some other book which has not been 
 preserved. These were very difficult to make out, for the 
 letters were, of course, reversed, and they were also much 
 blurred. In his diary, in which he notes down roughly 
 the process by which he got at the results given in the 
 " Memorandum," he remarks, " By the aid of a looking- 
 glass, my lamp, and my new magnifying glass, I can make
 
 234 LlBRA/t/ANSfflP, 1875-82. 
 
 out one or two words, as misericordia" He at once recog- 
 nized the type, and, from these and other indications, arrived 
 at the conclusion that the fragment had come in contact 
 with a waste leaf of the octavo Primer, " at present only 
 known from the fragment found by Mr Maskell in the 
 binding of a book, and given by him to the British Museum 
 in 1858." Hence it may be inferred that the Primer in 
 question and the book to which the fragment belongs, were 
 passing through the press about the same time. "Mr 
 Blades and myself (continues Bradshaw) had come inde- 
 pendently to the conclusion that both books belong to 
 the last year of Caxton's life (1490-91) ; so that this 
 fragment affords an additional mite of evidence." 
 
 Bradshaw gives several other instances in which he 
 has extracted similar results from fragments such as this. 
 He justly remarks, "After all that has been said, it can- 
 not be any matter of wonder that the fragments used 
 for lining the boards of old books should have an interest 
 for those who make a study of the methods and habits of 
 our early printers with a view to the solution of some of 
 many difficulties still remaining unsettled in the history 
 of printing. I have for many years tried to draw the 
 attention of librarians and others to the evidence which 
 may be gleaned from a careful study of these fragments ; 
 and if done systematically and intelligently, it ceases to 
 be mere antiquarian pottering and waste of time." 
 
 Another happy result of the Caxton Celebration was 
 a visit from M. Campbell, librarian of the Hague. Long 
 as Bradshaw had been in correspondence with M. Camp- 
 bell, he had never yet seen him. " I cannot tell you," he 
 writes in August, " how delighted I am to hear this morn- 
 ing of your being in London, and giving me a chance at 
 last of making your acquaintance in person, especially after 
 having missed you by half an hour in Brussels in 1875." 
 The visit, like that of Professor ten Brink, was productive
 
 CONFERENCE OF LIBRARIANS, 1877. 235 
 
 of as much pleasure on one side as on the other. Bradshavv 
 and his friend naturally spent the short time only a day 
 which they had together among the old books in the 
 University Library. " It was quite a sight," writes M. 
 Campbell, " to see the worthy librarian walking round his 
 shelves, picking out a volume here and another there, 
 bringing it to me with a smile and the remark, ' You will 
 be pleased to see this,' and showing me in this way all his 
 treasures." Soon afterwards Bradshaw wrote to him as 
 follows : " Your visit has given me an impetus to go on 
 with these studies, which I have for some time been so 
 much inclined to neglect. Have you no young man whom 
 you can train to work at these things ? Now that your 
 book is out, I can proceed in quite a different way from 
 that which I was obliged to adopt when I made my list 
 of founts of type used in Holland. I should like to do 
 Holland over again, and I should much like to do 
 Belgium." 
 
 It was in the autumn of 1877 that the first Conference 
 of Librarians, which has since become an annual institu- 
 tion, was held. The project originated in an article 
 published in the Academy early in the year by Mr 
 E. B. Nicholson, now Bodley's Librarian, in which he 
 suggested that a conference should be held for the mutual 
 communication of experience and suggestion on all points 
 of library management. Mr Nicholson, naturally anxious 
 that Bradshaw, among other heads of large libraries, should 
 support his scheme, asked him to become a vice-president. 
 Bradshaw was, however, reluctant to pledge himself in any 
 way, and declined the honour ; nor did he take any part in 
 the proceedings of the conference for several years. That 
 he approved of the scheme in a general way is clear from 
 a letter to Mr Nicholson, dated July 28, 1877, in which he 
 says, "The programme which you have circulated of the 
 proposed proceedings has given me the liveliest satisfaction,
 
 236 LlBRARIANSHlP, 1875-82. 
 
 and I look forward with great pleasure to the printed 
 reports of the conference. It is unquestionable that great 
 good must arise from such a conference, and we all owe 
 you a debt of gratitude for originating it in this country." 
 
 Considering the interest which he subsequently took 
 in the meetings of the librarians, it is a little difficult to 
 understand why at first he held aloof. It was partly due, 
 no doubt, to his dislike of conferences in general. He 
 regarded them as, for the most part, merely occasions for 
 airing crotchets and otherwise wasting time. He was also 
 influenced, we may imagine, by his habitual, almost morbid, 
 reluctance to put himself prominently forward. He knew 
 he would be expected to give his " views " about all sorts 
 of topics dear to the heart of the organiser, and " views " 
 he was always reluctant to give. He distrusted his oratorical 
 powers, and expected, in such a gathering as was antici- 
 pated, to be completely out of his element. In all this 
 there was, it must be allowed, a spice of that perversity 
 which was a strong ingredient in his character a perversity 
 which sometimes irritated strangers, but more often amused 
 his friends. 
 
 Another motive probably weighed with him on this 
 occasion, and that was the prospect of speedily resigning 
 his post as librarian. The impossibility of combining 
 literary work with the duties of his post, as he understood 
 them, was his principal inducement to take this step. 
 Writing to a friend in July, 1877, he says, " I cannot go on 
 at the library much longer, and then, if I live, I ought to 
 bring out some of the many things for which I have been 
 collecting materials all these years ; otherwise they will 
 never come to anything." Added to this was the sense of 
 his own shortcomings as a librarian, which was strengthened 
 at this time by a step which the Syndicate had lately 
 taken. It had been resolved that the library should be 
 annually inspected by some person of reputation as a
 
 THE ORLEANS GLOSSES. 237 
 
 librarian, who should be able to report frankly and im- 
 partially on its condition. Bradshaw could not help 
 approving of this scheme in principle. He wrote to Mr 
 H. B. Wheatley, who was the first inspector appointed, 
 " The inspection of the library intelligent criticism from 
 a competent outsider is in my mind of all things that 
 which we here need most." Nevertheless, the project was, 
 perhaps not unnaturally, at first very distasteful to him, 
 and in conversation with intimate friends he made no 
 secret of his feelings. It was disheartening to think that 
 such a corrective was considered necessary. Under these 
 circumstances, he would naturally shrink from appearing as 
 the permanent occupant of a position from which he was, 
 he believed, so soon to retire, or from taking part, in 
 arrangements for future meetings which some one else 
 would have to carry out. 
 
 Whether the reasons suggested above were sufficient to 
 account for his abstention, or whether there were others in 
 the background, I cannot say. Be this as it may, he 
 shirked the conference of 1877 altogether, and went gloss- 
 hunting instead. It was not, as we have seen, by any 
 means the first occasion when he made an expedition of 
 this kind. He had hunted glosses in the Bodleian as well as 
 in his own library, among Archbishop Parker's manuscripts 
 at Corpus, and in the British Museum. Unlike most other 
 hunters, he rarely, if ever, returned empty-handed, for he 
 marked down his game before he started on the chase. A 
 gloss-hunt was a genuine relaxation to him, and he could 
 always count on sport, for he brought to bear upon his 
 object all the zest and keenness of a boy, combined with 
 the cunning of an experienced hunter. On this occasion 
 the valley of the Loire was his happy hunting-ground, and 
 his efforts were rewarded by the largest bag which he ever 
 made. He had paid a preliminary visit to this district at 
 Easter, 1877, and had seen enough to show him that an
 
 238 LlBRARIANSHlP, 1875-82. 
 
 exhaustive exploration would be amply repaid. The 
 reasons which induced him to examine the libraries of 
 Tours and Orleans are worth noting, for they show that 
 his discoveries were not fortuitous, but the result of follow- 
 ing step by step a clue which pointed to success. 
 
 The finding of these glosses, it should be remembered, 
 was only one object and outcome of his researches among 
 the remains of Celtic antiquity. The glosses were in them- 
 selves of the greatest value to the philologist, but Bradshaw 
 was far from being interested in the language alone. He 
 was engaged on a general inquiry into the early literature 
 and history of the ancient collection of ecclesiastical canons 
 known as the " Hibernensis." * It appeared, from the 
 glosses contained in the two Paris manuscripts of the 
 " Hibernensis," and from other indications, that these 
 manuscripts, which had long been in the great monasteries 
 of Fecamp and Corbie, were of Breton origin. The transfer 
 from Brittany had probably taken place during the 
 monastic revival of the twelfth century, and the final 
 migration to Paris was the result of the Revolution. Now, 
 in the Communal Library of Orleans is a manuscript 
 (No. 193) containing the " Hibernensis," together with 
 other documents. This manuscript formerly belonged to 
 the Benedictine Abbey of Fleury, on the Loire, whence, at 
 the destruction of the abbey about 1789, it was transferred 
 to Orleans. What could be more probable than that this 
 Orleans manuscript, like its fellows at Paris, should have 
 found its way originally from Brittany, and like them should 
 contain valuable matter in the shape of Celtic glosses ? If 
 so, not only would the philologist gain an addition to his 
 materials, but further light would be thrown on the origin 
 of the canons which the manuscript contained. The 
 supposition was rendered the more plausible by the fact 
 
 * Edited by Dr Wasserschleben in " Die Irische Kanonensammlung," 
 1874 ; second edition, 1885.
 
 THE ORLEANS GLOSSES. 239 
 
 that other Fleury books had long ago found their way to 
 the Vatican, and among these were probably the Vatican 
 " Gildas " and " Hisperica Famina," both of Celtic origin 
 and most likely connected with Brittany.* 
 
 Accordingly, when Bradshaw visited Orleans in the 
 spring of 1877, he knew what to expect, and he found 
 what he expected. The manuscript contained glosses, and 
 the glosses turned out to be Breton. He had not time to 
 examine them thoroughly on that occasion, but resolved 
 to return in the autumn. The manuscript was certainly 
 Breton, and the glosses were sprinkled over the pages in 
 liberal profusion. Here was something to look forward to. 
 On his way out Bradshaw visited Cambrai and Amiens, in 
 order to examine- the manuscripts of the " Hibernensis " 
 which existed at those places. At Amiens he found 
 nothing of interest, but he discovered that the Cambrai 
 manuscript almost exactly resembled one of those at 
 Paris. At Orleans he was met by an unexpected diffi- 
 culty. The library was closed, the librarian away ; nothing 
 could be seen for another ten days. The old lady who 
 acted as custodian was for a long time obdurate, but 
 Bradshaw's good-tempered persistence at length prevailed. 
 The better part of two days was occupied in copying 
 out the glosses. Fortunately, in this task he had the 
 assistance of an old friend and travelling-companion, Mr 
 Yeld. While at work in the library, they were joined by 
 M. Bimbenet, president of a learned society at Orleans, 
 who was conversant with the treasures of the library. 
 M. Bimbenet showed Bradshaw an early printed Bible. 
 "How nice!" he exclaimed at once; "printed at Paris 
 in" such and such a year. M. Bimbenet looked up 
 astonished. " You will find the imprint at the end," he 
 continued, and the date was as he said. M. Bimbenet then 
 
 * The above is taken partly from Bradshaw's diary and note-books, partly 
 from his published letter on the " Hibernensis " (" Memorandum," No. 8).
 
 240 LlBRARIAXSHIP, 1875-82. 
 
 brought him a second Bible, and then a third, and Brad- 
 shaw, without hesitation, gave the place and date of each. 
 When asked how he could know them so accurately, he 
 replied, looking at his friend, "Just as I know him. I 
 know every line of his face, and could never mistake him 
 for anybody else;" and then, placing the Bibles side by side, 
 he pointed out the minute variations in the form of the 
 letters which sufficed to enable him to distinguish them 
 at a glance. 
 
 From Orleans Bradshaw went on to Tours, and spent 
 a whole day examining the manuscript of the " Hibernensis " 
 in the Communal Library there. Thence to Paris, where 
 he spent a day or so in getting the glosses from the 
 Orleans manuscript into proper order. " Finished my 
 glosses," he notes in his diary, "so as to make their se- 
 quence clear, and numbered them up to 320 ! " The 
 work had told upon him. " My eyes are very weak," 
 he writes ; but nevertheless next day " did good work 
 on the Corbie and Fe'camp manuscripts," as well as on 
 another book. Two days afterwards he was again in 
 England. The glosses were sent to Mr Whitley Stokes, 
 who writes in the preface to his separate edition of them,* 
 "The following old Breton glosses were found in 1877 
 by the late Mr Henry Bradshaw. . . . When I was leaving 
 England for India in 1880, he presented me with a copy 
 in his own hand, not only, of the glosses, but of the con- 
 text of most of the Latin words glossed ; and I seize 
 this occasion to express my gratitude for a generosity as 
 rare as it is precious. In 1881 I printed them privately 
 in Calcutta, with a commentary, and in 1882 Mr Bradshaw 
 recollated them with the manuscript. . . . There are 322 
 glosses, but of these no less than 109 are only portions 
 
 * "The Breton Glosses at Orleans," by Whitley Stokes, D.C.L. See also 
 Kiihn's Zeitschrift, vol. xxvi. pp. 423-497 ; and Loth, " Vocabulaire Vieux- 
 Breton avec commentaire" (Paris : 1884), pref. p. ix., etc.
 
 PROSPECTS OF RESIGNATION. 241 
 
 of words intended by the glosser. . . . These 109 ab- 
 breviations do not, of course, add much to our knowledge 
 of Old Breton, but the remaining 213 glosses are of great 
 value, not only from the point of view of the lexicographer, 
 but also from that of the grammarian." 
 
 A diary which Bradshaw kept with great assiduity for 
 a few months during the autumn of 1877 shows him 
 engaged, as usual, on a variety of occupations. He was 
 making inquiries into the order of Caxton's books, and 
 the history of the early Bibles published at Strassburg 
 and elsewhere ; he was tracing the origin of the " Hiber- 
 nensis," and making notes on the " Hisperica Famina," 
 " Gildas," and the date of the death of Bede ; he was talk- 
 ing over Chaucer with Dr Furnivall, and discussing astro- 
 nomical difficulties in the "Canterbury Tales" with Professor 
 Adams ; he was helping Mr J. W. Clark with his work 
 on the architectural history of Cambridge by reading over 
 manuscripts with him and revising his proof-sheets ; and 
 he was superintending, with as much care as anything 
 else, the painting and papering of an absent friend's rooms ; 
 all this, and much besides, in conjunction with his heavy 
 library work. 
 
 He was still thinking seriously about giving up the 
 library. " I know," he writes to Dr Luard, who had 
 dissuaded him from the step " I know I do not leave 
 from any feeling of pique, and it is an untold source of 
 happiness to me to think that during the ten years and 
 more that I have been in office, I have never been on 
 the remotest approach to bad terms with the Syndicate. 
 But I do feel two things most strongly : (i) that the time 
 is such that the university ought to have for its library 
 a better administrator than I could ever be, one who has 
 the power of dealing with men; and (2) that I owe to 
 the university to produce some of the many results which 
 their endowment of me in past years has enabled me 
 
 R
 
 242 LIBRARIANSHIP, 1875-82. 
 
 nearly to work out, but which I see not the slightest 
 prospect of working out while I remain in office. ... I 
 feel also that in the last month even I have made such 
 a fresh start in self-government as I have not made for 
 many, many years before, and this gives me hope and 
 encouragement to think that if I do resign, I shall not 
 wholly waste my time as I might have done had I given 
 up sooner. But I cannot write about these things." Six 
 months later he was of a different mind, and could write 
 to another friend, " When I have reached the autumn, 
 I shall know better what my prospects are of going on 
 at the library at all. I am beginning to feel that it would 
 be singularly foolish to give up at my age what is really 
 and must be my life's work, for what would be at best 
 but dilettante work." As time went on, he grew happier 
 in his place, and the feelings which had prompted him 
 to resign gradually wore away. 
 
 In the winter of 1877-8 much debate was going on 
 in Cambridge over the reform of college and university 
 statutes, in accordance with the Universities Act of 1877. 
 In King's a sort of three days' parliament was held during 
 the Christmas vacation to discuss the changes proposed. 
 Bradshaw attended the meetings, though he did not take 
 that vivid interest in the proceedings which he displayed 
 on a similar occasion fourteen years before. " I grudged," 
 he write, "having to come away [from Fairchildes] for 
 this college meeting, about which I hardly care a single 
 straw, though it is very wrong to say or feel this." Never- 
 theless he took an active part in the discussion, and his 
 remarks, strenuous and pointed as they always were, had 
 considerable influence on the voting. " They attribute to 
 a speech of mine," he tells a friend, " the unexpected total 
 abolition and sweeping away of celibacy as concerning 
 in any way the tenure of a fellowship. It was almost the 
 only thing I cared about effecting, but I did not expect 
 it would come so soon."
 
 HELP TO MR SEEBOHM. 243 
 
 Not long after this, in May, 1878, he was elected an 
 honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, in the 
 department of Polite Literature and Antiquities ; and in 
 the same month he was made a corresponding member 
 of the Bibliographical Society of Antwerp (Antwerpsche 
 Bibliophilen), whose motto, " Labore et Constantia," he 
 might fairly have taken for his own. 
 
 Later in the summer, in addition to the work which he 
 was doing for Mr Christopher Wordsworth, to be described 
 presently, he helped Mr Seebohm in the investigations 
 preparatory to his book on the " English Village Com- 
 munity." Mr Seebohm had just worked out, from the 
 Winslow Court Rolls, the average " virgate," or villain's 
 holding of thirty acres. On his showing Bradshaw .his 
 results, the latter at once produced further illustrations 
 from a manuscript * " terrier," or description of land, which 
 he had lately purchased. " On another occasion," says 
 Mr Seebohm, " I was studying the Welsh tribal system 
 of land-tenure. There are two or three records of early 
 grants of land in the copy of the Gospels known as the 
 ' Book of St Chad.' f But when were these records made, 
 and what was the date of the manuscript itself? Who 
 could tell me better than Bradshaw ? To Bradshaw I 
 went, and found him in his rooms. When informed of my 
 object, he said, ' You have done quite right in coming 
 to me, for I happen to have the Book of St Chad in my 
 possession just now, and, moreover, this is St Chad's day ! ' 
 Then he took up the volume, and, turning over its pages, 
 showed me how, by a mark here and a few words there, he 
 had made out its history, and could say with some confidence 
 
 * The manuscript in question, now in the University Library (Add. 2601), 
 describes the district to the north-west of Cambridge. It appears to belong 
 to the fourteenth century. 
 
 t This book belongs to the chapter library at Lichfield, and is called after 
 the patron saint of that see. It is a manuscript of the eighth century, in Irish 
 writing, and in the tenth century belonged to the church of LlandafF, whence 
 it was removed to Lichfield about the year 1000.
 
 244 LlBRARlANSHIP, 1875-82. 
 
 what was its date and that of the entries in the margin." 
 Coincidences of this kind will recur to the mind of every 
 friend of Bradshaw. 
 
 Early in the year 1879 two events happened in which 
 members of his family were concerned, and which gave 
 him the keenest gratification. His eldest brother, Mr 
 Thomas Bradshaw, then a county-court judge at Newcastle, 
 was requested to arbitrate in a dispute between capital 
 and labour which threatened to produce a disastrous 
 quarrel. He settled the dispute in a manner which satis- 
 fied both masters and men, and the strike was happily 
 averted. Shortly afterwards, his second brother, Captain 
 Richard Bradshaw, then commander of the Shah, being 
 on his homeward voyage and touching at St Helena, heard 
 of the catastrophe of Isandlwana. Without waiting for 
 orders, he took on board what troops he could find and 
 sailed straight for Natal. Every one will remember the 
 applause with which the act was greeted throughout the 
 country. 
 
 A little later Bradshaw received tidings of a very 
 different kind. It was in March, 1879, that the news came 
 of the death of his friend, Ernest Muggeridge, at Hong- 
 Kong. " No one can ever know," he writes to the common 
 friend who told him of their loss, "how much I owe to 
 Ernest, and I know you owe much also, as any one must 
 who saw much of him, and did not find the strength 
 in himself to do the right which he knew he ought to 
 do. No relation is like a real friend. I do not mean 
 that one is better than another, but a friend is a different 
 thing. And the memory of such a friend is a thing to 
 help one on in life, as few other things except his living 
 self could do. You remember what you said about not 
 caring to send his letter round, to be read by perhaps 
 indifferent people. It is no mere sentiment, but there 
 is a sacredness about such friendship which one cannot
 
 UNIVERSITY FRIENDSHIPS. 245 
 
 talk about." Two months later the body was brought 
 home, to be laid in the Brompton Cemetery. Bradshaw 
 was prevented by business from being present at the 
 funeral, but he was able to go to London in the afternoon 
 to see the grave before it was closed. " I cannot resist 
 the opportunity," he says, <f of once looking at the place 
 where he lies, who has formed such a part of my life 
 during the past eight years." " We two went together," 
 he writes to another friend, "to the cemetery, where the 
 boy lies close to his favourite uncle, and we stayed to 
 see the simple great slab of Aberdeen granite closed over 
 him. It was not an afternoon to forget. Though it had 
 been raining heavily, it cleared and the sun came out 
 by the time we got there, and everything looked bright. 
 We found the man who manages the whole place, and 
 the three workmen came. There were no undertakers, 
 no sham mourning, no vulgarity ; simply ordinary labourers 
 doing ordinary work. There was nothing whatever to 
 jar upon one. And then until the very last moment one 
 could see the flowers which lay upon the coffin, which 
 was of scented camphor-wood ; and when we had seen 
 this done, we came away quietly, and I came down home 
 the same evening." 
 
 But if death took from Bradshaw friends of this kind, 
 there was in him a never-failing spring of affection which 
 constantly won him others in their stead. The episode 
 which has now to be related cannot be better told than by 
 the person principally concerned, Mr W. M. Conway, 
 lately professor of fine art at University College, Liver- 
 pool, who writes to me as follows : 
 
 " You ask about my relation to Bradshaw. It was 
 briefly this. The term after I went in for my tripos I was 
 working in the Fitzwilliam Museum at the engravings 
 there Schongauer, Diirer, etc. That was the Lent Term, 
 1879. I then wanted to study the woodcuts of the same
 
 246 LlBRARlANSHIP, 1875-82. 
 
 period, and Colvin introduced me to Bradshaw, because, of 
 course, most woodcuts are in printed books, and the library 
 was the place to work in at them. The entry in my diary 
 of March 24, 1879, is, ' Spent three hours in the University 
 Library with Mr Bradshaw, who put me in the way of 
 studying and cataloguing the woodcuts in the fifteenth-cen- 
 tury printed books (of the Low Countries).' I judge from 
 the word ' cataloguing ' that on this very first day of our 
 acquaintance he involved me in his enthusiasm, for cer- 
 tainly when I went to him I had no idea of doing anything 
 of the kind. 
 
 " I well remember the friendliness with which he received 
 me, and how he said that he had been studying the bib- 
 liography of the subject for years, and had never once had 
 any one come to him in Cambridge to look at, still less to 
 study, the things which had been so much to him. He said 
 that the woodcuts had interested him, but that he never 
 had either the time or the qualifications for studying them. 
 Then he went to the shelves and took down book after book, 
 and showed me the same cut turning up now in the pos- 
 session of one printer, now in the possession of another. He 
 showed me the wanderings and developments of founts of 
 type ; he showed me the structure of books, and I know not 
 what besides. For three hours I followed him like a dazed 
 person into a new world a world of what I had before 
 thought to be dry and dusty things, but which his illuminat- 
 ing speech showed to be a very kingdom of romance and 
 surprise. Next day he had a table set up for me by his 
 own, and I came then and worked there day after day at the 
 books he gave me, finding out a method for myself as I 
 went along, but always guided, prompted, and controlled 
 by him. The first book he gave me was an edition of the 
 ' Dialogus creaturarum moralisatus ' printed at Gouda by 
 Gerard Leeu, about 1482. It was full of little cuts, and I 
 began to measure them. The measurements showed that
 
 UNIVERSITY FRIENDSHIPS. 247 
 
 three or four consecutive cuts had usually been made upon 
 one strip of wood, and then divided. This little discovery 
 pleased Bradshaw immensely, and from that time his 
 interest in my work increased. We usually spent five or 
 six hours a day together, and often I remained in his rooms 
 till long into the night. 
 
 " In the vacation I went to the British Museum, and 
 worked at the books in the library as I had done at Cam- 
 bridge, and the next term I continued the same course. 
 That would naturally have been my last term at Cambridge, 
 and I was faced by the problem of what to do afterwards 
 as a life-work. I wanted to devote myself to some com- 
 bination of art and letters, but my friends were naturally 
 opposed to any such vague profession, not knowing in the 
 least what it meant or whither it tended. Here then 
 Bradshaw stepped in. He said it might be possible to get 
 a grant from the Worts Fund to send me abroad to con- 
 tinue my investigations, but that the thing would take 
 time ; so, instead of that, he offered me out of his own 
 pocket fifteen pounds a quarter, as an earnest to my friends 
 that what I was doing was really work which some one 
 thought it worth while to pay for. 
 
 " Matters were thus smoothed over. I started off for the 
 Continent, travelled to all the libraries where fifteenth-cen- 
 tury Netherlands-printed books were to be seen, and wrote 
 continually to Bradshaw of the progress of my work. He 
 found me getting into the dumps, and as an encouragement 
 he wrote, telling me that I was to have twenty-five pounds 
 a quarter for the future. I was to consider him as an 
 employer in place of the library, he said. The library had 
 given him some kind of endowment-of-research post when 
 he was younger, and he always stated that the fact that he 
 had been able to do the bibliographical work he did was 
 due to that appointment. The library, he said, could no 
 longer afford to do for another as it had done for him, so
 
 248 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1875-82. 
 
 he felt it a pleasure to step in personally in its place and 
 do what he should like to see it do if he could." 
 
 While Mr Conway was. abroad he frequently received 
 long letters from Bradshaw, congratulating him upon his 
 progress, telling him what to see and do, giving him plain 
 and wholesome advice. " I was delighted," he writes, 
 " with the Erlangen discovery, and still more with the mode 
 of it. You can feel with me now in what I have so con- 
 stantly experienced in going into a strange library in search 
 of a thing which something slight led me to suppose was 
 there, and yet which people in general would never think 
 of. It has happened so constantly in my Welsh and 
 Breton discoveries. . . . You must manage to let us have 
 some real time together in January, to go over certain 
 things, and to fight out our own views, and, if necessary, to 
 knock each other down in more than one point" Again, 
 " ' I used to feel sure that as long as I worked steadily at 
 whatever had to be done, things paid themselves.' This is 
 what you say in your letter this morning, but your only 
 failing here is that you do not put sufficient emphasis on the 
 word done. It has been my curse all through life that I 
 want the power or gift, or whatever you like to call it, of 
 finishing what I work at ; and all the minute research in 
 the world is only rendered more hopeless by this one fail- 
 ing. . . . The upshot of all this is that you are perfectly 
 miserable, and I am not surprised to hear it. My dear boy, 
 you really must begin and see what depends on yourself, 
 and what on others. I do not like quoting poetry when 
 people are in the dumps, but Matthew Arnold's ' Self- 
 Dependence ' * has had such a deep and lasting impression 
 on me in connection with this very subject, that I cannot 
 
 * The lines beginning 
 
 " Weary of myself, and sick of asking 
 What I am, and what I ought to be, 
 At the vessel's prow I stand, which bears me 
 Forward, forward, o'er the star-lit sea."
 
 UNIVERSITY FRIENDSHIPS. 249 
 
 help putting it to you to look at it when you next come 
 upon it. ... Good-bye, my dear boy. Do not lose heart, 
 whatever you do, but look to yourself always as the only 
 person who can possibly be at fault when anything goes 
 wrong with you, and then you will have the whole control 
 of the situation." 
 
 The result of Mr Conway's journey was his book on 
 " The Woodcutters of the Netherlands." Not content with 
 enabling him to write the book, Bradshaw, who was de- 
 lighted with the thorough and exhaustive nature of the 
 work, persuaded the University Press to publish it, and 
 revised the proof-sheets. In fact, throughout its production 
 he watched the progress of the work as if it had been his 
 own, which indeed, as the preface acknowledges, to a great 
 extent it was. Nor was this the only book in the making of 
 which he had a hand about this time. It was partly at his 
 suggestion, and owing to his encouragement, that his friend 
 Dr Norman Moore translated Professor Windisch's grammar 
 of Old Irish. When the translation was completed, he got 
 the University Press to undertake its publication, and he 
 assisted the author in seeing it through the press. 
 
 His Easter holiday in 1880 he had none the year 
 before was spent in a tour through Southern France. 
 On his way back through London he attended a meeting 
 of the Society of Arts, at which his friend, Mr H. B. 
 Wheatley, read a paper on the history and art of book- 
 binding. Bradshaw took the opportunity of urging that a 
 collection of specimens, showing the styles of binding at 
 different dates, should be brought together, and emphasised 
 the importance of binding in connection with bibliography. 
 Nor did he lose the chance of having a fling at his old 
 enemies, the binders of the present day, for the damage in 
 which old books too often undergo in passing through their 
 hands. 
 
 It will be in the recollection of many Cambridge men
 
 250 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1875-82. 
 
 that, shortly after the regulations for the Classical Tripos 
 were modified so as to include classical archaeology as a 
 distinct study, a member of the Senate, who wished to 
 remain anonymous, offered two hundred pounds to endow 
 for one year a lecturer in that subject There are probably 
 very few even now who are aware that this anonymous 
 donor was Henry Bradshaw. I give here some extracts 
 from the letter in which he laid before his intermediary, 
 Dr Thompson, late Master of Trinity, his reasons for this 
 act of generosity. The letter is dated May 24, 1880. 
 
 " MY DEAR MASTER OF TRINITY, 
 
 "You ask me to put on paper the main 
 points which I tried to place before you to-day. They are 
 briefly these. The recognition of archaeology as a definite 
 study in the new rearrangement of the Classical Tripos 
 makes it very desirable that those who take up the study 
 should find a good teacher to aid and direct them in 
 their training. ... It is difficult to find the right man 
 at the right moment ; and it is not easy always to find 
 the necessary funds even when the right man is within 
 reach. Nothing, you must well know, could be further 
 from my mind than any the least resemblance of dic- 
 tating to the Board. It was the simple conviction that, 
 if only they could assure themselves of the worth of Dr 
 Waldstein's work in such a post, they would have no 
 reason to regret the appointment, that led me to-day to 
 place the sum of two hundred pounds in your hands. The 
 university has, we all know, to husband its own resources, 
 and I feel sure it would not take such an offer unkindly. . . . 
 I have written to you more freely than I could to any 
 other member of the Board. But I must trust you not to 
 use any language which might lead people to infer that the 
 offer came from me. It is not a mere figure of speech, for 
 I have an extreme repugnance to coming forward as doing
 
 SOCIAL LIFE. 251 
 
 anything of the kind. But the generous treatment I re- 
 ceived at the hands of the university for so many years 
 (1859-1867) makes me ready to do what I can when I 
 can. So pray keep my counsel. 
 
 " Yours most sincerely, 
 
 "HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 It is hardly necessary to add that the secret was 
 kept, and the anonymous donor remained completely 
 shrouded in the obscurity in which he had wrapt himself. 
 The Classical Board unanimously passed a resolution 
 expressing their "grateful appreciation of his munificent 
 proposal ; " the Council, with equal unanimity, brought 
 forward a grace, which the Senate accepted ; and Dr Wald- 
 stein was duly appointed to the post thus temporarily 
 created, which was afterwards converted into a permanent 
 appointment. 
 
 Some extracts from a correspondence which Bradshaw 
 kept up with an intimate friend during part of this summer 
 may be of interest. 
 
 "June 7, 1880, 11.15 P- m - Conway just got away, after 
 reading me his chapters on the woodcutters of Schoonhaven 
 and Schiedam, the last in his whole series talking about 
 prospects, and how to bring out his book in the most whole- 
 some manner. T., W., and one or two others in for a little 
 and wondering what it all means, what sort of things 
 cutters are, and so on. 
 
 " Frank Balfour and Taylor over annual Library Report 
 from 4 to 5,20. Then home and copying out, digesting, 
 and rewriting report till hall at seven ; no five-o'clock tea, 
 no coffee after hall, but straight upstairs after dinner to 
 finish report and send off to press, which done, Conway 
 appears. . . . 
 
 " June 8, 9, 1880. You seem to think egotism is a fault in 
 your letters. On the other hand, I should say precisely the
 
 252 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1875-82. 
 
 opposite, and I have set you the example, which is better 
 than any advice, which, further, is a thing I detest doing. 
 What you should, seriously speaking, avoid is the tuistic 
 form of letter. I know that I rise several pegs in your 
 estimation by coining a word, provided it is really wanted, 
 as in this case. . . . 
 
 "June 12, 1880. A quarter-past ten, Saturday evening, 
 
 and has just gone away, having drunk his tea here and 
 
 talked about his prospects, which I fear are none of the 
 brightest. I am quite used up with library work from 9 this 
 morning to 5.30 this afternoon, except one short interval in 
 the middle of the day. . . . You were so highly amused with 
 my pleasure at seeing the new moon for the first time and 
 raising my hat to it. The old idea is that the first wish that 
 comes naturally into your mind at the moment will turn out 
 happily. Now, what pleases me is to notice what it is or 
 who it is that naturally occurs to me first. Yesterday the 
 merest thread was visible in the sky after hall, and you 
 both, you and Ernest Muggeridge, came naturally and 
 at once into my mind. I do not like to write all this ; but 
 after a few more letters there will be no necessity for talk- 
 ing in the same way, and you will find that I only write 
 when I really want something. . . . 
 
 "Sunday evening, 9.35, June 13, 1880. I have nothing 
 at all to say, but I merely want to talk. I went to chapel 
 morning and afternoon, and I also went to St Mary's and 
 heard an excellent sermon from a young man on self- 
 gratification, self-confidence, and self-assertion. It touched 
 me in more than one point. J. W. Clark here for an hour 
 working in the morning,* and Conway here to luncheon. . . . 
 
 " June 1 5, 1 880. I had an excellent and most satisfactory 
 afternoon on Saturday at my Report work, but I have done 
 absolutely nothing since, so you will see I must be in a bad 
 
 * Mr J. W. Clark was at this time at work on his "Architectural History of 
 Cambridge," and Mr Conway on his " Woodcutters of the Netherlands.'
 
 SOCIAL LIFE. 253 
 
 condition of body and mind. ... I continually hunger 
 after some one really congenial to talk to about all imagin- 
 able things, and I suppose this will go on for a few days, 
 and then I shall be able to look forward to three months' 
 blank and steady work. . . . 
 
 "June 1 8, 1880. The curfew and the day of the month 
 again.* We have just come up from the garden, where we 
 have been smoking and watching the white cat and the 
 brown owl and the sunset clouds, each having his own 
 thoughts and not talking over-much. I picked a bit of 
 my favourite plant in the whole garden the Carolina 
 Allspice ; I don't know what you call it. It scents my 
 whole room now, and I send it on the bare chance of 
 its not losing all its power before it gets to Frankfort. 
 
 "June 21, 1880. Again the curfew. I have been writing 
 for half an hour and more, and yet I just happened to be 
 beginning a letter to you as this blessed bell is going, 
 bringing such endless pleasant memories to my mind, all 
 doubly pleasant by the fact of my writing this letter at the 
 same time. As I sit I can just see half the nearly full moon 
 rising above the library of St Catherine's opposite my 
 window, and it seems an age since I wrote at this time, 
 though it was only on Friday night. . . . 
 
 "July 6, 1880. You ask my advice, and you know how 
 I hate giving such stuff. As I was reading somewhere 
 yesterday, the only wise men are those who never give 
 advice and never take it. If you must have my feeling 
 about the Sunday lectures, I should repeat Punch's advice 
 to people about to marry : ' Don't.' It is quite easy for you 
 to earn five pounds in another way, and if you want to be a 
 great man you will keep clear of these controverted move- 
 ments. Next as to the paper ; if you are going to write it, 
 make haste about it. You know perfectly what your dis- 
 
 * The curfew is the bell which rings from the tower of Great St Mary's 
 Church every evening from 9 to 9. 15 p.m. After it has ceased, another bell 
 tolls the number of the day of the month.
 
 254 LIBRARIANS/TIP, 1875-82. 
 
 satisfaction means. Did any man ever write anything and 
 lay it aside, and take it up again some months after and re- 
 read it with satisfaction ? Only as it has to be published, 
 sit down and do the re-writing at once ; sleep over it, and 
 send it off hot next day. Don't allow yourself to cool over 
 it, or you will be miserable as before. . . . 
 
 "July 27, 1880. I have been all day at humming-birds 
 (Oiseaux mouches\ collating and arranging plates, which 
 the great man * could not be bothered to number as they 
 came out ; and it is sometimes a refreshment to me to 
 master a bibliographical puzzle, and bring it out all neat 
 and clean where my neighbours have all failed signally. 
 ' Vanity,' I hear you say ; but we all have our little vanities, 
 and even your excellency is not quite free from such weak- 
 ness sometimes. One stall of my Augean stable is clean ; 
 I finished it this morning between nine and ten. I look at 
 the ten which ought to be done in the same way before 
 October, and, though it is enough to make one despondent, 
 I do not quite despair. For one thing, I do not set myself 
 in a week a greater task than I think possible to be done, 
 and in this way I am happy. My power of leaving work 
 unfinished is so enormous, that to feel a week's promised 
 work done\$ a sensation which is both new and invigorating. 
 But why do I talk nonsense when I ought to be in bed ? 
 Good night now, and forgive me for my long silence. You 
 know it has not been from my not thinking of you. 
 " Ever your most loving friend, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSIIAW." 
 
 Early in 1881 Bradshaw gave some assistance to Mrs 
 Guest, who was then preparing a collective edition of Dr 
 Guest's archaeological papers.f He drew up at her request 
 
 * The "great man" is John Gould, who issued Part I. of a supplement 
 to his work on Humming-birds in 1880. He died in the following winter. 
 
 t Dr. Guest's papers were published in 1883, in two volumes, under the 
 title of " Origines Celticse," etc.
 
 TYPOGRAPHICAL AND OTHER WORK. 255 
 
 a list of the papers read before the Archaeological Society 
 and published in \\\Q Arch&ologia Cambrensis and elsewhere, 
 as well as of the letters in the Athenceum to which these 
 papers gave rise. In sending the list to Mrs Guest, he 
 writes, " I enclose a paper which gives a first clean result 
 of a good deal of work. I hope you will like the look of it, 
 as it contains a fair statement of Dr Guest's archaeological 
 activity during the twenty years 1849-1869. ... I cannot 
 tell you what a real pleasure it is to me to help to work 
 out a bibliographical problem of this kind, especially in 
 the case of one who was always one of the very few who 
 gave me intelligent encouragement in my own work." 
 
 During this period he was so much engaged on special 
 tasks, to be presently described, that he was unable 
 to spend much time on anything else, but he did not 
 altogether lose sight of his old studies. An error in Mr 
 Thackeray's account * of the Mazarine Bible at Eton set 
 him working for a while at the early German printers, 
 and this led him on to their English followers. " I am 
 delighted," writes Mr Blades in September, " with your 
 interesting discovery of what I take to be a portion of 
 a new indulgence from Caxton's press, t ... I don't envy 
 much our bibliographical posterity if they go on a-gleaning 
 after you. Your insight is so exceptional that your pre- 
 dictions seem to bring their own fulfilment." In the 
 autumn of the year Mr Blades sent him a copy of his 
 new edition of the " Life of Caxton." " Will you kindly 
 accept it," he writes, " and give it board and lodging ? 
 You ought to do so, for in truth you had no small share 
 in begetting its grandfather, and some, or rather a good 
 deal, of your own blood is in its veins." 
 
 * Notes and Queries, February to July, 1881. Bradshaw's correction is in 
 the number for May 14, 1881. He took a journey to Eton on purpose to see 
 if the name which Mr Thackeray stated to be on the binding of the book was 
 correctly given or not. 
 
 t In the library of Trinity College, Dublin.
 
 256 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1875-82. 
 
 In July, 1 88 1, the office of Bodley's Librarian became 
 vacant through the death of Mr Coxe. There was naturally 
 much talk at Oxford about his successor, and not a few 
 fixed on Henry Bradshaw. An intimate friend, who was 
 in a position to know the chances, wrote to urge him to 
 stand. " Your name is in people's mouths," he says, " and 
 you would be very acceptable here." The idea of standing 
 does not appear to have occurred to Bradshaw till he 
 received this letter. For a moment the prospect was 
 so alluring as almost to overpower him. " As to the main 
 point of your letter," he writes in reply, " it has completely 
 upset me. . . . To think of my saying to you in the vestibule 
 of our college library, looking at the print of Thomas 
 Hyde, the Orientalist, Bodley's Librarian in Charles II's 
 reign, ' When will another fellow of King's go to Oxford 
 in that capacity ? ' Honestly, the possibility of such a 
 thing in my own case never once so much as crossed 
 my mind. ... Of course, it is a much greater library 
 than ours, and a much higher position in every way, 
 because, whatever happens, Oxford must always stand 
 much higher than Cambridge in the general estimation, 
 and yet Cambridge men may, nevertheless, be quite con- 
 tent to be Cambridge men. My own fearful indolence 
 and want of energy, to say nothing of my total ignorance 
 of German, would to my mind be an absolute bar. . . . But 
 you don't know what a shock your letter has given me. 
 The very idea of any one thinking such a thing within the 
 bounds of possibility is enough to turn a stronger head 
 than mine." 
 
 The letter alluded to above was followed, at the begin- 
 ning of the Michaelmas Term, by more direct overtures on 
 behalf of influential persons, and it is clear from Bradshaw's 
 correspondence that for a short time he had some thoughts 
 of standing for the post. But calm consideration and the 
 counsel of one or two intimate friends enabled him to resolve
 
 LlBRARIANSHIP OF THE BODLEIAN. 257 
 
 on what was probably the wiser course. On October 
 30, 1 88 1, he wrote to the friend who had first suggested 
 the idea, " I have had a very anxious time of it, and I 
 know I ought to have written to you before. But such 
 a crisis in one's life does not often occur of course, nothing 
 resembling it has ever occurred to me before and I cannot 
 bear to decide on the spur of the moment, even though 
 my final decision may be identical with my first impression. 
 There are, of course, many things to be thought of and 
 well weighed ; but I cannot have the least hesitation now 
 in making up my mind that to stay where I am is the 
 wisest and best course for myself, and certainly the best 
 thing that could happen for the other people as well." 
 
 To one of the most influential of the curators he wrote 
 at the same time, " Bodley's Librarian is, in my mind, 
 beyond any doubt, the head of my profession in this 
 country, and there are abundant reasons which would 
 tend to make me covet the honour. But the more I weigh 
 the matter the more I am convinced that I could do more 
 good here than I could possibly do there ; and this alone 
 has sufficed to bring me to a deliberate decision to remain 
 here." When Mr Nicholson was appointed, Bradshaw 
 wrote to congratulate him in the warmest terms. " I am 
 happy and at ease," he says, " in the conviction that they 
 have found a man who, while there is no fear of his 
 working slavishly in a groove, will, on the other hand, not 
 despise the traditions of a place, where good traditions are 
 of such vital importance, if that aroma is to be preserved 
 which gives the charm to the Bodleian and places it 
 at the head of all the libraries in Europe." 
 
 Towards the close of 1881 Bradshaw was able to 
 announce to the members of his college the completion of 
 a work in which he had taken great interest, Mr Herkomer's 
 portrait of Dr Okes, Provost of King's College. The 
 value which he set on such memorials was shown by the 
 
 s
 
 258 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1875-82. 
 
 attention which he devoted to the portraits in the University 
 Library. He had some time before this been at much 
 pains to trace their history, and under his supervision and 
 that of Professor Colvin they were cleaned and repaired, 
 and hung in the position in which they now are. Some 
 four years back he had been instrumental in obtaining 
 for the college a portrait of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, 
 perhaps the most distinguished Kingsman of the century, 
 and had given ,100 towards it. The success of this 
 portrait, painted by Mr Herkomer, made him desirous 
 that the college should possess an equally good memorial 
 of the provost, who had thirty years before led the way 
 to reform by freeing it from the unwholesome privileges 
 which it then enjoyed,* and who had presided over the 
 society during two successive epochs of change. His 
 proposal was warmly taken up, and the requisite funds 
 were easily obtained. In the summer of 1881 Mr Herkomer 
 came to Cambridge to paint the picture, and stayed in 
 King's as Bradshaw's guest. The portrait met with 
 universal approval, and was presented to the college in 
 October of this year. 
 
 Shortly after this Bradshaw was elected a member of 
 " the Family," a select Cambridge club, consisting of a dozen 
 congenial spirits, chosen rather for their social gifts than 
 for academical distinction, but generally combining both 
 qualifications. The club dates from the last century, and 
 is said to have begun by meeting to toast " the family over 
 the water." It no longer has any political bias, but meets 
 for dinner once a fortnight. To be a member of it, one 
 must, at any rate, be regarded as " a good fellow," and 
 the distinction thus bestowed was a source of real gratifi- 
 cation to Bradshaw. His first dinner, it may be noted, 
 was in Francis Balfour's rooms. 
 
 In January, 1882, was published the first number of 
 
 * See above, p. 21.
 
 TINDAL&S NEW TESTAMENT. 259 
 
 the Bibliographer, a journal edited by Mr H. B. Wheatley. 
 This number contained an article * by Bradshaw on " God- 
 fried van der Haghen (G. H.), the publisher of Tindale's 
 own last edition of the New Testament in 1534-5." The 
 article cost him a good deal of trouble. "I shall take 
 good care," he writes to Mr Wheatley, " never to promise 
 any one an article again, until I can hand it over to them 
 then and there. I would not go through the last ten days 
 again for much. With a very heavy cold on me, which 
 muzzed my head, and a mass of work by day, and people 
 to attend to, whom I could not get rid of, almost every 
 evening, and the knowledge that you really wanted the 
 copy for the printer, I have been very far from comfort- 
 able. ... I feel inclined to envy you light-hearted Lojn- 
 doners, who don't care a straw what you write. I hope 
 honestly, both for your sake and mine, that it may be 
 my last as well as my first contribution to any magazine 
 of the kind." 
 
 The question to be solved was the following. Tindale's-f- 
 first attempt to publish his version of the New Testament 
 was made in 1525, but the work was interrupted before 
 it had gone far. His first complete edition was printed 
 later in the same year, and his second nine years later. 
 The third edition, which contains his final revision, was 
 printed at Antwerp in 1534-5. It is not known who 
 printed this edition, but the publisher's name is indicated 
 by the initials " G. H." on the title-page. Who was this 
 " G. H." who was bold enough to undertake the publication 
 of so dangerous a work as the first English version of the 
 New Testament ? To all interested in the early history 
 of the Reformation, this was clearly an inquiry worth 
 following up. Mr Fry, in his " Bibliographical Description 
 
 * This article has since been reprinted by Mr Blades. 
 
 t Bradshaw shows conclusively that this, and not Tyndale, is the way 
 in which the reformer habitually spelt his own name.
 
 26b LlBRARIANSHIP, 1875-82. 
 
 of the Editions of the New Testament," etc. (1878), had 
 adopted a suggestion of Mr Henry Stevens, that " G. H." 
 stood for Guillaume Hytchins, "the assumed name of 
 William Tyndale," thus referring to the translator, and 
 not the publisher of the book. After showing that this 
 explanation is impossible, Bradshaw offers his own sugges- 
 tion, which is that " G. H." stands for Godfried van der 
 Haghen, an Antwerp publisher of the day. This man, 
 like so many others of his time, was in the habit of putting 
 his name into a classical form, and when so Latinised it 
 appeared as Godfridus Dumaeus. Bradshaw not only 
 shows that Godfridus Dumseus and Godfried van der 
 Haghen are one and the same person, but he traces a 
 close business connection between him and Martin de 
 Keyser, the printer of Tindale's second edition, the imme- 
 diate predecessor of the one in which the mysterious initials 
 appear. It is impossible here to give the steps by which 
 Bradshaw arrived at his conclusion, or the proofs by 
 which he established it. A happy accident one of those 
 accidents which the skilled eye and the constructive mind 
 can turn into opportunities gave him the first hint, to 
 be followed up, as he says himself, by " putting the book 
 among its fellows, that is, among the productions of the 
 same and neighbouring presses," and " allowing facts to 
 speak for themselves." The conclusion, when arrived at, 
 was irresistible, and the name of a worthy who took a 
 part, and no unimportant one, in furthering the work of 
 the Reformation, was rescued from oblivion. 
 
 This little paper was almost his last publication of the 
 kind. Work in other lines increased upon him, and with 
 the introduction of the new statutes, he was dragged into 
 the vortex of university business, from which he had hitherto 
 kept comparatively free. In April, 1882, he writes to his 
 friend Mr Stephen Lawley, " 1 was away from Saturday 
 evening till Tuesday at Christmas, and I have not stirred
 
 MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN LANGUAGES. 261 
 
 from Cambridge since. Every day and every night has 
 brought its work, and I have been in one constant round, 
 at the library by day and in my rooms by night. . . . My 
 head is crammed full of work of various kinds, and I seem 
 to have no knowledge of everyday outside-world interests." 
 
 One of the pieces of University business which occu- 
 pied most of his attention about this time was the elabora- 
 tion of the schemes for the Special and Tripos examinations 
 in Mediaeval and Modern Languages. He had been made 
 a member of the Board which controls the teaching of 
 those subjects in November, 1881. In February, 1882, the 
 Board issued its first report, recommending the establish- 
 ment of a special examination (i.e. an examination for the 
 ordinary degree) in Mediaeval and Modern Languages, a.nd 
 this report, with some alterations, was accepted a year 
 later. Meanwhile they had been engaged in the more 
 difficult task of formulating a scheme for a Tripos exami- 
 nation in the same subjects. Their first proposal was 
 issued in March, 1883, but the plan had to submit to large 
 modifications, and was not finally passed till May, 1884. 
 When it is remembered that Bradshaw had devoted a 
 great part of his life to the study of early English writers, 
 and that his " Memoranda," as first projected, were to 
 contain the results of his work on the mediaeval literature 
 of our own and other countries, it is easy to understand 
 with what interest he watched over a scheme which was 
 for the first time to include these subjects in the recognised 
 curriculum of university studies. 
 
 I will conclude this chapter with a few extracts from 
 his correspondence during the summer of 1882. Writing 
 to one of his sisters on her birthday (July 30), he says, 
 " I have been reading Mozley's ' Reminiscences of Oriel 
 College and the Oxford Movement/ which is full of More- 
 ton Pinkney. But it is a very uncomfortable book, every 
 story, where possible, being told just wrong." It will be
 
 262 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1875-82. 
 
 remembered that, having been at one time intimate with 
 Dr Pusey, he was likely to have heard many of the stories 
 correctly told. 
 
 On the same day, the first anniversary of the wedding- 
 day of a young friend, he writes, " Bad as I am, I cannot 
 let to-day pass by without writing just to tell you that 
 I have been drinking your healths and wishing you (in 
 silence) many, many happy returns of the day a day I 
 shall not easily forget. ... I have just lost a month by 
 a violent attack of cold, which I could not shake off till 
 a few days ago, and the result is that I have a mass of 
 arrears to work off. . . . When I could do nothing else, 
 I have been destroying thousands of letters and papers 
 of the last few years. It brings back so many things. 
 But I could not bring myself yet to destroy the least scrap 
 of Ernest's * or yours. The picture they all bring back 
 is so vivid ; the varying tone of illness or health, of bright- 
 ness or despondency, in both of you all this is a thing 
 I cannot throw away. My own hands are pretty full just 
 now. I have the Library Association coming here at the 
 beginning of September, and a great deal of the work falls 
 upon me as president, and I am not much accustomed to 
 this kind of thing. However, I hope it will go off well." 
 
 To another friend, who had declined to deprive him of 
 a valuable book which he had offered him, he says, " I 
 agree wholly with what you say of presents. Emerson's 
 idea is good, that nothing but fruit or flowers, or something 
 equally perishable, should be given. . . . Only consider 
 that, as the offer implies no sacrifice whatever, so the refusal 
 involves none of the churlishness which you seem to think 
 it must imply in my mind. I know you a little too well. 
 I am rather down at this moment about other things, so 
 you must not misinterpret the dull tone of my letter." 
 
 On Sunday, July 23, 1882, Cambridge was saddened by 
 * N. E. Muggeridge.
 
 DEATH OF FRANCIS BALFOUR. 263 
 
 the news that one of the most distinguished of her younger 
 scholars, Professor Francis Balfour, had been killed, on July 
 19, by a fall on the Aiguille Blanche de Peuteret. Bradshaw 
 felt the loss very deeply, both on personal and public grounds. 
 Writing to Mr Seebohm on August 6, he says, " I don't 
 think you had met him, or you would inevitably have felt 
 something of the loss he will be to the whole university, 
 and not only to his own near and personal friends and 
 more immediate fellow-workers. For a man of only thirty, 
 his influence was extraordinary ; but the secret of it lay 
 in an indomitable energy, coupled with that Darwin-like 
 singleness of aim, which never let him spend any of his 
 energy, as so many of us do, in irritation at other people's 
 shortcomings, or in abuse of his neighbours where they 
 happened to differ from him."* 
 
 * I may mention here that Bradshaw contributed the sum of y> to the 
 Balfour Memorial Fund.
 
 264 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 I HAVE thought it best, as in a previous instance, to give 
 in a separate chapter some account of the work which 
 occupied most of Henry Bradshaw's leisure during the last 
 seven or eight years of his life. During this time he was 
 principally engaged on two lines of investigation : first, his 
 bibliographical researches in connection with the Cambridge 
 edition of the Sarum Breviary ; and, secondly, his inquiries 
 into the history of the statutes of Lincoln Cathedral. I 
 will take these in order. 
 
 It was in the year 1878 that he began to help Mr Procter 
 and Mr Wordsworth in the preparation of their edition of 
 the Sarum Breviary.* His contributions are for the most 
 part printed in the introduction to the third part, or 
 "fasciculus." Mr Wordsworth had been for some time 
 acquainted with the librarian when he began his work, for 
 the latter had already given him assistance when he was 
 composing his " Scholae Academicae," a book on the studies 
 of the university in the eighteenth century. Mr Words- 
 worth invited him one day in 1878 to his house in order to 
 talk over the breviary. " Report," writes Mr Wordsworth, 
 " said that Bradshaw would not accept invitations ; how- 
 ever, he walked out to Castle End, where I was curate, to 
 dine with us, and to give us his ideas about the proposed 
 
 * Of this edition (which is based on the Paris folio of 1531, by Chevallon 
 and Regnault), the first part published was fasc. ii., containing the Psalterium 
 and Commune, with Officia Missalia, in 1879; fasc. i,, containing the Kalen- 
 darium and Temporale, followed in 1882; fasc. iii., containing the Sanctorale 
 and Accentuarius, with the bibliographical and other apparatus, in 1886.
 
 THE SARUM BREVIARY. 265 
 
 book. You can imagine how he sat on the sofa, nursing 
 Dr Laing's Aberdeen Breviary, and illustrating his recom- 
 mendations with his usual readiness and practical good 
 sense." On another occasion, when a senior member of 
 the university remarked in hall that he had seen Brad- 
 shaw that afternoon "discoursing plain truths to a ritualist," 
 " he was really," Mr Wordsworth says, " pointing out to me 
 the superiority of the Prayer-book of 1549 over that of 
 1662, because of the disadvantage which Cosin (as well as 
 Laud and Overall) laboured under, with all his desire to 
 be correct, as compared with Cranmer and his contem- 
 poraries, who could not help being familiar with the old 
 services, which as priests they had been obliged to know 
 almost by heart." Mr Wordsworth left Cambridge shortly 
 after this, and henceforth the assistance which Bradshaw 
 gave him was mostly conveyed in a voluminous corre- 
 spondence extending over a period of eight years. 
 
 In preparing the text of the breviary for publication, the 
 editors were not often obliged to have recourse to Brad- 
 shaw, but the introductions and appendices bear the mark 
 of his hand on almost every page. The editors gratefully 
 acknowledge that the most valuable of these supplements to 
 the text are the chronological lists and descriptions of all 
 the printed editions of the breviary and other service-books 
 belonging to the Salisbury use. These lists are almost 
 entirely Bradshaw's work. To draw them up was one of 
 the toughest bits of bibliographical research which he ever 
 undertook. The service-books are arranged under nine 
 heads breviaries (of which three classes are distinguished), 
 special services for certain feast-days, antiphoners or anthem- 
 books, psalters, hymnals, etc., for a detailed account of 
 which I must refer my readers to the pages of the Cam- 
 bridge edition. Some notion of the onerous nature of the 
 task may be derived from Mr Wordsworth's statement a 
 statement borne out by several passages from Bradshaw's
 
 266 LITERARY WORK, 1878-86. 
 
 correspondence that he examined no less than 210 out of 
 the 277 volumes or fragments of Sarum Breviaries known 
 to exist, besides 58 volumes of other choir service-books 
 of the same use. Not content with inspecting one copy 
 only of any particular edition, he examined, so far as he was 
 able, every copy which there was the slightest reason to 
 suppose contained any variation. The copies so examined 
 are scattered up and down the country, in England, Scot- 
 land, and Ireland, in private as well as public libraries. 
 Some are abroad, in Paris, Antwerp, and elsewhere. The 
 examination of them entailed much correspondence and 
 not a few journeys, for he insisted on doing the work him- 
 self, and would rely on no second-hand evidence. 
 
 The result is to be seen in these lists, lists like those of 
 his fifteenth-century books, devoid of all ornament and 
 unnecessary detail, and compressing into the barest possible 
 statement the outcome of years of toil. They state the 
 edition, the date, size, printer's name, and place of printing 
 of every copy known to exist, as well as the name of pre- 
 sent owners. It is needless to say that the result, small as 
 it appears on paper, would have been unattainable had not 
 Bradshaw been familiar with the services of the mediaeval 
 Church from his youth up. Writing to Mr Maskell in 
 1882, he says, "I think of all my favourite fields of work 
 this is my special favourite. ... I only wish I could have 
 had you here for a week or a fortnight, to go through the 
 books one by one. It is impossible to put into the com- 
 pass of letters the results of twenty years' anatomical study 
 of these books." 
 
 During all the time while the edition was preparing, 
 Bradshaw was engaged in constant correspondence with the 
 editors. His letters touch on a multitude of obscure points, 
 such as the terminology of mediaeval service-books, the 
 origin and connection of different parts of the services, the 
 order of the various portions of the breviary, liturgical
 
 THE SARUM BREVIARY, 1879. 267 
 
 survivals from remote periods in the history of the Church, 
 and kindred subjects. " I know next to nothing," he writes 
 to Dr Littledale, " about what the young men call liturgi- 
 ology," but those who have perused these letters will 
 hardly agree with him. The correspondence is naturally, 
 for the most part, too technical to be given here, but I may 
 quote a few passages. The preface spoken of in the follow- 
 ing extract from a letter dated February, 1879, is the pre- 
 face to the first fasciculus, and the list alluded to is the list 
 of breviaries, for which " one day in London and one in 
 Oxford " were eventually not found to suffice. 
 
 " I have read your proof [of the preface] over and over 
 again, and have made many alterations. I will send it you 
 as rewritten in some parts by me, that you may use it as 
 you think fit. It will come in a day or two, I hope. 
 Where do you find that odious word portuary ? That and 
 portfory are words used by modern liturgiologists which I 
 cannot abide, until I find the old people using them. The 
 title-page is frightful, as most titles are.* ... I am very 
 anxious indeed about the bit at the end. It is a great pity 
 to leave it as it stands without a revision of certain things, 
 which one day in London and one at Oxford would 
 suffice for, both of which I would gladly give, in spite of 
 all library work here, if you would accept of such a contri- 
 bution. . . . The list ought to begin with my fragments of 
 an edition! of 147 , probably printed at Cologne, at least 
 ten years earlier than your first. Your first ought to be 
 ' formerly University Library, Cambridge,' instead of 
 ' formerly McCarthy.' It was stolen from here, and still 
 bears our library class-mark." \ 
 
 * Mr Wordsworth says that the title-page eventually prefixed to the Kalen- 
 darium was "sketched by Bradshaw one morning in bed, when he had been 
 up a great part of the night with some manuscripts which I had to carry back 
 to Lincoln." 
 
 t These fragments are dated in the published list " 1475 ?" 
 J This is the Venice edition, on vellum, of 1483, the rediscovery of which 
 I have narrated above, p. 101.
 
 268 LITERARY WORK, 1878-86. 
 
 "April 5, 1879. I have done a good deal to most of the 
 books, but I have done more than this in the breviary. I 
 have begun at the end, and am examining everything I 
 can find before going to Oxford. The fearful mess of 
 Marian Breviaries I have wholly and satisfactorily cleared 
 up, except only the two editions of Kyngston and Sutton, 
 which will present no difficulty when I can examine one or 
 two copies which have not been tampered with in modern 
 times." After giving a classification of the Marian Bre- 
 viaries, the results of which are printed in the appendix to 
 the Cambridge edition, he continues, " I am very anxious 
 to get to the bottom of this. I have mastered the real 
 1535 edition, which is of some consequence, and every step 
 backward becomes very much easier. I must print some- 
 how what I do now, as it would be so much waste, and it 
 would be much more satisfactory, of course, to get it into 
 a standard book such as yours must be. 
 
 "April 8, 1879. I hope I have said or written nothing 
 which grates upon you. As far as I can see, our habits of 
 thought are equally Anglican of the last generation, and not 
 at all the independent of the present generation. It is a 
 great comfort to find some one of the present generation 
 who retains this tinge. I know no one in Cambridge who 
 does it at all. 
 
 "June 26, 1879. I have told Mr Procter of a monastic 
 English supplement to a breviary printed at York about 
 1513, which I have just turned up. ... I have written to 
 see if I can get any further information, and meantime I 
 have copied it all out. It is very interesting to me from all 
 sorts of points of view, both what you would call li-tur-gi- 
 o-lo-gi-cal as well as pa-lse-o-ty-po-gra-phi-cal, if these 
 words are long enough." 
 
 In August, 1879, he made the visit to Oxford which he 
 promises in one of the previous letters. The special object 
 he had in view was to work out the relations of the Marian
 
 THE SARUM BREVIARY, 1879. 269 
 
 Breviaries, and this he satisfactorily accomplished. On his 
 return to Cambridge he writes (September 6, 1879), " I send 
 you a variety of things. I hope you will not be very much 
 shocked at the amount. After thirteen hours yesterday at 
 it, and twelve the day before, and a good deal of tolerably 
 constant work before that, I am glad to have something 
 to show." 
 
 In September, 1879, he paid a visit to Longleat, whence 
 he writes, " I had not been a quarter of an hour in the 
 house yesterday before I ran up to the old library at the 
 top of the house (the room where Bishop Ken spent so 
 much of the latter part of his life), to see again a volume of 
 the Sarum Breviary, which I knew I could put my hand 
 upon in the dark. I knew it was a P. E.,* bearing the im- 
 print of Regnault, 1535 ; but I had written it down in my 
 list a Caly (i.e. the pseudo-Regnault). Imagine my 
 delight at finding it a real Regnault, quite complete as far 
 as P. E. goes, and just exactly settling my question." A 
 few days later he writes again, " I had a delightful day 
 over at Mells f yesterday, and saw all the Homers and all 
 the breviaries, and a heap of most lovely and interesting 
 things besides." 
 
 In October, 1879, he was at Dublin, still engaged prin- 
 cipally on breviary work. While there he wrote to Mr 
 Wordsworth, " Here I am, after three days' work, and 
 crammed full of breviary collations. When I wrote to 
 you from London, I hardly knew where the next hour 
 would start me for whether for Paris, to master the 1483 
 edition ; to Antwerp, to see for the first time the long-lost 
 Louvain edition of 1499 ; to Edinburgh, to examine for 
 myself the Great Breviary J of 1496, which - and 
 
 * Pars Estivalis, i.e. for the later or summer half of the year. P. H. stands 
 for Pars Hyemalis, the winter part, beginning with Advent. 
 
 t A house belonging to Mr J. F. F. Horner, who possesses copies of several 
 of the Marian Breviaries. 
 
 J A Great Breviary, as distinguished from the Portiforium or Common
 
 270 LITERARY WORK, 1878-86. 
 
 combined have made such a hopeless fog about ; or, finally, 
 here to master the editions of 1494 and 1516, as well as 
 the Rouen edition of 1556. Three days' steady work 
 from ten to six have enabled me to do something towards 
 clearijng my way. . . . When I am tired out with such 
 work I take a short interlude of Irish books, which are 
 of all my special hobbies the most special ; and, as I am 
 here at head-quarters, it is a perfect holiday for me, as you 
 may well believe." 
 
 Not long after this, Mr E. M. Thompson, of the British 
 Museum, knowing the interest which Bradshaw took in 
 Celtic remains and in service-books, presented him with 
 a Christmas dish combining both these dainties. He had 
 lately seen at Salisbury a manuscript * containing a 
 Psalter and Litany, with several entries in a Celtic hand, 
 and he wrote to inform Bradshaw of this treasure. Brad- 
 shaw's answer is dated December 31, 1879. 
 
 " MY DEAR THOMPSON, 
 
 " What an angel you are, and how many happy 
 new years do I wish you in return for your most welcome 
 letter just received ! The Litany does indeed interest 
 me. . . . Cutberct, of course, is northern English, and 
 Iltutus Welsh ; but every other man among them is pure 
 Breton, and therefore gold to me, and I must see the book 
 as soon as I can." 
 
 Besides this enchanting book, there was in the same 
 library a Sarum Breviary of 1556, which he was anxious 
 to see. With this object he went off to Salisbury one 
 cold, wet January day, returning as far as London the 
 same evening, in order to look at the books with his own 
 eyes, and he afterwards sent a special messenger to Salis- 
 
 Breviary, is a large book adapted for use in church. All known editions of 
 it are in folio ; the Common Breviaries are in quarto, or a smaller size. 
 * No. 180 in the cathedral library.
 
 THE SARUM BREVIARY, 1880. 271 
 
 bury to bring away the Psalter, so that he might examine 
 it at his leisure at Cambridge. 
 
 In the course of the next year (1880) he extended 
 his investigations so as to include several classes of service- 
 books beyond those to which he had at first intended to 
 confine himself. In reference to this, he writes to Mr Stephen 
 Lawley, the editor of the York Breviary,* about the same 
 time, " Here is one [letter] which I wrote an hour after 
 you left, but did not send, because later on, before post- 
 time, I had advanced in my ideas to include all the printed 
 service-books, and the matter was so fully in my head that 
 I sat down in my room, and, after thinking in peace for 
 an hour, I put my work down on paper, and it was half- 
 past five in the morning before I knew where I was. 
 Fortunately for me, it is not often nowadays that I give 
 way to such impulses, or my life would not be good for 
 much." 
 
 A short visit which he made to Paris in January, 1881, 
 had for its principal object an examination of the unique 
 Sarum Breviary of 1483 preserved in the National Library. 
 He speaks afterwards in the warmest terms of the kind- 
 ness which was shown him on this occasion 'by M. Leopold 
 Delisle, the librarian. For some years after this his time 
 was so much occupied with other things, particularly with 
 his work on the statutes of Lincoln Cathedral, and his 
 edition of the university and college statutes, that he was 
 able to make but slow progress with the breviary. He con- 
 tinued, however, to work at the subject at intervals, and the 
 editors, it must be allowed, showed considerable patience 
 in waiting for his results. The pressure of public and 
 private engagements, which increased very largely during 
 the last five or six years of his life, was beginning to tell 
 upon his strength, and he felt that he had undertaken too 
 
 * The York Breviary was edited by Mr Lawley (from the 8vo edition of 
 1493) for the Surtees Society, in 1880-83.
 
 272 LITERARY WORK, 1878-86. 
 
 much. At one time he was on the point of putting aside 
 all the work that he had done, and allowing the breviary 
 to appear without his additions. That his task was weigh- 
 ing heavily upon him is clear from the following letter, 
 addressed to Mr Clay, of the University Press, in Sep- 
 tember, i! 
 
 "Mv DEAR CLAY, 
 
 " I have put everything aside this Long Vaca- 
 tion to get my list ready for the appendix to the preface 
 to the breviary ; but I do not hesitate to say that the 
 labour all along (and skilled labour too) has been far 
 greater than any editing of the text of the breviary could 
 possibly be, apart from journeys to Paris, Edinburgh, 
 Dublin, and a score of places in England. I will do my 
 very best to see what this week will enable me to do, 
 which I can print with as little discredit as possible. ... It 
 is work I find extremely difficult to do for another, when 
 every day I feel the curse of keeping others waiting. 
 
 " Yours very truly, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 Mr Clay offered him the services of an amanuensis, 
 to which he replied, "Thanks for the offer of an amanu- 
 ensis, but I fear that would be of little use at present. 
 I never know how to deal with such a person, and it 
 generally ends in my wasting both his time and mine." 
 
 He was fortunately dissuaded from putting aside his 
 work, and he continued his researches whenever he could 
 find time. Writing to Lord Beauchamp in 1884, to ask 
 him for the loan of some of his breviaries, he says 
 
 " DEAR LORD BEAUCHAMP, 
 
 "... The University Press edition of the book 
 (by Procter and Christopher Wordsworth) is now waiting for
 
 THE SARUM BREVIARY, 1885. 273 
 
 my account of the printed editions, and this I have worked 
 out almost entirely to my satisfaction. I am most anxious, 
 for the sake of future investigators, to see all the copies 
 I can see, and so to settle clearly what each copy contains." 
 
 After asking for the loan of Lord Beauchamp's copies, 
 he concludes 
 
 " I know you will forgive me for asking such a favour, 
 whether you see your way to granting it or not. As I 
 cannot get away from home at this time, and I really do 
 want the books, I feel sure you will do what you can. 
 I can never forget that it was by you that I was first in- 
 doctrinated with these studies long ago. 
 
 " Yours very sincerely, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 A few days later, after receiving the books, he writes 
 to Lord Beauchamp again, "Your letter and the books 
 which followed it are both delightful. ... I have not half 
 expressed my thanks for your kindness. You naturally 
 forget these things, but there is no doubt you were the 
 very first, as a boy at school, to give my mind a turn 
 towards Church ideas and Church things. It was an 
 epoch with me, and one does not forget these things easily." 
 
 Throughout the next year (1885) he continued to ex- 
 amine the books necessary for the completion of his list. 
 In January, 1886, he had very nearly completed his task. 
 His last letter to Mr Wordsworth, is as follows : 
 
 "King's College, January 18, 1886. 
 
 " MY DEAR WORDSWORTH, 
 
 " I trust your extreme gentleness and forbear- 
 ance will shame me into doing what much louder ex- 
 postulation would fail in doing. I dread making promises, 
 or talking of the future, when I have failed so egregi- 
 ously before in keeping to my word. But I have to-day 
 
 T
 
 274 LITERARY WORK, 1878-86. 
 
 written to Lord Spencer and to Mr Ellis to ask them 
 to let me see their two books ; and when I have seen 
 them I see no possible excuse which I shall be able to 
 allege for not finishing my work. I have been better all 
 to-day, in consequence of your letter, than I have been 
 for two months, and I seem to have gained heart to take 
 the necessary steps. But I dare not say more. Be urgent 
 and do not listen to any excuses on my part. I have 
 cleared my rooms of service-books, and have given every 
 scrap to the library, this Christmas. I hope they will not in- 
 fect all who use them hereafter with my own dilatory spirit. 
 " Ever yours affectionately, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 His requests to Lord Spencer and Mr J. H. Ellis were 
 naturally granted. In writing to thank the latter, he says 
 (January 22), "Your precious little book has come safely. 
 I am delighted to see your careful way of packing it. It 
 more than answers my expectations, as it at once explains 
 my troubles about Regnault's books. . . . Your book has 
 been very slightly cut by the binder, nothing really to 
 hurt ; but I regret to find that he has misplaced the first 
 sheet of the Proprium Sanctorum . . . From the very 
 minute worm-holes which exist in some parts, it is perfectly 
 clear that the sheets were correctly placed before it came 
 into the recent binder's hands. If they possibly can ruin 
 a book, they will do so, and I know no binder free from 
 such habits certainly none of the great London binders." 
 The books from Lord Spencer's collection were deposited 
 in the British Museum for Mr Bradshaw's use, but he did 
 not live to use them. They were the only Sarum Breviaries 
 in England which remained for him to examine. At his 
 death he left the lists of breviaries and other service-books 
 so nearly complete, that his friends were able to fill up 
 the few gaps and to print the lists almost as they stood.
 
 THE LINCOLN STATUTES, 1880. 275 
 
 I now pass to Bradshaw's work on the Lincoln statutes. 
 
 In September, 1880, he paid a visit to Lincoln, in order 
 to examine the documents in the chapter muniment-room, 
 as well as some books in the cathedral library. This 
 visit was the beginning of his investigations respecting the 
 statutes of Lincoln Cathedral, the results of which he, 
 unfortunately, did not live to publish. It is to be hoped 
 that they will shortly, however, see the light under the 
 editorship of his friend, the Rev. Christopher Wordsworth. 
 Without anticipating his fuller statement, I must give 
 some account of them here.* 
 
 The circumstances which gave rise to these investiga- 
 tions were as follows. W T hen Dr Wordsworth, having 
 been enthroned as Bishop of Lincoln, in 1869, was in- 
 ducted, as the custom is in that cathedral, into a prebendal 
 stall, in order to gain a voice in the chapter, he promised 
 to observe, among other things, all the statutes, customs, 
 and ordinances contained in the " New Registry," and in 
 the " Laudum," or award, of Bishop Alnwick. Up to this 
 time these documents existed only in manuscript. Bishop 
 Wordsworth, thinking it well that they should be more 
 accessible to the persons interested in them than they could 
 be while in this condition, printed a copy of each document 
 in a volume which appeared in iS/j.f 
 
 A few words are necessary here, in order to explain 
 to the reader the relations of these and other documents 
 which formed the subject of Bradshaw's investigations. 
 The older customs and ordinances of Lincoln are contained 
 in a book known as the " Liber Niger," a document com- 
 piled in the early part of the thirteenth century, but based 
 
 * I ought to say that I am specially indebted in what follows to Mr 
 Wordsworth, who was kind enough to read over and correct this chapter, and 
 to entrust me with the papers (or copies of them) by Bradshaw which he 
 intends to publish, as well as with notes of his own. 
 
 t In printing this volume, Bishop Wordsworth had the assistance of Canon 
 Venables and of Dr. Benson, then Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral.
 
 276 LITERARY WORK, 1878-86. 
 
 upon still older documents which have long since dis- 
 appeared. That these customs were not clearly laid down 
 or that all cases which might occur were not provided for, 
 is evident from the fact that there arose in the first half of 
 the fifteenth century a great dispute between Dean Mack- 
 worth and his chapter. This dispute, which lasted many 
 years, was settled by Bishop Alnwick in 1439, after a 
 unanimous appeal from all parties concerned. The epis- 
 copal award is contained in the " Laudum " mentioned 
 above, and is undoubtedly of statutable authority. Not 
 so the " Novum Registrum." Bishop Alnwick, anxious 
 to provide against such disputes in future, proposed that 
 the existing laws and customs of the cathedral should be 
 brought together and clearly stated in a new book, and 
 that this collection should supersede all earlier documents. 
 The dean and chapter consented, and a " registrum " or 
 collection was drawn up. This " registrum " was discussed 
 at a length which even a parliament of the present day 
 might almost envy, and with a result which not unfre- 
 quently closes the lengthiest parliamentary debates. After 
 no less than thirty-six " convocations," the matter was 
 brought to a close by a solemn protest * from Dean Mack- 
 worth against the acceptance of the bishop's proposal. 
 It therefore fell through, and the " Novum Registrum," 
 not being accepted, remained of no effect. 
 
 But the efforts of Bishop Alnwick, though frustrated 
 at the time, eventually bore fruit. Towards the close of 
 the seventeenth century, two hundred and fifty years after 
 its first appearance, the " New Registry " was revived. By 
 a process, the history of which was not preserved, it 
 became customary at that time, and has been customary 
 ever since, to exact from every member of the chapter on 
 taking possession of his dignity a promise of obedience to 
 
 * It appears to have been Dean Blakesley who unearthed this protest, and 
 thus threw the first doubts on the validity of the "New Registry."
 
 THE LINCOLN STATUTES, 1880. 277 
 
 the rules therein contained. For nearly two centuries after 
 this, it appears that no one doubted the authority of the 
 " Novum Registrum." In recent times, however, doubts 
 began to arise, and Dean Blakesley, in his answer to the 
 questions addressed to the dean and chapter, in 1879, by 
 the Cathedral Commissioners, plainly expressed his belief 
 that it was invalid. What Bradshavv did was to trace out 
 the history and connection of the documents mentioned 
 above, and of others still older, and to establish beyond 
 a doubt what was already matter of suspicion that the 
 " Novum Registrum " is a document of no authority beyond 
 what the custom of the last two centuries may have 
 given it. 
 
 A contemporary copy * of the " Novum Registrum " 
 was carried off, a century after Alnwick's time, by Matthew 
 Parker (afterwards archbishop), when ejected from the 
 deanery in 1553, and deposited at his death, with the rest 
 of his books, in the library of Corpus Christi College, 
 Cambridge. Bishop Wordsworth, being anxious that the 
 inquiry which he had set on foot should be prosecuted 
 further, requested Mr Lewis, librarian of Corpus Christi 
 College, to give him some information respecting the copy 
 of the " Novum Registrum " preserved in the library of 
 that college. Mr Lewis brought the letter to Bradshaw, 
 who examined the book. " I was not long," he writes in 
 the introduction to his unpublished memorandum on the 
 subject, " in making the unexpected discovery that it was 
 no mere transcript of Bishop Alnwick's book, but an 
 original copy of the most precious description, and full 
 of a living human interest possessed by very few books of 
 the kind. What with the amendments of the hot-tempered 
 
 * Mr Bradshaw, judging from internal evidence, considered that the 
 Corpus copy was not the absolute original draft, but a contemporary transcript, 
 a sort of fair copy, made immediately from the original used in the discu>sions, 
 and therefore of all but equal value with the absolute original, which has 
 disappeared.
 
 278 LITERARY WORK, 1878-86. 
 
 precentor and others, and the running comments of the 
 bishop, accepting or rejecting them, the whole scene in the 
 chapter-house at Lincoln was brought up so vividly before 
 one, that the very life of the people of the time seemed 
 to be in the book : 
 
 "'A book in shape, but, really, pure crude fact 
 Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard, 
 And brains, high-blooded, ticked foitr centuries since.' * 
 
 The temptation to pursue the subject was irresistible." 
 
 In order to pursue it, he made the visit to Lincoln to 
 which I have already alluded. On his return to Cambridge, 
 he wrote to Mr Wordsworth, " My brain was seething with 
 the results of my six hours' work in the muniment-room all 
 the time of my journey back, and a good while after I 
 got to bed. I have come to a few very satisfactory results 
 in my own mind." This first visit enabled him to take 
 a general view of the subject, and to draw up a rough list 
 of the documents with which he was concerned. A couple 
 of months later he visited Lincoln again, and made a more 
 searching examination, the results of which he wrote out 
 soon after and put into type (November, 1880). The 
 printed matter occupied nearly fifty pages, but he after- 
 wards became dissatisfied with it, and cancelled the whole. 
 The work which Bradshaw had already done on these 
 and other cathedral statutes enabled him, in the spring of 
 1 88 1, to draw up a letter on the cathedral system addressed 
 to Archdeacon Norris, which I have printed in the appendix. 
 Dr Benson, now Primate, then Bishop of Truro, in writing 
 to thank Bradshaw for allowing him to see this letter, says, 
 " It is simply the most important paper on chapters and 
 their modernisation which I have ever read ; " and he goes 
 on to remark that he had found the statements and sugges- 
 tions of the letter most useful in elaborating the ecclesi- 
 
 * " The Ring and the Book," i. 86-88. " Four " in the last line is sub- 
 stituted for "two."
 
 THE LINCOLN STATUTES, issi. 279 
 
 astical machinery which he desired to establish in his new 
 diocese. 
 
 Bradshaw paid two more visits to Lincoln in 1881, and 
 the second time carried off with him the famous " Liber 
 Niger." He copied out the whole of this book, which in 
 many places is very difficult to decipher, and put it into 
 complete order. Finally, he had it rebound under his own 
 direction, a process of which it stood much in need. The 
 chapter passed a vote of thanks, when they received the 
 book back in 1883, "for the pains and skill bestowed by 
 him on one of the most valuable of their muniments, which 
 they could not have found in any other quarter, and which 
 have made the document in question readily available for 
 consultation." 
 
 Early in 1882 he sent to Bishop Wordsworth an elabo- 
 rate analysis of a volume called, " The Bishop's Statute- 
 Book," as being always in the possession of the bishop for 
 the time being.* In the letter enclosing this analysis 
 (which Mr Wordsworth intends to publish), Bradshaw says, 
 " My only wish has been to collect facts, in order that 
 others may form a judgment upon them. As a Fellow 
 of King's College, I cannot feel that there is anything 
 incongruous in my contributing my share towards the 
 elucidating the history of the Church of Lincoln.f Only 
 a few months ago Canon Robertson brought me an un- 
 doubted autograph signature of Remigius, the founder of 
 the see of Lincoln, to examine ; and I confess that to one 
 like myself, whose life is spent in the care of books, the very 
 sight of such a document is enough to stir me to do my 
 best to clear the ground for those who want a knowledge 
 of the historical facts, in order to form a just judgment on 
 
 * This volume, says Bradshaw, was compiled about 1540, and contains 
 transcripts of the "Black Book," the " Laudum " of 1439, the "Novum 
 Registrum " of 1440, and the " Statuta Vicariorum." 
 
 f The Bishop of Lincoln is Visitor of King's College.
 
 280 LITERARY WORK, 1878-86. 
 
 what is put before them." And a few days later, " How 
 
 far the continuous acceptance of a body of statutes (which 
 
 were first acted upon two hundred and fifty years after 
 
 date, under an erroneous conviction that they had been 
 
 ratified at the time of their composition) is a tenable form 
 
 of acceptance, is a legal difficulty upon which, of course, it 
 
 does not concern me even to offer a suggestion. But 
 
 having a very great love for anatomising books, and for 
 
 working out what I may call the bibliographical elements 
 
 of a problem of this kind, so as to ensure to those who 
 
 wish to form an opinion a sound basis on which to form 
 
 it, I have been unable to resist the temptation to work 
 
 out the results of my various searches. This, I hope, now 
 
 very soon to have finished. I wish much that I could 
 
 write briefly ; but when my heart is full, I cannot help 
 
 myself." 
 
 To Dr Benson he writes a little later (March, 1882) : 
 " I am beginning to see daylight about my own little 
 book. I am making it simply a guide to such things as 
 are to be found in the Lincoln muniment-room and else- 
 where, illustrating or containing statutes and ordinances 
 affecting the chapter. ... It will be very imperfect at 
 best, but I think the lines will be drawn which others can 
 fill in. ... I have made a thorough chronological tran- 
 script of every atom of writing that is to be found in the 
 Black Book, copying everything in the order in which it 
 was written into, or came to form part of, the book. This 
 I should like to print directly I can get the other out of 
 my hands. I hate shovelling in a mass of old documents, 
 with no clue to what they mean, what they consist of, or 
 how they came there. But, intelligently printed, I feel 
 sure it would be found of some use. Having done this, 
 which would please the Bishop of Lincoln, and enable the 
 people there who differ to see and understand what they 
 are differing about, I should like to print a little volume
 
 THE LINCOLN STATUTES, 1882. 281 
 
 containing as good a text as can be got, of the five or six 
 sets of consuetudines (you will be surprised at the number) 
 with which Lincoln was provided in the thirteenth century, 
 or a hundred years before the Mackworth-Alnwick period. 
 These I have got into shape, and I am working hard to 
 understand their history and their connections with the 
 consuetudines of other churches. I can truly say that 
 I have never been engaged in such an intensely interesting 
 piece of anatomical work. 
 
 " Salisbury and Lincoln are two sister churches, chil- 
 dren of Rouen. . . . Just before Salisbury came to the 
 front under Richard Poore,* who built the cathedral and 
 drew up (to all appearance) the Consuetudinarium which 
 all the world quotes, Lincoln was the most prominent 
 church in England, and sent its customs to Scotland, 
 where Moray, Aberdeen, and Caithness all bear marks of 
 its influence. Then the new Salisbury book goes to 
 Lincoln, to Lichfield, to Wells, to Exeter, to Dublin, to 
 Glasgow, to York, and Hereford, and leaves its mark. 
 Lincoln uses it and modifies it, and hands it on to 
 St Paul's. I now find, to my surprise, that whereas 
 Alnwick's book is based on St Paul's, so St Paul's is 
 based again on Lincoln, having got nothing (apparently) 
 direct from Salisbury. But I need not go on with this. 
 I will only say that the erasures in the dean's oath in the 
 Black Book of Lincoln I was able to read only by going 
 to the Dublin and Lichfield books. . . . Your letters 
 always stir me up, and give me renewed life and heart 
 for work ; and if I can only keep from side work, I hope 
 to be able to do something to help you to clear the ground 
 to build upon. It requires endless patience, but it is its 
 
 own reward. 
 
 " Ever yours most affectionately, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 * Bishop of Salisbury from 1217 to 1228.
 
 282 LITERARY WORK, 1878-86. 
 
 That these historical researches were, in Bradshaw's 
 mind, connected with the problems of modern ecclesiastical 
 organization is clear from a letter to Dr Benson, written 
 shortly after the above, with respect to his work in the new 
 diocese of Truro. " I wish it were not too late as you are 
 reviving old ideas, and are presenting to men's eyes and 
 minds a thing which is very different from the vague ideal 
 they had formed of a cathedral chapter and its constitu- 
 tion to restore the real body." He goes on to speak of 
 the large body of canons which formerly existed at Lin- 
 coln, the bishop himself being one, together with other 
 officers, dean, chancellor, archdeacons, etc. The canonry, 
 or position of a canonicus, is the bond which binds all 
 together in one brotherhood. "The fact of having one 
 common symbol of membership, the canonry, seems to 
 give a notion of corporate unity the one body, and many 
 members which I should dearly like to see brought to 
 light again." 
 
 To Mr Lawley he writes in April, 1882, "I am at pre- 
 sent in a great state of delight at having finally knocked 
 the Sarum Consuetudinary on the head. I have been very 
 sick, for some years, of hearing it called St Osmund's work, 
 and I felt sure it was really the work of Richard Poore. 
 And now at last I have got the actual constitution of 
 Osmund * himself, dated 1091, and it is altogether the most 
 interesting document I know, or have ever heard of, for my 
 purpose. It seems the three great churches where this 
 four-square arrangement of chapter- 
 Treasurer. Chancellor. 
 Chanter. _ Dean. 
 
 was established, were your own beloved York, Lincoln, and 
 Salisbury. All the others gradually adopted it, except 
 London ; but these are the three primitive establishments, 
 
 * St Osmund was Bishop of Salisbury from c, 1078 to 1099.
 
 THE LINCOLN STATUTES, 1882. 283 
 
 and they are almost coincident. York is said to be 1090. 
 I wish I could find any document anywhere, or anything 
 which would give me certain information. Lincoln was 
 September 1-8, 1090, Thomas of York and Osmund of 
 Salisbury both being witnesses. Salisbury was early in 
 1091, Thomas of York and Remigius of Lincoln both 
 being witnesses. You read a great deal nowadays of 
 this constitution being of the usual Norman model (a vague 
 phrase), so I was at the pains to take all the churches (forty- 
 four of them) within a considerable range of Normandy, 
 and see what their constitution was, in the ' Gallia Chris- 
 tiana,' as a rough indication. The only one which is pre- 
 cisely Osmund's institntio at Salisbury is Bayeux. . . . Now, 
 Thomas of York was himself Treasurer of Bayeux, and 
 Bayeux was a church with greater prestige in some respects 
 than even Rouen. Is it not pretty ? I should like you to 
 see my schedule of the different constitutions, showing how 
 they tell their own story." 
 
 In the year 1882-3 Bradshaw was much occupied with 
 his work on another body of statutes, namely, those of the 
 University and the colleges of Cambridge. He managed, 
 however, at intervals to carry on his Lincoln work. In the 
 summer of 1883 Mr H. E. Reynolds advertised an edition 
 of the Lincoln " Consuetudinarium," which was to contain 
 some work of Mr Wordsworth's. " I sent him [Brad- 
 shaw] the proofs," says the latter ; " I received them care- 
 fully annotated, but with a candid admonition as to the 
 crudeness of the production." " I am," writes Bradshaw, 
 " in a state of very half or quarter knowledge on the 
 subject myself, and I naturally look eagerly everywhere 
 to see fresh light. ... I cannot put down on paper for 
 you my views, merely because they are thoroughly pro- 
 visional. Ever since I began to print in 1880, I have felt 
 bound (not only to you and to Wickenden,* and to your 
 
 * The late Rev. J. F. Wickenden, Prebendary of Lincoln, had for several
 
 284 LITERARY WORK, 18,8-86. 
 
 father,* but especially to the dean [Blakesley] for all his 
 kindness and hospitality to me while at work, and to the 
 chapter for lending me books) to do my best to work out the 
 subject, bringing to bear the familiarity with anatomising 
 manuscripts which my work here has forced upon me. It 
 is a very serious work, and my leisure is small, but the work 
 progresses, and if I live I hope it will not be long before I 
 have something to show, both for my own labour and for 
 other people's exceeding kindness." He did not live to 
 accomplish this task, though he made large preparations 
 for it. In 1884 he made with his own hand an inventory f 
 of a great portion of the contents of the muniment-room 
 at Lincoln, " as a first attempt to take stock (so he modestly 
 described it) of the patient and loving work bestowed upon 
 these treasures " by Mr Wickenden. 
 
 The work which he left on the subject of the statutes 
 can only be regarded as containing his provisional, not his 
 final, judgment. Nevertheless it is not probable that any 
 but a few details will need alteration. He seems to have 
 been dissatisfied more with the form than the substance of 
 what he had put into print. As his work, so far as it was 
 put on record, will be published by Mr Wordsworth, I need 
 only give a brief summary of it here. 
 
 The object of the paper which Bradshaw intended in 
 1882 to publish was, as he states himself, "to clear the 
 ground for an investigation into the growth and subsequent 
 history of those documents which either possess, or have 
 been supposed to possess, more or less claim to be con- 
 sidered authoritative statutes of the Cathedral Church of 
 Lincoln." He goes on to point out that, " strange as it may 
 appear, there is not yet the slightest evidence to be found 
 that the chapter has ever been provided with a body of 
 
 summers been engaged in arranging the contents of the muniment-room at 
 Lincoln. He died in 1883. 
 
 * Christopher Wordsworth, D.D., Bishop of Lincoln 1869-85. 
 
 t This inventory has since been completed by Mr C. Wordsworth.
 
 THE LINCOLN STATUTES, 1882. 285 
 
 statutes under seal," and that there is "grave doubt, at the 
 present moment, as to what are strictly to be considered 
 statutes of the church, and what are not." For the purpose 
 in view, he divides the history of the Church of Lincoln 
 into two periods : from its foundation soon after the Nor- 
 man conquest to the early part of the fourteenth century ; * 
 and from that date to the present time. He intended to 
 take the latter period first, and to trace the history of the 
 " Novum Registrum " from its promulgation in 1440, through 
 the stages by which it gradually crept into recognition and 
 acceptance, to its publication as an authoritative document 
 by Bishop Wordsworth. 
 
 Secondly, he contemplated printing the contents of the 
 " Liber Niger," the book of statutes which the " New 
 Registry " was intended to supersede ; and, in the third 
 place, he hoped "to print as accurate a text as can be 
 found of the several collections of statutes, or Registra 
 consuetudinun? , of the Church of Lincoln, which were in 
 existence before the compilation of the Black Book, adding 
 such illustrative documents as may serve to show the posi- 
 tion of the Lincoln statutes by the side of those of other 
 cathedral bodies." He intended, moreover, not only to 
 print but to describe and analyse, and, where possible, to 
 date, these documents. Such a scheme, if only it could 
 have been executed, was calculated to throw a flood of light 
 on the mediaeval history of the English Church. Unfor- 
 tunately, only the first, and perhaps the least interesting 
 part, of the programme was even provisionally carried 
 out, though extensive preparations, including a transcript 
 of the Black Book, were made for the rest. 
 
 The question to be answered in the first part of this 
 plan was, How did the " Novum Registrum," in reality 
 
 * In the (manuscript) introduction to his memorandum, dated 1882, he 
 adopts another division, breaking the history at the early part of the fifteenth 
 century, the date when Mackvvorth became dean.
 
 286 LITERARY WORK, 1878-86. 
 
 nothing more than an abortive proposal, come to be recog- 
 nised as possessing statutable authority ? Bradshaw solved 
 this problem by examining in order, first, the oaths taken 
 by members of the chapter on admission to their dignities ; 
 and, secondly, the copies of statutes or collections of cus- 
 toms made from time to time since the middle of the 
 fifteenth century. The evidence derived from these two 
 lines of investigation combined to show that there had 
 gradually arisen in the minds of the chapter a miscon- 
 ception as to the nature of the " Novum Registrum," which 
 ended in its adoption as a body of statutes after 1695. 
 Down to that date, the oaths made no allusion to that 
 document, but for two centuries previously, owing to 
 the fact that it was frequently copied out along with the 
 statutes contained in the Black Book and other ordi- 
 nances of undoubted authority, it had been gradually 
 creeping into an authoritative position. In 1523 "a regular 
 Lincoln statute-book" was compiled, containing the 
 " Novum Registrum." The increasing sense of its im- 
 portance is shown by the fact that in the transcript of 
 1 540 a joint index for it and the Black Book is provided. 
 A few years later Parker carried off the original, and thus 
 made it still more difficult to keep the true nature of the 
 " New Registry " in mind. At length, after the confusion 
 of the civil wars, the tradition of its origin had completely 
 disappeared. The chapter suddenly awoke to the incon- 
 sistency, as they thought it, between their oaths and the 
 laws under which they lived. " After a short period of 
 fluctuation, the oaths of the Black Book were quietly 
 superseded in favour of those prescribed in the newly dis- 
 covered treasure, and all mention of the Black Book dis- 
 appears from the official records of the chapter." 
 
 Having thus answered the question with which he set 
 out, and explained the acceptance of an unratified body 
 of statutes, Bradshaw proceeded to another part of his
 
 THE LINCOLN STATUTES, 1882. 287 
 
 inquiry the origin and growth of that body of customs and 
 ordinances which Bishop Alnvvick's " Novum Registrum " 
 set aside. The Black Book itself he ascribes to the fourteenth 
 century. Its contents, or some of them, go back a good 
 deal further. Bradshaw proves the existence of two earlier 
 consuetudinaries or collections of customs, known at the 
 opening of the fourteenth century as the " Registrum 
 Vetus " and the " Novum Registrum " respectively. The 
 former of these he traces back to 1214 or thereabouts ; the 
 latter to 1267.* By a delicate process of analysis and 
 comparison, the details of which are too minute to be given 
 here, he shows what the earlier of these two consuetudi- 
 naries contained. The fragment of his work unfortunately 
 breaks off just as he was about to enter on a similar ex- 
 amination of the fuller Consuetudinary of 1267. 
 
 * With respect to the contents of the Black Book itself, Bradshaw (about 
 1884) distinguished three principal portions, viz. (i) transcribed soon after 
 1300 from the " consuetudines " drawn up about 1236-7 ; (2) a collection of 
 privileges, etc., entered in the book about 1325, with the oaths and other 
 entries inserted about 1421 ; (3) the Consuetudinary drawn up about 1260-70, 
 and entered in the book about 1400.
 
 ( 288 ) 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 EARLY in September, 1882, the fifth annual meeting of the 
 Library Association was held at Cambridge, under the presi- 
 dency of Henry Bradshaw. It was an event of great im- 
 portance in his quiet life, and one which, in several ways, 
 had a lasting effect upon him. He took' much trouble in 
 thinking out all the details beforehand, and in the prepara- 
 tion of his address ; he fulfilled the duties of chairman 
 with conciliatory tact and firmness, and his attention and 
 geniality as a host won all hearts. The consequence was 
 that the meeting, to which he had looked forward with 
 considerable trepidation, was a complete success. It had 
 been proposed to hold the meeting of 1881 at Cambridge, 
 but it was held in London instead, in order that Bradshaw, 
 who had not attended the previous meetings, might have 
 an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the nature of 
 the proceedings before undertaking the duties of president. 
 He accordingly attended the London meeting as an ordi- 
 nary member, but he refused to take a place on the plat- 
 form, and at first took no part in the discussions. Presently 
 he suggested to Mr R. Bowker, who happened to be 
 sitting next him, that they should move up towards the 
 front, in order to hear better. He would not go alone, 
 but was willing if Mr Bowker would support him. It 
 was, as the latter remarks, a characteristic bit of shyness. 
 After this he became keenly interested in the proceedings,
 
 LIBRARY CONFERENCE, 1882. 289 
 
 spoke several times, and before the conference was over 
 had made acquaintance with most of those present. 
 
 The local arrangements for the Cambridge meeting 
 and for the reception of the visitors gave him naturally a 
 good deal of trouble, and that, too, of a novel kind. 
 Shortly before the conference he wrote to Mr Lawley, 
 " The Association people come to-morrow fortnight. Most 
 university people snub the whole thing and go away, so 
 I have double work in the way of thought, letter-writing, 
 and responsibility. I have asked some five and thirty 
 people to come and stay with me in college for the week, 
 and twenty have had great pleasure in saying yes. So 
 you can, perhaps, believe that I have enough on my hands 
 what with preparing my opening address and general 
 material for work and discussion. Besides which, I have 
 four people all on me, clamouring for me to read their 
 proofs and give them criticisms, every word of which they 
 resent as soon as given. I was not made for this kind of 
 work." 
 
 When the guests, a hundred or more in number, met 
 in Cambridge, they found everything prepared for them, 
 and not a hitch occurred. The meetings were held in the 
 hall of King's College, and other public rooms in the 
 college were also put at the disposal of the visitors. 
 Bradshaw's opening address* dwelt chiefly on the duties 
 of a librarian ; on the development of the library in general, 
 from the purely utilitarian library of early times to the 
 mixed antiquarian and practical library of our own days ; 
 and on the history and principal features of Cambridge 
 libraries in particular. He entertained the members of 
 the Association at a social gathering in his own college 
 the first evening of the conference, and two days after- 
 wards was entertained by them in return at a dinner at 
 the Lion. He presided at all the meetings, which no 
 
 * Subsequently printed as No. 7 of the " Memoranda." 
 
 U
 
 2QO LlBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 president had done before, and more than once restored a 
 friendly tone to discussions which threatened to become 
 acrimonious, or by some happy suggestion reconciled 
 discordant views. He warmly supported a proposal to 
 institute some sort of examination or a certificate of com- 
 petency for library assistants, to be granted by the Associa- 
 tion, which would assist the provincial libraries in obtaining 
 an efficient staff. He conducted the visitors over the 
 University Library, and arranged for the inspection of other 
 important libraries and objects of interest in Cambridge. 
 Besides his address, he contributed an "Account of the 
 organisation of the University Library ; " a " Note on local 
 libraries considered as museums of local authorship, and 
 printing," a subject in which he always took a keen 
 interest ; and a " Note on size-notation as distinguished 
 from form-notation," * at the end of which he remarks, in 
 defence for introducing what might to some appear super- 
 fluous, that " he had not found, in the last twenty years, 
 five Englishmen, either librarians or booksellers, who knew 
 how to distinguish a folio from a quarto, or an octavo 
 from a I2mo or i6mo." He had also intended to read a 
 paper on English bindings, and to have arranged an ex- 
 hibition of specimens, but want of leisure prevented him 
 from carrying out either project. 
 
 The week during which the members of the Associa- 
 tion were at Cambridge was for Henry Bradshaw one of 
 unmixed satisfaction, the satisfaction which arises from the 
 discovery and exercise of powers of which the possessor 
 was previously unconscious, and the conviction that he was 
 winning the gratitude and respect of all his guests. It 
 was generally acknowledged that it had been the most 
 successful meeting yet held, and when the mover and 
 seconder of the vote of thanks attributed this success to 
 
 * These are printed in the appendix to the Report of the proceedings at the 
 conference.
 
 LIBRARY CONFERENCE, 1882. 291 
 
 the energy and forethought of their president, and to the 
 tact and judgment which he had displayed as chairman, 
 they were giving utterance to a universal sentiment. " His 
 conduct in the chair," writes Mr Nicholson, " was a model 
 of dignity, pleasantness, and impartiality." Several leading 
 members of the conference have told me since that they 
 were astonished by the practical ability displayed by one 
 hitherto almost entirely unused to the conduct of public 
 business ; but no one was more surprised than Bradshaw 
 himself. The success of the meeting, and the recognition 
 which awarded his efforts, acted upon him like an ex- 
 hilarating stimulant. He said no more than he felt when, 
 in answer to the vote of thanks, he remarked that, in spite 
 of the work which the meeting had entailed, " it had been 
 the most perfect holiday to him which he had ever enjoyed 
 in his life." 
 
 Writing to a friend shortly after the meeting was over, 
 he says, " I only wish you could have seen us at our work. 
 I had five and twenty guests of my own in college, and I 
 had council-meetings and committee-meetings in abun- 
 dance, besides taking the chair at all the general meetings. 
 But instead of knocking me up, as most people thought it 
 would do, it has had the effect of a complete holiday, and 
 I feel really better than I have for years past. Every 
 single thing went well, and the tragedies which were ex- 
 pected to come off and mar the pleasure of the meeting, 
 every one melted away and ended in stronger feelings of 
 union and friendship than could have been believed. Com- 
 mittees which were composed of irreconcileables (to each 
 other), so that no report seemed possible, ended in satis- 
 factory reports in which people were unanimously agreed, 
 by people being brought to understand each other, instead 
 of being allowed to succeed in getting round each other. I 
 never experienced such pleasure as I did in the sense of 
 power in controlling those opposing forces, especially at
 
 292 LlBRARIANSHir, 1882-86. 
 
 the general meetings, and in doing so by uniformly taking 
 every one at his best, and ignoring anything he might say 
 which tended towards the irreconcileable. There had 
 been a great deal of ill feeling for a year or two past, and 
 by a simple determination that it should be worked out 
 of the system (as the doctors say), it went, to the infinite 
 satisfaction of all. It has made me extremely happy." 
 He had already taken the part of peacemaker, and 
 with effect, though in an unofficial position, at the meeting 
 of 1881. 
 
 To one of his guests, who had thanked him for his 
 hospitality, he writes, " My one object was to make people 
 feel at home and at their ease ; to leave them in great 
 measure to themselves, but yet to provide them with an 
 opportunity of making one or two acquaintances which 
 they would be very glad of the chance of making/' And 
 again, " Outsiders have so often in the last week remarked 
 to me how especially humanising a librarian's work seemed 
 to be, the people were all so genuine and friendly." To 
 another he writes, " Work seems to increase upon me daily, 
 but my librarians' meeting did me an enormous amount 
 of good. It was like a three or four weeks' holiday in the 
 Alps the entire change, and the absence of a jar, not a 
 shadow of a thing going wrong. I had not the face to 
 run away after the meeting, I felt so completely set up 
 by it ; so I remained here, and did a quantity of necessary 
 work." 
 
 His correspondence for some time after this shows the 
 stimulating effect which the conference had upon him, 
 though it can hardly have been in reality the holiday 
 which it seemed. The following is from a letter written 
 in October, 1882, to an intimate friend, who had some 
 notion of taking work at Cambridge. 
 
 " If you were drawn strongly towards some particular 
 calling, I should, of course, never dream of allowing myself
 
 CORRESPONDENCE, 1882. 293 
 
 to try and move you from your purpose, however much I 
 might regret your loss to us here. But it is evident that 
 your schoolmastering project is not a thing of this kind. . . . 
 No doubt there is too much of picking holes at King's, 
 and misunderstanding of good intentions ; but this is the 
 case more or less at most places, and nothing but a higher 
 tone of real work will remedy this. It is here that Frank 
 Balfour's death* is such a terrible loss. He was one of 
 those people who go on and on, working, and full of work 
 and vigour, and never wasting a particle of energy on 
 decrying his neighbours, and ready to enjoy himself in 
 congenial company to the very fullest. It is these Darwin- 
 like men that we want here, the men who go at truth 
 because they can't help it, and never find pleasure in weakly 
 picking holes in their neighbour's work. There are several 
 here as it is, and the more we have the more we shall 
 get on. 
 
 " I cannot for a moment allow your plea of want of a 
 real sphere of work here. So far from your absence from 
 Cambridge being a loss, it is a double gain both to your- 
 self and us. Save me from a Cambridge man who has 
 never known any atmosphere but Cambridge. It is this 
 very freedom of the early years of a college fellowship 
 which is such a blessing. A man gets time and leisure 
 to find favourite pursuits, which he can carry on when he 
 comes and takes up his quarters here. The only thing is, 
 you must write you must produce. It is that cynical 
 fastidiousness which destroys so many of our good men. 
 Don't tell me that a man of your calibre of mind could 
 possibly be forced to sit without employment in Cam- 
 bridge. The sensitiveness which says, ' I cannot bring 
 myself to fight against the dead weight of philistinism, or 
 whatever it may be called, and sooner than it should crush 
 me, I will go elsewhere,' is a thing to be fought against 
 
 * In July, 1882. See above, p. 263.
 
 294 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 in one's self, quite as much as the other thing in one's 
 neighbour. Further than this, if you feel that you are 
 working honestly, and are worth your salt, you cannot fail 
 to find friends whom you never dreamt of. The very 
 essence of university life is that friends must go, but this 
 only means that friends must come ; and those who go are 
 not by any means lost, while one's own sympathies are 
 widened by the very variousness of men's character. 
 
 " All that you say at the end of your letter is a mistake. 
 A man can be none the worse for having two very different 
 favourite pursuits or lines of work. ... I am not going to 
 believe that you could not make yourself really useful in 
 both your subjects. The soundest way of learning is 
 teaching, provided only you enjoy the work, and that I 
 know you would do. ... My heart is so full that I cannot 
 help writing all this. I must give my testimony, as the 
 Quakers say. Who can say what a very few men, banded 
 together unselfishly to go straight ahead in a good cause, 
 will accomplish, or rather, what they will not accomplish ? 
 Only bear with me for my pertinacity. My library meet- 
 ing has given me a new sense of life, and stirred me up 
 in many ways." 
 
 To the same friend he wrote in another letter, " The 
 serious task which I have set myself is to draw people to 
 see that the leading feature of the new day, which is 
 beginning now with our new constitution, is that, idle 
 fellowships being abolished, the only real meaning of this 
 is that in the future the fellowship dividend is to be looked 
 upon as a part endowment of the work done here, and that 
 all recognised work done here is work which qualifies for 
 a fellowship. It will be a hard task, and will require more 
 tact than I have, but with patience and help it ought to 
 come. When this becomes recognised, all will go right. 
 A man holds his fellowship free as air for six years, with- 
 out being compelled to make up his mind to his vocation
 
 EDITION OF UNIVERSITY STATUTES. 295 
 
 in life. But if, before that time is over, he comes here 
 and takes work here, his fellowship lasts at least as long 
 as his work lasts. Cambridge is becoming every year 
 more and more such a hive of workers, that I do long to 
 see King's possessed of some good share of these workers 
 in different fields. Only none of these changes for good 
 will ever come of themselves, or without strong individual 
 effort on the part of each one of us that is certain." 
 
 The New Statutes to which this letter alludes came 
 into operation during the Long Vacation of 1882. Brad- 
 shaw was elected a member of the newly created council of 
 his college, in the affairs of which he had been unable, 
 since he had been Librarian, to take much active part. 
 A more important event was his election to the General 
 Board of Studies, a body which controls the various special 
 boards, and exercises a general supervision over the educa- 
 tional machinery of the university. These appointments 
 indicated the respect which was felt for him in his college 
 and in the university, but they added heavily to the weight 
 of his business engagements. For the present, however, 
 the encouragement which they gave only stimulated him 
 to fresh exertions. 
 
 In 1882 he undertook to edit for the University Press a 
 volume containing the statutes of the university and the 
 colleges, as sanctioned by the commissioners in the pre- 
 vious summer. It was a very laborious work, for he was 
 too scrupulous to allow any one else to look over the proofs, 
 and spent much time, which he could ill spare, in the 
 effort to obtain absolute and literal accuracy. Beyond 
 this result, his zeal for which was characteristic enough, 
 the work offered no scope for the display of his peculiar 
 powers, and one can hardly help regretting that he ever 
 undertook it. He regretted it himself when it was too late. 
 Writing to Mr Clay in February, 1883, he says, "I am 
 ready to go on steadily, but for goodness' sake don't let
 
 296 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 your people send me the council office copy rolled up tight 
 and wet with paste, for the boy to jam into a small hole in 
 my door." Two months later he writes, " Every day 
 shows me more clearly that I ought never to have allowed 
 myself to undertake any such work, and if you can make 
 any other arrangements I shall be very grateful." He 
 went on with the book, however, and finished it in the 
 autumn of 1883. For all the labour expended on it, which 
 was considerable, he declined to accept more than a merely 
 nominal honorarium. The Syndicate offered him a certain 
 number of copies. He accepted two for his own use, but 
 the rest he refused, with the remark, " I should prefer to be 
 allowed to buy all such copies of the book as I want to 
 give away to my friends. It would be a satisfaction to me 
 to feel that the book had some sale, even though a portion 
 of the money came out of my own pocket." 
 
 At Easter, 1883, he took a fortnight's holiday in the 
 south-west of France. He visited Bordeaux and Bayonne, 
 and finally took up his quarters at Pau. He was evi- 
 dently out of health. He notes in his diary that he slept 
 badly, and one night he " woke in pain, which nothing but 
 quiet made right." The weather, too, was often bad, and 
 rain deprived him of much of the enjoyment he expected. 
 Even when away he could not rid himself completely of 
 work. Writing to Mr Arthur Coleridge on March 23 
 (Good Friday), he says 
 
 "Mv DEAR ARTHUR, 
 
 " These great Church days always have the effect 
 of bringing you to my mind, and I have treated you so 
 very badly for many months past, that I must sit down 
 and talk to you, if only for a few minutes, before going 
 out for a walk. We are away for an exact fortnight, . . . 
 and I, not having had a clear week's holiday for three 
 years, am quite content with a fortnight as things go. It
 
 EDITION OF UNIVERSITY STATUTES. 297 
 
 is a thorough change and holiday, and I have brought an 
 Augean stable of letters and papers in my portmanteau, 
 all wanting sifting, answering, or destroying. . . . The day 
 is baskingly lovely, and the pure snow-line of the Pyrenees 
 just out of my window, as I sit writing, fills me with all 
 good thoughts. We had a nice quiet service (such as 
 you would have liked) at Trinity Church this morning. . . . 
 Kindest regards to all. 
 
 " Ever your loving friend, 
 
 "HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 To Mr Donald Masson, of Edinburgh, he writes, " I 
 am just reading with very great interest M. d'Arbois 
 Jubainville's first course of lectures at the College de France, 
 ' Introduction a 1'etude de la litterature Celtique.' They 
 are, to my mind, extremely well worth reading, having all 
 the research of a German, coupled with the lucidity of a 
 Frenchman. He deals only with Irish, and it makes me 
 long to have leisure to learn something of the language, 
 to which I have always had such strong attractions. But 
 I have to content myself with the lower ground of the 
 palaeography and bibliography of the subject" 
 
 Early in September he attended the conference of the 
 Library Association at Liverpool. He occupied the chair 
 at one of the meetings, and spoke several times. Mr R. 
 Somervell, with whom he stayed on the occasion, says, " He 
 was in excellent spirits, and used to give us, with almost 
 boyish pleasure, accounts of what he had done and said in 
 the course of the day, while he sipped the nightcap of milk 
 and soda-water with which he used to regale himself before 
 going to bed." 
 
 In October, 1883, he finished the statutes. On the 8th of 
 that month he wrote to Mr Seebohm, " I have this evening 
 returned for press the last sheet of a book of eight hundred 
 pages which I have been seeing through the press, and it
 
 298 LiBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 has taken it out of me considerably, though there is nothing 
 that most people would not have found easy and light 
 work. The result is that I have not been able to get even 
 my week's ' long vacation,' at the beginning of October, as 
 I generally do." The result, however, must have been very 
 gratifying to him, for those best qualified to judge received 
 the book with grateful applause. Mr Coutts Trotter 
 wrote to him, " Your handsome and well-printed volume is 
 a pleasant contrast in every respect to the chaotic blue- 
 book which contained the college statutes of 1859-61 in 
 their least inaccessible form." Dr Luard said, " I see what 
 pains and trouble it has taken ; but this is only to say in 
 other words that it is you that have edited it." Dr Hort 
 wrote, " One line of warm thanks and congratulation. It 
 is a beautiful and satisfactory book. It would be pleasant 
 to believe that many of those for whose benefit it is in- 
 tended will value as they should the care and thought 
 which have been lavished upon it." And Professor Mayor, 
 in a letter of thanks, remarked, " It is curious to contrast 
 the statutes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
 with the wisdom of the nineteenth ; the one dealing with 
 the ends of university life, the other engrossed in the means, 
 which, just in the nick of time, are dwindling away." 
 
 In December, 1883, the stipend of the librarian was 
 raised, in accordance with a recommendation from the 
 Library Syndicate, to .500. Bradshaw had held the post 
 for more than sixteen years at the original stipend of 400 
 a year. It was certainly high time that some such recog- 
 nition of his services, slight as it was, should be made. 
 
 Early next year there was a great sale of books, belong- 
 ing to the famous Vergauwen Collection, at Brussels. The 
 Syndicate placed .500 at the librarian's disposal for the 
 purchase of early printed books from this library. In 
 March he went over to Brussels to inspect the collection, 
 having previously armed himself, as his custom was, with a
 
 VERGAUWEN SALE, 1883. 299 
 
 classified index of the fifteenth-century books which it 
 contained. Shortly after the sale he wrote to Mr Ferd. 
 Vanderhaeghen, of Ghent, " I went over to Brussels on 
 Thursday night, and returned on Friday night, having 
 spent a long day at Olivier's, examining M. Vergauwen's 
 books, as I had never had a chance of seeing them before. . . . 
 I sent commissions for several books, and obtained a good 
 many of them. Our funds would not, of course, allow us to 
 bid for any of the great treasures, like the Colard Mansions, 
 and many others of general interest. But such as I wanted 
 for my typographical researches I happily succeeded in 
 getting. Among these was a packet of fragments sold at 
 the very beginning of the sale, and not in the catalogue. 
 If I had not gone to Brussels myself, I should not have 
 known of their existence. ... I felt very heartless when I 
 heard that it had fallen to me, because I felt that you 
 ought to have had it. But then, I did not feel at all sure 
 that it would go to you if I lost it." 
 
 The acquisition of one of these fragments, consisting of 
 some leaves from a " Horae Beatse Mariae Virginis," in 8vo, 
 printed by Arend de Keysere at Ghent, gave him very 
 great pleasure, for the book, he says in another letter, was 
 wholly unknown, and he considered himself amply re- 
 warded for his journey by having obtained it. He bought 
 altogether at this sale one hundred and forty fifteenth-cen- 
 tury books, at a cost of .551. " I only lost two interesting 
 things," he told Mr Sandars, " and neither of them was of 
 real importance to me. What I need is not so much 
 rarities as books containing problems to work out." 
 
 In October, 1884, he attended the annual meeting of the 
 Library Association at Dublin. At the dinner on October 
 2, he replied on behalf of the members of that body to the 
 toast of " the Association." The next day he delivered an 
 address on the subject of Irish printing. He had intended 
 to write his paper, but when the time came he had only
 
 300 LlBRARIANSHlP, 1882-86. 
 
 put together a few notes, and his communication was almost 
 entirely oral. He was listened to with great attention for 
 over an hour. Unfortunately, the newspaper reports have 
 preserved very little of what he said, but he appears to 
 have given a general sketch of the history of printing in 
 Ireland, and an estimate of the chief authorities on the 
 subject. He traced the wanderings of printers and work- 
 men from one spot to another, and showed how the print- 
 ing trade moved with other trades from place to place, 
 even from street to street in Dublin. He appealed to all 
 interested in the study to aid in collecting materials. Every 
 provincial library, he thought, should form a museum of 
 local productions. Such a collection might contain much 
 rubbish, but for their purpose it ceased to be rubbish when 
 once put in order and employed to throw light on the his- 
 tory of typography. His own interest in the subject arose 
 from the circumstance that his father and mother were 
 natives of Ireland, and that he had inherited from the 
 former a collection of Irish books. He had, therefore, been 
 all his life interested in Irish literature and printing, and 
 his object was to get at the original sources of information, 
 especially the books themselves, and so to place the study 
 of Irish typography on a scientific basis. Professor Mahaffy 
 says in a letter to me, "The flood of facts, of original 
 combinations, of acute inferences in his address, was quite 
 astonishing, and we came away so amazed that no one 
 thought of writing anything down." 
 
 The success of his address and the pleasure of meeting 
 old friends put him in high spirits. Dr Gwynne, who had 
 known him in far-back St Columba days,* writes of him 
 on this occasion as follows : " I was at a conversazione 
 [in Dublin], and I was informed that Bradshaw was in the 
 next room, and was anxious to see me. I went in the 
 direction indicated by my informant, and saw a small 
 
 * See above, p. 55.
 
 LIBRARY CONFERENCE, 1884. 301 
 
 group of men talking together. I looked at them for a 
 few minutes, utterly unable to identify any one of them 
 as Bradshaw. At last I was obliged to turn to my friend 
 and ask him which was the man I sought. Even when he 
 was pointed out, I was still unable to recognise him in the 
 stout, healthy-looking man, with an air of hearty enjoy- 
 ment and a manner full of animation and bonhomie, 
 whom I saw before me. When he spoke, my puzzle came 
 to an end. The voice was unchanged, and I felt at last 
 that this was the Bradshaw I had known twenty-eight 
 years before." Throughout the meeting he was treated 
 with marked respect. On his first appearance, on the 
 second day of the meeting, the whole assembly stood up 
 to welcome him, 'and received him with loud applause. 
 His remarks were listened to with attention, and carried 
 conviction. " I never knew before," says one who was 
 there, " what commanding personal influence meant." 
 
 From Dublin he went to Broomfield to stay a day or 
 two with Archbishop Trench. Thence he wrote to a 
 friend, " The meeting of the Library Association has 
 been very pleasant. ... I got over my paper better than 
 I expected. I had put down on a bit of paper the order 
 in which I wanted to take the several matters, and of 
 course I had thought it out ; but it appears that I went 
 on for an hour and a quarter without a break. There was 
 no clock to warn one, and they were all perfectly attentive. 
 I was amused to read in one of the papers next morning 
 that ' Mr Henry Bradshaw from Cambridge delivered a 
 most engaging address on the subject of printing in Ireland,' 
 etc. It was very amusing, and the people are coming 
 to me now hour by hour to ask questions, and to see how 
 they can help in working the matter out." From Broom- 
 field he went to visit Dr Reeves, now Bishop of Down and 
 Connor, one of his oldest friends. " My stay in Ireland," 
 he wrote a little later, " was most enjoyable ; and it ended
 
 3O2 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 up most happily with a long hoped-for visit to Armagh 
 and Tynan. Was there ever such a man in this world as 
 the dean?" 
 
 Soon after his return from Ireland in November, 1884, 
 Bradshaw was elected a member of the University Council. 
 His name appeared on the Liberal ticket, but the support 
 given to him was very general, and in the voting he came 
 out at the head of the poll. He was much gratified by 
 the compliment, but, as it implied being engaged on 
 university business several additional hours every week, 
 it was a compliment which he could ill afford to accept. 
 Nevertheless he attended the meetings regularly, and took 
 an active part in the conduct of business. All this implied 
 an increasing readiness on his part to " come out of his 
 shell." It is certain that, during the later years of his life, 
 a sense of growing influence gave him more confidence in 
 himself, and broke down, to a great extent, the old barrier 
 of shyness and reserve. As an instance of this tendency, 
 I may mention that in June, 1884, he allowed himself to 
 be proposed for the Athenaeum by Professor Liveing, after 
 having for many years refused to stand. He did not, 
 however, live to become a member of the club. 
 
 Just before Christmas, 1884, he received the news of 
 the sudden death of his eldest brother, Mr Thomas Brad- 
 shaw, a county court judge at Newcastle-on-Tyne. He 
 immediately went north, and stayed with his sister-in-law 
 and her family for some days after the funeral. 
 
 From Newcastle he writes to a sister, respecting the 
 brother whom he had lost, " I never knew a man more 
 perfectly happy within his own immediate family, and I 
 have never known a man about whose public work, and 
 the good unpretending high quality about it, there has 
 been for years past a more singular unanimity of opinion. 
 These two things I am content to take as the lesson of his 
 life." To another sister he writes, " You know something
 
 DEATH OF MR. T. BRADSHAW. 303 
 
 of what I can feel of the satisfaction of my having had 
 ten days here last summer. . . . ' If only,' he said so many 
 times while I was here ' if only we could see each other 
 a little oftener, as we all grow old ! We cannot see each 
 other many more times, in any case.' The words sunk 
 into me, and I made up my mind to spend a few days 
 with them at Christmas." Writing to one of his oldest 
 friends, in answer to a letter of condolence, he says, " I 
 have just been with them [his brother's family] for a week, 
 and, though a very sad Christmas, it has been in some 
 ways a happy one, for these times of deep sorrow some- 
 how open up wells of comfort which might otherwise have 
 been unobserved." 
 
 The shock of his brother's death was all the more 
 severe because he was himself far from well. Unintermitted 
 labour was undoubtedly telling upon him. His snatches 
 of holiday were but pleasant moments ; they did not suffice 
 to recruit his waning strength. Those who saw him day 
 by day hardly marked the gradual change, and when long- 
 absent friends came to visit him, old affection and common 
 interests acted as a pleasant stimulus, and made him appear 
 the same man as he had been. His spirits were not visibly 
 affected. He went often into society, more often than had 
 been his wont some years before, and he enjoyed his grow- 
 ing popularity. His interests seemed as keen as ever. 
 Whether he had any inkling that he was suffering from a 
 serious disease, it seems impossible to say. He certainly 
 took his brother's death as a warning, and he made no 
 secret of his conviction that his was not to be a long life. 
 He more than once told me he knew he should not live 
 to be more than sixty. But it does not appear that as 
 yet he had any notion that the end was near ; nor did any 
 of his acquaintances, so far as I am aware, discover any 
 signs of its approach. 
 
 In looking back at the last year of his life, one can
 
 304 LiBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 recall a certain loss of the old elasticity, a shrinking from 
 unusual physical exertion, and other symptoms of failing 
 energy, but these were not sufficiently marked to demand 
 attention at the time. The consciousness of fatigue shows 
 itself, however, in his correspondence. He frequently com- 
 plains of being tired out, a condition which, in former days, 
 never seemed to occur to him as even conceivable. 
 
 At Easter, 1885, he went for a short holiday to Whitby, 
 in company with Dr Jackson. Writing to Mr F. Madan, 
 of the Bodleian, on April 6, he says, " I have come off 
 here with Henry Jackson for a week's real fresh air and 
 exercise, with no intellectual food but a portmanteau full 
 of letters to answer, yours among the number. I was 
 completely used up at Cambridge, and now, spending, as 
 we do, most of our day in fighting the strong south-east 
 wind on the sands or on the cliff, I feel getting daily 
 stronger, and more without excuse for not answering my 
 letters. I am delighted to hear of your discoveries at 
 Oriel. . . . But you are really on the wrong tack when 
 you go to a college library and look in their alphabetical 
 catalogue. I never should have found anything in this 
 way. The only real way is to walk right round the shelves, 
 as I have often longed to do at Oxford, and as I so often 
 have done at Cambridge every time I do so, finding some- 
 thing which I had allowed to escape me the time before; 
 I should dearly like to have another good time at Oxford." 
 
 Dr Jackson notes, in connection with this Easter 
 holiday, a characteristic incident. " We broke the journey," 
 he says, " at York, and after dinner, with his bag of letters 
 in his hand, he joined me on the platform for a turn or 
 two. It ended in a promenade of something like three 
 hours, during which time, swinging his bag as he walked, 
 he told me the whole history of his inquiries respecting the 
 ' Hisperica Famina.' * I was very anxious that he should 
 
 * Unfortunately, Dr Jackson took no notes of this conversation.
 
 GIFT TO USHAW COLLEGE. 305 
 
 lose no time in publishing an account of his discoveries." 
 Unfortunately, he did not live to do so. 
 
 I may mention here a kind and thoughtful act which 
 he did about this time. When in Dublin for the meeting 
 of the Library Association, he was shown by the Rev. Dr 
 Gibbings, among some books of his which were shortly 
 to be sold, the proof-sheets of Dr Lingard's "History of 
 England " (first edition), with the author's notes and cor- 
 rections, bound up in several quarto volumes. It occurred 
 to him afterwards that such a relic would be valued at 
 St Cuthbert's College, Ushaw,* and he therefore bought 
 it and presented it to the college. The gift was gratefully 
 received, and is now in the library there. Bradshaw had 
 no personal connection either with Dr Lingard or with 
 Ushaw, and his motive was simply his habitual desire 
 to preserve any literary memorial of interest, and to 
 preserve it in the place where it was likely to be most 
 appreciated. "As I know," he writes to the president, 
 " that the people at Ushaw value every relic of him [Dr 
 Lingard], you must let me deposit it in your library, as 
 some return for your kindness to me at Ushaw last year." 
 
 About the same time he was engaged in doing another 
 small service for the chapter library at Carlisle.f A packet 
 of musty and worm-eaten letters had been lately dis- 
 covered by a workman engaged in the restoration of 
 the cathedral. They were concealed in a hole in the 
 wall of the triforium, and had lain there unnoticed for 
 more than two hundred years. On examination they 
 proved to be the correspondence of Lord Nithsdale, a 
 leading royalist partisan in the time of the Civil War. 
 
 * The famous college of Douai, broken up by the Revolution, migrated to 
 England, and, after several changes of abode, was finally established at Ushaw. 
 Dr Lingard, who had himself been at Douai, was for several years resident as 
 a professor at Ushaw, and began his history there. 
 
 t He had, some years previously, rearranged and superintended the re- 
 binding of the ancient registers of the chapter of Carlisle Cathedral. 
 
 X
 
 306 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 The chapter applied to Bradshaw, as they had done on 
 a previous occasion. He undertook the arrangement and 
 restoration of the letters, put together the mutilated frag- 
 ments, and had them carefully mounted. Some of them 
 were so illegible and dilapidated that this was a task 
 of great difficulty. He was able, however, to complete it, 
 and the letters, bound up in a volume, were sent back 
 to Carlisle after his death. 
 
 In May, 1885, he read a paper on "Early Bibles" at 
 a meeting of the Library Association in London. But 
 his chief work this year was the eighth and last of his 
 " Memoranda," on " The early collection of Canons com- 
 monly known as the Hibernensis." It was in the form of 
 a letter to Dr Wasserschleben, who was just about to bring 
 out a second issue of his edition of his " Irische Kanonen- 
 sammlung." Bradshaw had for several years, more especially 
 about the year 1876, been at work on the early history 
 of this famous code of ecclesiastical law. He had been 
 led into the investigation in the course of the search for 
 Celtic remains, of which I have already given some account.* 
 It was obvious that his palaeographical and philological 
 researches would be aided by a study of the origin and 
 sources of the code itself, and would in turn throw light on 
 the latter. It was in accordance with his habits and training 
 that he approached the question from the point of view 
 of the manuscripts, deducing his conclusions primarily, 
 though not altogether, from the nature of the handwriting, 
 the language of the glosses, and similar characteristics. Dr 
 Wasserschleben, on the other hand, based his results mainly 
 on the subject-matter. Bradshaw was anxious to prove 
 that while, without any doubt, " the ultimate origin of the 
 ' Hibernensis ' was Irish," the two texts, as we have them, 
 in which the canons have been preserved, " can only have 
 spread over Europe from Brittany." This was only part 
 * See above, pp. 187, 227.
 
 THE " HIBERNENSIS." 307 
 
 of the outcome of his work on early Celtic remains, the 
 result of which had been to show that " Brittany had been 
 overlooked," and to restore Breton to its proper place 
 among the dialects of the Celtic race. 
 
 When Dr Wasserchleben was bringing out his second 
 edition, Bradshaw, to whom he had applied for the loan 
 of a transcript of one of the manuscripts, requested him 
 to delay the issue for a week or two till he could send 
 him the results of his investigations. This Dr Wasser- 
 schleben consented to do, although it took Bradshaw a 
 month before he could get his work into shape. While 
 engaged on this task several new ideas occurred to him. 
 In a letter to Mr Whitley Stokes, dated May 17, 1885, he 
 asks his opinion about an ingenious emendation of a 
 hitherto unintelligible passage, in which he discovers the 
 name of the person who was most instrumental in trans- 
 cribing or drawing up the code, and adds another proof 
 to the evidence of its Irish origin. He writes, " My present 
 point is about the rubric at the end of the ' Collectio 
 Canonum Hibernensis ' itself. This is the only manuscript* 
 which has anything like a rubric with a name, and at the 
 end of the last chapter it stands thus : ' Hucusque nuben & 
 cv. cuiminiae, & du rinis.' Seeing how undistinguishable et 
 and ex are in Hiberno- Saxon manuscripts, and how easily 
 a; and ce might be confused, it strikes me that the rubric 
 might read thus : ' Hucusque nubenetcu cuimini a* ex 
 durinis,' and that ' cuiminus abbas ex durinis ' might well 
 be a Cumin, abbat of Dairinis, or some such place. If so, can 
 you see any trace or corruption in ' nubenetcu ' of an Irish 
 word which might refer to any such compilation, or defloratio, 
 or series of extracts. I do not, of course, wish to force any- 
 thing, and I think you will credit me with sufficient honesty 
 
 * This is one of the Paris manuscripts, which, he says, " is clearly the most 
 primitive of all, and the only one which contains traces of Irish in what I 
 should call a fossil state, the scribe [a Breton] not understanding what he is 
 writing. "
 
 3O8 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 of intentions for this ; but it would be so extremely happy 
 a result, if this should turn out to be some disguised word, 
 which really made sense to any one who had the key to 
 unlock the difficulty." 
 
 Mr Whitley Stokes, in his reply, accepts the suggestion 
 that Durinis stands for Dair-inis (oak island), " a monastery 
 near Youghal, now called Molana, from St Maelanfaedh, 
 the patron saint," and, while suggesting that the letters 
 " nubenetcu " contain the proper name " Ruben," recognizes 
 Cucumne as an Irish celebrity of the eighth century more 
 than once mentioned in the annals of that time.* " This 
 hitherto unrecognised compiler of the ' Hibernensis,' " says 
 Bradshaw in his published letter, " may, without any strain 
 either of language or of evidence, be looked upon as 
 possibly identical with the Cummeanus abbas in Scotia ortus, 
 to whom the penitential literature of the eighth century is 
 so much indebted." 
 
 Unfortunately, Bradshaw found it impossible to work 
 out his ideas fully, and was forced at length to put merely 
 his results on paper, and send them to Dr Wasserschleben 
 with no more than a short introduction. At one moment 
 he despaired of being able to send him anything at all. 
 " I have been doing my utmost," he writes, " to put my 
 notes into a satisfactory shape that I might send them 
 to you, but I find that it is more than I can possibly do 
 in the middle of the work of the University term, with the 
 mass of other things that I have to do. So I must release 
 you at once. . . . My health will not bear the strain of 
 the double work of the last three or four weeks, and I 
 must reluctantly give it up." He went on with it, however, 
 and a week later wrote to Dr Wasserschleben as follows : 
 
 " I could not resist sending you something of my work, 
 
 * Mr Stokes refers to the " Four Masters," ed. O'Donovan, s. a. 742 ; 
 and "Liber Hymnorum," ed. Todd, pp. 138-146. Cucumne died about 
 742, and " oddly enough," says Mr Stokes, " the entry in the 'Four Masters' 
 next before that relating to Cucumne is the obit of an abbot of Dairinis."
 
 THE "HiBERNENsisr 309 
 
 so I determined to compress a part of it into twelve 
 short propositions, which I hope some day to be able to sub- 
 stantiate. I wrote them out with a few preliminary pages, 
 necessary to show how I came to find the clue to so many 
 difficulties in Brittany, and these I finished at six o'clock 
 this morning and sent them to the press. . . . My twelve 
 propositions will show to some extent the aim of my work, 
 and if you choose to say anything about them in your 
 preface, or even to print them, I shall be encouraged to 
 carry my intentions through, and to put my reasons clearly 
 (or as clearly as I can) in print, when the vacation 
 comes. ... I think you will see that my work has brought 
 me to see things which your work did not lead you to 
 consider, and that there is no real antagonism between 
 our views." * 
 
 In the paper in question, after sketching briefly the 
 course of his own studies and the steps which led him 
 " to bring the claims of Brittany into notice," Bradshaw 
 gives a list of the manuscripts containing the " Hibernensis," 
 and then lays down the twelve propositions referred to 
 in his letter, touching the manuscripts themselves, the 
 origin and authorship of the " Hibernensis," the chief facts 
 in the life of Gildas, and the position of Brittany in Celtic 
 history. Of these propositions I have given some further 
 account below (Chap. XI.) " Until you have fuller materials 
 before you," the author says in conclusion, " these proposi- 
 tions may at least serve the purpose of suggestions. They 
 may, perhaps, lead some student to take pleasure in pursuing 
 the investigation further, and if they are honestly pursued, 
 light will assuredly come to clear up what is a deeply interest- 
 ing, even though a most obscure question in literary history." 
 
 Another bibliographical problem, smaller and more 
 capable of complete solution, occupied Bradshaw for a 
 
 * Dr Wasserschleben printed the whole of Bradsbaw's letter as an appendix 
 to the preface of his book (Die Irische Kanonensammlung, ed. 2, 1885).
 
 310 LiBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 short time this summer. This was an investigation of 
 the work of the first Cambridge printer, John Siberch, 
 who printed several books at Cambridge in 1521-2. Mr 
 Robert Bowes had issued, in 1878, a facsimile of one of 
 these books, Linacre's translation of Galen, and was 
 anxious to publish the other productions of Siberch's 
 press. At his suggestion, Bradshaw set to work on the 
 books, and succeeded in discovering, from internal evi- 
 dence alone, the exact order in which Siberch's eight 
 volumes were published. The different copies of one of 
 these, however, an edition of " Papyrius Geminus," dis- 
 played certain variations which could not easily be ex- 
 plained. The publication was therefore delayed, in order 
 to give Bradshaw time to examine all the known copies. 
 This he was able to do in 1885, and by putting the books 
 side by side and patiently comparing them, he made out 
 for the first time a complete history of this, the first 
 Cambridge press.* 
 
 Meanwhile he gave as much attention as ever to the 
 affairs of his office and to the public business of the 
 university. In May, 1885, he drew up a long and elabo- 
 rate report on the requirements of the library.f In this 
 report he emphasised the increasing need of space, and 
 the growing inconvenience which arose from overcrowding. 
 As a partial relief he proposed the annexation of the Law 
 School, the last of the three old public lecture-rooms which 
 originally occupied the ground-floor of the library. But 
 he pointed out that the relief thus obtained would be only 
 temporary, and therefore suggested the filling up of the 
 western side of the western quadrangle. The first of these 
 suggestions was carried out almost immediately. Funds 
 were at the time lacking for the execution of the larger 
 
 * His notes, prepared for press by Mr Jenkinson, are printed as an intro- 
 duction to the facsimile of " Bullock's Oration," the earliest of Siberch's 
 books, published by Mr Bowes. 
 
 t Published in the University Reporter, May 6, 1885, p. 679.
 
 WANTS OF THE LIBRARY, ETC. 311 
 
 part of the scheme, but it has been taken up since his 
 death, and the building which he proposed is now nearly 
 completed. Another matter in which he took great in- 
 terest was the proposal * to reorganise the machinery of 
 the university registry, and to increase the stipend of the 
 registrary. In support of this scheme, he issued (on June 10, 
 1885) a warm appeal to the members of the Senate, in which 
 he traced the steps which led up to the proposal, pointed 
 out the insufficiency of the existing staff, and pressed upon 
 the university the claims of the registrary, who, "with 
 an old-fashioned modesty which it is easier to respect 
 than to approve, had unfortunately felt it his duty to go 
 on and on for years unaided in the constantly increasing 
 work of his office." The grace approving the proposal 
 was carried by a large majority. 
 
 The day after this letter was written he received the 
 news of the sudden death of his eldest sister, Mrs Daniell. 
 It was the severest loss he had ever yet sustained, and 
 it affected him very deeply. For years past her house 
 had been a second home to him, and his letters to her 
 show the intimate communion and sympathy which ex- 
 isted between them. " There seems nothing but death 
 on all sides this year," he wrote soon afterwards to a 
 friend. " My brother's sudden death last Christmas has 
 broken up a very happy home, and my sister Katherine's 
 death last month has been a blow such as I never ex- 
 perienced before." But on occasions like this he was not 
 wont to express his feelings in words, and only those who 
 knew him well saw how bitter was his grief. 
 
 It was, perhaps, some sort of foreboding aroused by 
 these events which induced him to make an effort to set 
 in order or get rid of the accumulations of years which 
 lay piled about his rooms. Early in July he was destroy- 
 ing old letters, he writes, at the rate of a hundred a 
 * Published in the University Reporter for June 2, 1885, p. 789.
 
 312 LlBRARlANSHIF, 1882-86. 
 
 day. A little later he went north to aid his sister-in-law, 
 Mrs Bradshaw, in the move from Newcastle to London. 
 On his way home he took the opportunity of paying a 
 short visit to an old Eton and college friend, Mr Booth, 
 near Sheffield. They had not met for years, but absence 
 never interposed a barrier between Henry Bradshaw and any 
 one to whom he had once become attached. " While in 
 my house," says Mr Booth, " he found the original edition 
 of the Waverley novels, in rather a neglected condition. 
 He gathered them together, all but one (since found), 
 which he noted as missing, and wrote off a catalogue of 
 them for me, then and there, in a few minutes, seeming 
 to have all their titles and the order of their publication 
 in his head." The meeting was an affecting one for both 
 of these old friends. To Mr Booth it seemed like a fare- 
 well. "It was rather," he writes, "the general tone of 
 Bradshaw's manner and conversation when he was here, 
 along with the fact of his coming at all and of his having 
 volunteered to come, than any particular expression, which 
 assured me that he was aware of his precarious condition. 
 But just before we parted company, when I had been 
 speaking of something (I forget what) to be expected with 
 certainty at no distant time, he said abruptly, with some 
 emphasis, and in his cold, grave, composed tone, ' / shall 
 not be alive then.' The remark only seemed to me at 
 the time to be a summary of what had been unexpressed, 
 but sufficiently understood between us." 
 
 Not long after this, towards the end of August, Brad- 
 shaw had an attack which alarmed his friends considerably, 
 and appeared ominous of serious mischief. He had been 
 ailing for some time past, when one night, just as he was 
 going to bed, he was seized with a violent bleeding at 
 the nose, which continued for more than three hours. 
 There was hardly any one in college, and he tried in 
 vain to rouse the porter in order to send for a doctor.
 
 ILL-HEALTH, 1886. 313 
 
 Thus imprisoned, and unable to get assistance, he had 
 to return to his rooms and await the event, whatever it 
 might be, in no pleasant frame of mind. The bleeding 
 stopped eventually, and he got to bed. " I have at last 
 collapsed in my small way," he wrote shortly afterwards, 
 " and it is a thousand pities it did not happen before. It 
 has been a very innocent thing merely violent bleeding 
 at the nose for three or four hours together one night, 
 repeated to a smaller extent next day. But I did send 
 for a doctor at once, when morning came for the first 
 time for ten years and I am ordered to shut up. Pro- 
 fessor Robertson Smith has insisted on carrying me off 
 with him to France somewhere next Monday, and I hope 
 to come back a wiser and a soberer man in three weeks' 
 time. I can only reflect that my experience of the Long 
 Vacation has shown me that I have neither done work 
 nor had holiday, which is a very desirable sort of warning 
 to prevent me going on with this sort of folly." 
 
 During the warm days of the latter part of August and 
 the first half of September, he wandered from one old 
 French town to another, seeing much and enjoying all. 
 Even now he could not avoid doing some work. " I had 
 a very successful hour in the library at Tours," he writes, 
 " going carefully through a manuscript I wanted much to 
 get an account of. At Le Mans, the only other place 
 where I tried the library at all, I failed signally, being 
 paid in my own coin, After waiting two hours to see the 
 librarian, he did not come till just as I was forced to leave, 
 and it was no use speaking to him. I wanted to see the 
 library-marking of some of the old cathedral library books, 
 to get confirmation about our Bede * having come from 
 there." 
 
 Once back at Cambridge, he plunged into work again 
 
 * The famous contemporary manuscript of Bede's " Ecclesiastical History," 
 preserved in the University Library (Kk. v. 16).
 
 314 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 as before. It was at this time, the quiet fortnight at the 
 end of September, when Cambridge is quite empty, that 
 he made the acquaintance of Professor Mommsen, who 
 had come to Cambridge in order to examine the manu- 
 script of Gildas in the University Library, and to investi- 
 gate the authenticity of that work. This was naturally 
 a point on which Bradshaw was able to give him valuable 
 assistance, for it was one on which, as we have seen, he 
 had bestowed much attention.* " I am writing in the 
 library," he says in a letter of this date, " attending every 
 two minutes to old Professor Mommsen, who is here from 
 Berlin. He has completely won my heart, and it is as 
 good as a month's holiday to see his method of working." 
 The respect and liking were reciprocal. Professor Mommsen 
 told Mr Robertson Smith that he had been more impressed 
 by Henry Bradshaw than by any other man he had met 
 in England, and that he longed for a shorthand writer to 
 take down the information which he poured forth on sub- 
 jects of common interest. He had come to England with 
 a suspicion that the work attributed to Gildas was a 
 forgery, and that Gildas himself had never existed. Brad- 
 shaw succeeded in convincing him that this was not the 
 case. 
 
 After Professor Mommsen had left Cambridge, he 
 exchanged several letters with Bradshaw, bearing on 
 the history and manuscripts of Gildas and the so-called 
 Nennius. These letters are of too learned and technical a 
 character to be given here, but I may quote some passages 
 of general interest. " Do not scruple," says Bradshaw 
 " to ask any number of questions about the manuscripts 
 which you think I may be able to answer for you. It 
 will be no loss, much less waste, of time to me ; for I 
 have longed for years past to find some one who will work 
 at these books with grounded intelligence, and it is a real 
 
 * See above, pp. 120, 187.
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH Mo MM SEN, ETC. 315 
 
 happiness to have lived to find the man." Again, " Above 
 all things, I feel that it is of vital importance to trace 
 out, by all available means, what was the home of each 
 of these manuscripts in early times, before attempting to 
 come to any final decision about them. It is, as you 
 justly say, an extremely complex investigation ; but it 
 is its very complexity which interests me so much, and 
 induces me to try my utmost to clear it up. I have done 
 something towards this end in past years, but, from not 
 finding any scholar to whom my work could be of imme- 
 diate use, I have never carried it through, as so many 
 matters have stood in the way with more pressing claims. 
 My primary duty as a librarian is, of course, rather to help 
 scholars in their work to the best of my power, than .to 
 pursue any favourite investigation of my own." 
 
 Shortly after this Bradshaw was in correspondence with 
 Mr Talbot B. Reed, who, while engaged in bringing out 
 his " History of Type-Founding," had written to ask him 
 some questions about Irish printing. " I hope," he writes to 
 Mr Reed, on October 15, "that you will not put down 
 my silence for five days to ingratitude, but I have been 
 absolutely unable to get five minutes' peace in which to 
 answer a letter which has given me more pleasure than 
 any I have received for many years past. It is a real 
 satisfaction at last to find some one who can interest 
 himself in the question of Irish typography from a typo- 
 graphical point of view." And then he goes on to write 
 him a long letter full of information, especially with regard 
 to the use of the Irish character in printed books, which 
 he describes as stopping short in 1 742, and not beginning 
 again till after the Union. This letter was followed by 
 several others, and by a long list of books (covering three 
 large sheets) which he had examined in the course of his 
 investigations into the subject. " To have found some 
 one," he writes, " who will aid in carrying the matter back
 
 3*6 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 beyond the printers to the letter foundry is an advance 
 which I hardly expected to see." One of his letters ends 
 with the words, " I was very glad indeed to hear of the 
 Belfast movement * about local books ; I wish very much 
 I could be put into communication with those who are 
 interested in the subject." 
 
 This wish was soon afterwards gratified, and in the 
 early part of 1886 several letters passed between him and 
 Mr Anderson, the author of the movement referred to, on 
 the subject of Belfast books. These letters show that 
 typography was with him by no means confined to the 
 study of printers' types and habits. He brought his 
 typographical facts to bear on the history of religion and 
 politics in Ireland, and extracted from them new informa- 
 tion about the spread of Protestantism or the stirrings of 
 the national spirit. They show also the human interest 
 which attached him to these studies. " I hope some day," 
 he writes to Mr Anderson, " if I live, to get as far as your 
 part of the country [Belfast]. . . . My mother came from 
 Ballintoy, and lived till she married at Lisburn, while my 
 father came from Newtownards ; so you cannot be sur- 
 prised at my taking an interest in such matters. My 
 father left me the Irish portion of his library, and during 
 the last thirty years I have done my utmost to increase 
 it, and the productions of the Irish presses have always 
 had a special interest for me. Some fifteen years ago I 
 gave all I had in this way to the University Library here 
 some five thousand books, pamphlets, and papers but 
 I cannot now help buying whatever I can afford to buy 
 when it comes in my way, and I must have about three 
 thousand more by this time ready to go in the same 
 direction f when I can get them into some sort of order." 
 
 * This refers to the list of books printed at Belfast, which was then being 
 prepared, and has since been published, by Mr J. Anderson. 
 
 t The Irish portion of Mr Bradshaw's library, together with all the early
 
 CORRESPONDENCE ON LOCAL PRINTING, ETC. 317 
 
 These Belfast books were almost the last subject that he 
 was at work upon, and his last letter to Mr Anderson was 
 written only four days before his death. He gave Mr 
 Anderson considerable assistance in drawing up his list 
 of the productions of the Belfast press, and added a number 
 of titles from the books in his own possession and else- 
 where. At the same time he was corresponding with Mr 
 J. P. Edmond about Aberdeen printing. Other produc- 
 tions of the Irish press were also engaging his attention. 
 One of the last facts he elicited from this investigation 
 was the continuance of the Cork press all through the 
 troubled times of the Irish rebellion in 1641 and of the 
 civil war. 
 
 In spite of the unabated scientific ardour and vigour 
 which his correspondence with Professor Mommsen, Mr 
 Anderson, and others, displays, it is clear that he felt his 
 duties press too heavily upon him, for towards the end of 
 the Michaelmas Term, 1885, he wrote to the vice-chancellor 
 to resign his place on the University Council. A plan 
 was talked of among his friends by which he might have 
 been relieved of the more onerous of his duties as librarian, 
 and have been left free to devote himself to the care of 
 his favourite books and the pursuit of his favourite studies. 
 He himself seemed to favour this idea, but he did not 
 suggest it or press it on. Perhaps he felt it was too late. 
 During the last two months of his life he lived as he had 
 lived before, busy in the discharge of his regular duties, 
 and enjoying the society of an ever-increasing circle of 
 friends. He was much interested in the production of the 
 late Dr Todhunter's work on " Elasticity," which was being 
 edited by his friend Professor Karl Pearson for the Uni- 
 versity Press. He was aiding Mr J. W. Clark in bringing 
 out his architectural history of Cambridge, and Dr Wald- 
 
 printed books and the service-books which he had not already given to the 
 University Library, were presented by his family to the university after his 
 death.
 
 3l8 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1882-86. 
 
 stein in his " Essays on Pheidias." His sympathies were 
 as keen as ever. To his friend Mr Seebohm, who had 
 lately lost a daughter, he wrote on December 20, 1885 
 
 " I am indeed sorry to get your letter and to hear your 
 distressing news. . . . From the few times I have been 
 with you, I have always pictured to myself yours as almost 
 the happiest home I have known all bound up in one 
 another, yet without any of the exclusiveness which some- 
 times goes with this ; all full of their various kinds of 
 work, and so all ready with sympathy for others. I have 
 had so much to bring home to me sorrow of this kind 
 during the last twelve months that you will know, apart 
 from my own feelings for yourself, how much my heart is 
 with you. 
 
 " Ever yours affectionately, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 He spent Christmas with his sister-in-law, Mrs Brad- 
 shaw, in London. Soon after coming back to Cambridge, 
 he wrote (January 4, 1886), to two intimate friends : 
 
 " MY DEAR PEOPLE, 
 
 "My hand is quite tired with writing twenty 
 letters since I came in this evening, but I have not the 
 face to send off such a packet without also sending a 
 few lines to both of you. ... It is very stupid of me 
 to be in the dumps, except that I am quite stupid with 
 coughing, but in other respects I have nothing to complain 
 of. ... I often think of you all, though I never write ; 
 indeed, the less I write the more I think of you, because 
 it weighs upon me so, not writing." 
 
 And a little later to the same 
 
 " The weather here gets more and more disgusting. 
 I had to come here from the library just now in a pelting
 
 NOTES ON JOHN DORNE. 319 
 
 storm of rain, and every few hours it freezes hard ; so 
 altogether I am in no mood for seeing my way happily 
 through the work of an unusually long term. I have not 
 been so deeply in the dumps for a very long time. The 
 chief moral of this is that I had better stop this, and not 
 pour out my troubles (which are entirely of my own 
 making) to you. With best love and thanks for both the 
 long and welcome letters, 
 
 " Ever yours affectionately, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 Towards the end of January, 1886, he was much pleased 
 by the receipt of Mr F. Madan's edition of the " Day-book 
 of John Dome, Bookseller in Oxford, A.D. 1520." This 
 day-book, or bookseller's diary, containing an account of 
 the books sold at an Oxford book-shop ten years before 
 the Reformation, naturally threw light on the literature 
 of the day, and at the same time raised a number of those 
 bibliographical problems which it was Bradshaw's chief 
 delight to solve. He at once set to work on it, and in a 
 few days produced what he called " A Half-century of 
 Notes " on the book in question. These notes abound 
 with abstruse knowledge, conclusive explanations of diffi- 
 culties, and ingenious suggestions. Here is one, for instance. 
 Dome enters in one place, " 1018 : I hackum end hontigle 
 4<aT." On this Bradshaw writes, " You will think me very 
 bold (or rather presumptuous), but Dome shows himself 
 so hopeless where he has to deal with English books, that 
 I am quite prepared to see, through the mist of this entry, 
 the little quarto pamphlet issues of ' Hawking ' and ' Hunt- 
 ing/ issued by W. de Worde about this time. We have 
 the ' Hunting ' in our library, and the ' Fishing ' is well 
 known. The price would suit perfectly for such a book." 
 This is but a slight specimen of his notes, which I extract 
 merely on account of its shortness and simplicity. Refer-
 
 320 LlBRARIANSHlP, 1882-86. 
 
 ence must be made to the whole body of notes in order 
 to obtain an idea of the wide and intimate knowledge of 
 mediaeval literature and typography which they display. 
 What makes the production the more remarkable is the 
 rapidity with which it was dashed off, in short intervals 
 of leisure, with hardly any books at hand, the facts drawn 
 almost entirely from the storehouse of memory.* 
 
 When finished, he wrote out the notes quite cleanly 
 they cover about thirty pages of foolscap made an index 
 to them, drew out a title-page, had the sheets bound as a 
 book, and sent them off at once to Mr Madan. Round 
 the title-page is written, in a dotted border, the text, ominous 
 of what was close at hand, " Whatsoever thy hand findeth 
 to do, do it with thy might ; for there is no work, nor 
 device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave, whither 
 thou goest " (Eccles. ix. 10). And at the foot are the 
 words, " Quasi morientes et ecce vivimus." The following 
 introductory letter is prefixed : 
 
 " King's College, Cambridge, January 30, 1886. 
 
 " MY DEAR MADAN, 
 
 " The care and patience with which you have 
 edited the ' Day-book of John Dome,' ought to have secured 
 you an earlier acknowledgment on my part. The separate 
 copy reached me at the beginning of this week ; and, as 
 it happens that I have been unequal to much serious work 
 during the interval, the interest and amusement which such 
 a book naturally provides for me has come at a most 
 welcome time. I have been through it over and over 
 again, every time finding some new light which it throws 
 upon the subject in which we both feel a strong interest. 
 To show you the sincerity of my thanks, I have put down 
 a few notes, in which I have brought some of the entries 
 to bear upon one another with very satisfactory results. 
 
 * The " Half-Century of Notes" has been reproduced in facsimile by the 
 Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company.
 
 NOTES ON JOHN DORNE. 321 
 
 You will be glad to have them, though I dare say many 
 of them express rash views which may have been enter- 
 tained by yourself for a moment, but have been rejected 
 on the second thoughts which come before final publication. 
 The notes are arranged in the order of your first index, 
 and I have added a small supplementary index, in which 
 I have endeavoured to follow your admirable method. 
 It is not until such a book is actually in print, with the 
 contractions and abbreviations all honestly marked, just 
 as you have done here, that it becomes possible to inves- 
 tigate the further problems which such a document pre- 
 sents. It augurs well for your Historical Society, if the 
 publications continue to show the same amount of intelli- 
 gent care which you have brought to bear upon this. 
 " Yours very sincerely, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 This was the last piece of work which he was able 
 to complete. The end was come. On the evening of 
 Wednesday, February 10, 1886, he diried with Mr and 
 Mrs J. W. Clark, at whose house he met several old friends, 
 Dr and Mrs Luard, Professor arid Mrs Sidgwick, Dr Henry 
 Jackson, and others. He seemdd well, and was in excellent 
 spirits. Dr Jackson asked him about his work on the 
 " Hisperica Famina." He said he had done nothing at 
 it since the May Term. " How long would it take you 
 to get it out of hand ? " " Perhaps a fortnight." " Then 
 why not stop all other work and clear it off ? " " Because 
 there are so many other things to do." The evening 
 passed agreeably, with plenty of genial conversation of 
 that pleasant sort which leaves no special impression 
 behind. When the time came to part, Bradshaw walked 
 home with Professor and Mrs Sidgwick as far as the gate 
 of King's. The porter who let him in was the last person 
 who saw him alive. 
 
 t
 
 322 LlBRARIANSHIP, 1882- 86. 
 
 Next morning, when his servant came in to call him 
 about eight o'clock, he was startled by finding that his 
 master had not gone to bed. He brushed past him in the 
 dark as he went to open the shutters, and at first thought 
 him asleep ; but when he touched his hand it was cold. He 
 was sitting in his armchair at the table in his inner room, 
 the head leaning over to the left side, the left hand hanging 
 down, the right in his lapi His spectacles were pushed 
 up on his forehead, as his habit was when he was not 
 actually at work, A little Irish book, closed, lay on the 
 table in front of him, and near it some paper and a pen, 
 unused. He had taken off his overcoat, but still wore his 
 evening dress, and a blue silk scarf which he used to put 
 on when going out in the evening hung loosely about his 
 neck. The fire had burnt down in the grate, and the 
 reading-lamp on the table had gone out. It seemed as if 
 he had sat down to do a little work before going to bed, 
 and had fallen asleep. 
 
 On the following Tuesday, February 16, his body, 
 followed by a great concourse of persons assembled to pay 
 him the last tribute of love and honour, was laid in the 
 grave. He lies beneath the vault of that great chapel in 
 which he worshipped from a boy, and by the doors of 
 which he passed to and from his daily work for thirty 
 years. His last resting-place is fittingly midway between 
 the rooms which to so many were a second home, and the 
 library where he spent his life in unselfish toil.
 
 ( 323 ) 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 IN this chapter I propose to bring together some materials 
 bearing on Henry Bradshaw's literary work, for which 
 there appeared to be no special place in the foregoing 
 pages, and to attempt a summary of what he accomplished 
 in the various branches of study in which he was interested. 
 The chief of these branches were bibliography, especially, 
 perhaps, that of Irish literature ; palaeography, and the 
 study of manuscripts in general ; Celtic antiquities ; eccle- 
 siastical antiquities, particularly mediaeval service-books 
 and cathedral organization ; early English literature, espe- 
 cially the works of Chaucer ; and the early history of 
 printing. This list is not exhaustive, but most of his work, 
 of which any traces remain, will fall under one or other of 
 these heads. It is not too much to say that in each of the 
 subjects mentioned he was the first, or among the first, of 
 the scholars of his day. The order in which the subjects 
 are placed is unimportant, for it was one of Bradshaw's 
 peculiarities that he studied them simultaneously, and 
 there was hardly a year of his life after he first entered the 
 University Library when any one of them was altogether 
 put aside. The Irish books which he inherited from his 
 father were apparently his first love, and he remained 
 faithful to them to the end ; but his employment among 
 the manuscripts and early books in the University Library 
 determined the main lines of his intellectual activity. He
 
 324 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 had an irresistible tendency to go to the bottom of things, 
 and the study of manuscripts was therefore the natural 
 basis of his work. Still, in his own mind all his favourite 
 subjects were connected. His manuscripts opened the 
 door to a knowledge of Chaucer and other early poets, of 
 the Celtic languages, of the system and ritual of the mediae- 
 val Church ; and from manuscripts he passed on to the 
 study of those incunabula in which the printing-press first 
 supplanted the scribe. 
 
 This " natural piety," which linked together the various 
 branches of study which he took up, was at once a source 
 of strength and weakness. Of strength, for it enabled him 
 to view things in their entirety, with all their surroundings, 
 and to bring to bear on the solution of any problem a mass 
 of illustrative knowledge. Of weakness, for one subject 
 inevitably led on to another ; one peak surmounted, 
 another lay beyond ; he could not resist the fascination 
 of discovery. Unambitious as he was, no thirst for fame 
 urged him to publish his results, and acquisition was more 
 attractive than utterance. His very fastidiousness, his love 
 of accuracy, his ideal of completeness and perfection, stood 
 in his way. He could not desist from his research till he 
 had explored every by-path ; he could not leave any diffi- 
 culty unsolved so long as any clue remained to follow up. 
 His marvellously retentive memory was in one respect a 
 drawback, for it enabled him to lay one subject after 
 another aside, confident that he could take it up again at 
 any moment. He would thus return again and again, often 
 at long intervals, to some favourite mine, each time dis- 
 covering something new, but never working out the vein. 
 At the British Museum there is a relic of Celtic antiquity, 
 the Bodmin Gospels, a manuscript containing entries in the 
 Cornish dialect, in which his marks were allowed to remain 
 for ten years and more. " Almost every time he came to 
 the museum," says Mr E. M. Thompson, "he used to have
 
 HABITS OF STUDY. 325 
 
 a turn at it." What was true of the Bodmin Gospels was 
 equally true of many other things. 
 
 His position in the library was in itself a hindrance to 
 concentration. His intimate knowledge of the treasures 
 under his charge laid him open to the attacks of scholars 
 in many lines, and questions would be asked or suggestions 
 made which constantly started him on a fresh course. 
 There was also in him, it must be allowed, a certain natural 
 indolence, combined with an immense capacity for work. 
 To put his results on paper involved an effort which he 
 was generally loth to make, and he willingly seized on the 
 pretext of some fresh opening or some unsolved problem 
 to defer the unpleasant task. This peculiarity was early 
 noticed by his friends. The late Mr A. A. Vansittart was 
 once asked what Bradshaw was doing. " Oh, he's doing 
 something else," was the reply. Pressure put upon him 
 and there was no lack of this from certain quarters pro- 
 duced only an effect the very reverse of what was intended. 
 He was touchingly grateful for sympathy and encourage- 
 ment, and he stood much in need of such assistance ; but 
 he would not be driven, and the more he was pushed the 
 more he hung back. He shrank from publicity ; he hated 
 being pinned down to any statement of which he was not 
 absolutely sure ; he was ever apprehensive that something 
 might turn up to modify his best-grounded opinions. The 
 consequence was that he published comparatively little. 
 Had he known less he would undoubtedly have written 
 more. How much of his knowledge died with him it is 
 impossible to say, nor is it, perhaps, very important to 
 discover. It was not, after all, his acquirements which were 
 most remarkable ; it was the spirit and the method of his 
 research. His intense love of truth, his scrupulous accuracy, 
 the sense of responsibility which controlled his sympathetic 
 imagination, the sobriety of his judgment, the carefulness 
 of his deductions, his tender and reverent regard for the
 
 326 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 past, the human interest in which he clothed the dry bones 
 of learning, his generosity towards predecessors and con- 
 temporaries, these and other qualities of his work are still 
 more worthy of admiration than the width or profundity of 
 his knowledge. It is to those qualities that I am most 
 anxious to draw attention in the following pages. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Of Bradshaw's work in this department there is, unfor- 
 tunately, little to record. It was one of his earliest pursuits. 
 Mr Alexander Macmillan remembers him well as an under- 
 graduate, often coming into his shop at Cambridge, and 
 looking through his books with a bibliographical eye, 
 counting the signatures, saying, " This is in sixes, this in 
 eights," and noting cancelled pages. Mr Tuckwell, one of 
 his contemporaries at St Columba's, recollects "with what 
 skill and completeness he catalogued the library there. It 
 was a treat," he continues, " to see him handle a rare 
 volume. First the caressing clasp of the closed book in 
 his two broad hands ; then the rapid estimate of lettering, 
 tooling, gilding ; then the critical glance at type and 
 margin, the survey of title-page and colophon, and the bit 
 of erudition or instructive anecdote in illustration of his 
 judgment." 
 
 Bibliography is a subject which gave ample scope to 
 his love of accuracy and his minute observation, but what 
 he has left behind is little more than a vast collection of 
 facts. A long line of note-books bears witness to his 
 industry, and it is to be hoped that an index may be made 
 which will open these storehouses of information to the 
 bibliographer. But to Bradshaw himself the mere dissec- 
 tion and description of books was a matter of interest only 
 so far as the results threw light on the habits of writers, 
 printers, and publishers, and generally on the history of 
 any particular place or time. It was not only literature,
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 327 
 
 but the whole life of the day, which was capable in his 
 hands of illustration from its books. " Books," he wrote to 
 the Rev. J. T. Fowler, in connection with the Coverdale 
 Bible,* which he bought for the University Library in 1883 . 
 " books are to me living organisms, and I can only study 
 them as such ; so every particle of light which I can obtain 
 as to their personal history is so much positive gain." In 
 another letter he urges Mr Fowler "to see that it [the Bible 
 in question] does not go to any place whatever, where they 
 will separate the title-page from the rest, and so destroy 
 the book for scientific purposes. . , . Whatever happens to 
 your copy," he continues, ' it is of vital importance that the 
 whole preliminary matter should be kept together as a 
 monumenttim of this state of the book. Now, this is a 
 point which, I feel absolutely certain, almost any one . '. . 
 would entirely fail to see ; and it makes me sufficiently 
 miserable to think that the book is fated to pass into the 
 hands of those who will certainly destroy what is really 
 the principal feature of value in it. 
 
 " It is very hard to see these precious monumenta 
 destroyed almost before one's very eyes, without being 
 able to help it. If I were a richer man, I would not let 
 it go from the university, because I know it would be safe 
 here, and it would be highly appreciated and if I had any 
 patrimony left, I would give what I had to secure such a 
 thing on any reasonable terms. I am aware that at 
 present I stand almost alone in my view of the nature of 
 these questions. But in another generation it will be 
 different, and then the things will have been destroyed. 
 You must forgive me for writing at this length, but you 
 do not know how nearly this question touches my heart" 
 
 Speaking of the light which Bradshaw's observations 
 enabled him to throw on the past, Professor Pearson justly 
 
 * For an account of this copy, in some respects unique, see Notes find 
 Queries, 6th series, vol. vi., December j6, 1882.
 
 328 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 says,* " In books which the mere bibliographer described 
 as reprints, he would find the local colouring, the peculiar 
 prejudice, or the special glory of a district, introduced by 
 some slight change. . . . As he handled the pages of some 
 early folio, and described how two presses had been em- 
 ployed, one working away at this point, and the other at 
 that ; how the first stock of paper had been exhausted here, 
 and the second there ; how at this point the printer had 
 thought to improve on his original, or had bought somebody 
 else's cuts, or chopped up his own the auditor felt himself 
 carried back centuries, and saw the men of the past at their 
 work. Not improbably, Bradshaw would conclude with the 
 remark, ' I wish I could find out anything about that book.' " 
 
 The readiness and accuracy of his bibliographical know- 
 ledge were astonishing. Many years ago, when he was as 
 yet only a beginner, he gave a remarkable proof of this. 
 It was in the year 1861. He happened to be in Mr 
 Ouaritch's shop in Piccadilly, when that well-known book- 
 seller received a request from the late Earl of Crawford 
 and Balcarres for a < ( collation," i.e. a bibliographical de- 
 scription, of a very rare book, the Virginian or Massa- 
 chusetts Bible, a large folio in two volumes, printed in 
 Charles II's reign. Not being able to lay his hand on any 
 collation of the book, Mr Quaritch referred to Bradshaw, 
 who at once wrote down a complete collation of the book 
 from memory. It was sent to Lord Crawford the same 
 evening, and proved to be quite correct. Any one who 
 knows what the collation of such a book is, will be able to 
 appreciate the feat.f 
 
 The following extract from a letter \ to Dr Furnivall is 
 
 * The Academy, Febuary 27, 1886. 
 
 f I have this story both from Mr Quaritch and the present Lord Crawford, 
 who was good enough to send me the actual sheet on which Bradshaw wrote 
 out the collation. 
 
 \ This letter is published in " Francis Thynne's Animadversions," etc. 
 (Chaucer Soc., series ii. 13, 1875), P- xxvi -
 
 BinLlOGRAPHY. 329 
 
 so neat an example of the ingenuity which he brought to 
 bear on bibliographical problems and of the human interest 
 he attached to them, that I cannot help inserting it here. 
 
 " We know that William Thynne [the editor of Chaucer] 
 was ' Chief Clerk of the Kitchen,' that is, as we should now 
 say, that he held an appointment in the royal household 
 (the Board of Green Cloth) at Greenwich. Sir Brian Tuke 
 was postmaster, then an appointment in the same office. 
 When Leland tells us that Sir Brian Tuke wrote a lima- 
 tissima prcsfatio to the edition of Chaucer published by 
 Berthelet, we are all puzzled ; and when Leland tells us 
 that Thynne edited the edition, we are still more puzzled, 
 because no such edition is known. Now, the woodcut 
 frame round the title in Godfray's edition (Thynne, 1532) 
 is that which, having belonged to Pynson, the king's 
 printer, was transferred to Berthelet, his successor as king's 
 printer ; and this is enough to show that there were print- 
 ing relations between Berthelet and Godfray, quite enough 
 to allow this to be the edition meant. Curiously enough, 
 there is a copy of Godfray's edition in one of the college 
 libraries here, in its original binding, in which, at the top of 
 Thynne's dedication, Sir Brian Tuke has written with his 
 own hand : ' This preface I sir Bryan Tuke knight wrot at 
 the request of Mr Clarke of the Kechyn then being, tarying 
 for the tyde at Grenewich.' It would be difficult to find 
 a prettier coincidence in all points the tarrying for the 
 tide at Greenwich, when we learn fr6m quite other sources 
 (i) that Thynne's office was at Greenwich, and (2) that he 
 lived down the Thames at Erith. You will allow that it 
 is not often one has the pleasure of hitting things off so 
 prettily." 
 
 Of his work on Irish bibliography there is, unfortunately, 
 next to nothing in print. Mr Anderson's list of books 
 printed at Belfast owes a good deal to him, and other Irish 
 bibliographers have received his help ; but most of his work
 
 330 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 in this department is buried in his note-books, or has 
 perished with him. He prepared only a few notes for his 
 address on Irish printing at the Librarians' Conference in 
 Dublin (1884), a d these notes I have been unable to find. 
 One of the last things he was working at was Lord Orrery's 
 romance, " Parthenissa," which was supposed, from the 
 title-page, to have been printed in London, but which he 
 ingeniously proved to have been printed in 1654 at Water- 
 ford, where the author was at that time staying. 
 
 Bradshaw paid special attention to the bindings of books 
 in this connection, and he was much interested in a pro- 
 posal of Mr H. B. Wheatley's for an exhibition, showing 
 in chronological order the styles adopted at various times. 
 He had an intimate knowledge of the styles, and could 
 often fix a binding down to a certain decade or a par- 
 ticular collection. For instance, in a letter to Mr Cosmo 
 Innes respecting a manuscript in the library of Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, he says : " From the look of the 
 binding I should think it had formed part of the Laudcrdale 
 collection." Acting on this idea, he looked up a catalogue 
 of that collection, after doing which he continues : " I have 
 very little doubt it is the volume marked nine in the 
 list." Nor was his knowledge confined to early books ; 
 he was well acquainted with all the changes in binding 
 that have taken place down to the present day. About 
 a year before his death, Mr Wheatley proposed that Brad- 
 shaw should join him in a history of English binding, with 
 facsimiles of various dates. He agreed to do so, but he 
 did not live to take any steps in that direction. In his 
 younger days he was very particular about his own bind- 
 ings, and had his pet books clad in certain distinctive garbs. 
 
 MANUSCRIPTS. 
 
 Bradshaw's knowledge of manuscripts was, as I have 
 already said, the ultimate basis of most of his work. His
 
 MANUSCRIPTS. 3 3 1 
 
 ten years' training in the University Library, before he 
 became librarian, gave him a control of the subject which 
 was probably surpassed by none of his contemporaries. 
 But here again his biographer is met by the difficulty that 
 there is little to refer to, beyond the testimony of others, in 
 proof of the assertion. Bradshaw never edited a manu- 
 script ; he seldom described one in print ; and his publi- 
 cations under this head are almost entirely confined to a 
 few short papers in the Communications of the Cambridge 
 Antiquarian Society. I have already mentioned his dis- 
 coveries of the " Book of Deer," the Vaudois manuscripts, 
 the poems of Barbour, etc., and his connection with the 
 catalogue of manuscripts in the University Library.* His 
 work on Chaucer, on the Lincoln statutes, and on the 
 " Hibernensis," was based on a careful and exhaustive 
 examination of manuscript authorities. 
 
 In his study of a manuscript he brought to bear the 
 same human interest as in the case of printed books, and 
 that, as was natural, in a still greater degree. The monk 
 at work in his scriptorium, the clerk in his office, the suc- 
 cession of hands which have left their mark on some great 
 historical manuscript, all these were as real to him as the 
 men of the present day. To see and touch the handwriting 
 of some great man of the past, to have in his possession 
 the actual manuscript which was written at Bede's dicta- 
 tion when the saint was on his death-bed, to show to a 
 sympathetic observer the portrait of Dunstan traced by the 
 hands of Dunstan himself, filled him with an emotion as 
 infectious as it was real. The spirit of an ancient pilgrim 
 was in him. Writing to Mr Stephen Lawley in 1881 he 
 says : " How I should indeed enjoy going to St Gall and 
 elsewhere under your guidance ! All that country is 
 entirely unknown to me, and if I could worship at the 
 shrine of Schaffhausen, where the contemporary copy of 
 
 * See above, pp. 69, 87, 103, 134, 153.
 
 332 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 Adamnan's ' Life of St Columba' is preserved the patriarch 
 (by centuries) of all Scotch books I should be supremely 
 happy." 
 
 The love which inspired his work triumphed over all 
 difficulties. M. Jusserand, who on one occasion paid him 
 a visit at Cambridge, notes in his diary his admiration 
 of the " merveilleux flair au fait de mss. et cette sorte de 
 pouvoir divinatoire dont il [Bradshaw] est doue." He 
 puzzled out the most crabbed writing, and unravelled the 
 most perverse contractions with an astonishing ease which 
 nothing but lifelong application could give. He was as 
 conversant with the general characteristics of manuscripts 
 as with the handwriting of particular ages and countries, 
 and could base the detection of a forgery or the dating 
 of a book on observations quite out of the reach of most 
 palaeographers. I may refer here to the controversy with 
 Simonides, and his proof that the Codex Sinaiticus could 
 not have been the manuscript which Simonides said he 
 wrote.* His knowledge was shown in a somewhat similar 
 way in connection with another famous manuscript of 
 the Greek Testament, the Codex Alexandrinus. Mr E. 
 M. Thompson, in his preface to vol. iv. of the facsimile 
 edition of this manuscript (1879), described it as bound 
 up in quires of six leaves each, as indeed is now the 
 case. Bradshaw said he was sure there was something 
 wrong about this, and a closer examination of the manu- 
 script disclosed the fact that the book had been muti- 
 lated when it was rebound early in this century. The 
 binder had actually had the audacity to cut the double 
 leaves in halves, and, after remounting them and rejoining 
 the edges, to bind them in quires of six instead of eight, 
 but no one appears to have been aware of this fact till 
 Bradshaw's doubts led to the discovery, f 
 
 * See above, p. 95. 
 
 t See a paper by C. R. Gregory on " The quires in Greek manuscripts,"
 
 MANUSCRIPTS. 333 
 
 The following instance, one out of many, illustrates his 
 mastery of a science for which we in England have no 
 special name, but which the Germans call Handscrifts- 
 kunde, or Diplomatik. Mr C. Wordsworth writes to me, 
 " I remember that when I showed him the manuscripts 
 which my father sent for his inspection, he at once guessed 
 the dates of them as 1540 and 1750 respectively. The 
 latter, on closer examination, proved to have a water- 
 mark relating to Culloden (1746), and the other date was 
 verified by a memorandum at the end." A few testimonies 
 from well-known scholars will confirm what I have said. 
 
 The Bishop of Oxford writes to me as follows : " He 
 [Bradshaw] knew, more than any mere critic of ink and 
 paper, the contents of books, and had a really unparalleled 
 power (in my experience) of critical analysis ; able to dis- 
 tinguish/rzV//0 morsu between the original and the insititious 
 parts of texts, even of subjects remote from his favourite 
 studies." Mr Scrivener, asking for some notes on the book 
 of St Chad at Lichfield, writes, " Rough notes from you are 
 better than elaborate treatises from others." Professor 
 Robertson Smith remarks, " He used to say that he was 
 very ignorant of palaeography and bibliography. By this 
 he meant that there were lacunas in his knowledge, as there 
 must always be in the case of a man who refuses to take 
 things at second-hand. But it is also true that his way of 
 dealing with a manuscript or an early printed book was 
 entirely different from the received way, and led him to 
 results which the ' landlaufige methode ' could never have 
 touched. . . . You know, I suppose, that he was the one 
 man who produced a great impression on Mommsen on his 
 recent visit to England [1885]. Mommsen said to me, ' I 
 will tell you one thing ; it is a small one, but it is charac- 
 
 in the American Journal of Philology, vol. vii., no. I. The mutilation is 
 noticed by Mr Thompson in his preface to vol. i. of the facsimile edition, 
 published in 1881.
 
 334 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 teristic. I told Mr Bradshaw of a contraction I had seen 
 in a manuscript of the British Museum, which, with all 
 my experience of Pandect manuscripts, I had never seen 
 before. The British Museum people, who have also great 
 knowledge, had not seen it either. When I told it to Mr 
 Bradshaw, he said nothing, but presently brought me a 
 manuscript and showed me the very thing.' " 
 
 Professor Robertson Smith continues, "In everything 
 that relates to the history of manuscripts he was facile 
 princeps. As to English manuscripts, he could often tell 
 by the writing alone in what monastery they had been 
 written. But he knew all about his manuscripts. I learned 
 from him, for example, a very simple mark, characteristic 
 of Arabic manuscripts written in India, which I don't 
 think any orientalist was aware of till he discovered it." 
 Of several oriental languages he taught himself enough to 
 impress more than one scholar with his knowledge, and 
 this simply with the object of being able to catalogue his 
 manuscripts correctly. Mr Rhys-Davids writes, "At a 
 time when the Pali language and the historical treasures 
 recorded in it were almost unknown, I was agreeably 
 surprised to find that Mr Bradshaw showed not only a 
 keen interest in Pali manuscripts, but a better knowledge 
 of them than was possessed by any one in Europe, except 
 a few specialists who could be counted on one's fingers. 
 But you will doubtless have many and more striking 
 examples of a breadth of sympathy and of a rare and 
 accurate knowledge which filled me with reverence." 
 
 Professor Wright, speaking of the Sanskrit manuscripts 
 in the University Library, says, " I often had long conversa- 
 tions with Bradshaw about them, and was surprised to find 
 how much he, though no Sanskritist, really knew about them, 
 and how readily he could assign approximate dates and 
 localities to manuscripts which had no indication of either. 
 Again, as editor of the oriental series of the Palaeographical
 
 MA NUSCKIPTS. 335 
 
 Society of London, I was anxious to give some speci- 
 mens of Tibetan manuscripts. I took advantage of a visit 
 from Professor Schiefner, of St Petersburg, to get him to 
 select a couple of specimens [from the University Library] 
 and to describe and transliterate them for my series. Cir- 
 cumstances prevented Dr Schiefner from revising the 
 descriptions when printed, and as neither I nor any of my 
 colleagues had any acquaintance with Tibetan, I thought I 
 should have to lay aside the plates. But to my no small 
 surprise I found that Bradshaw knew enough of that 
 language to render me adequate assistance, which I doubt 
 if any other man in our universities could at that time 
 have done." 
 
 M. Paul Meyer, the first, or one of the first, old-French 
 scholars of the day, says of him, " Bradshaw e"tait admi- 
 rablement doue pour le recherche. II savait, dans 1'ensemble 
 d'un sujet, demeler le point capital a e"claircir, et des re- 
 marques que personne n'eut songe a faire 1'amenaient a 
 de sures decouvertes. II connaissait tous les mss. des 
 ' Canterbury Tales/ et en savait la valeur relative." Mr 
 T. W. Jackson, of Worcester College, writes, " His astonish- 
 ing familiarity with the manuscripts of the library appeared, 
 without fail, the moment any question arose. For instance, 
 I was trying to work out so minute a point as the methods 
 of ruling Greek manuscripts up to the end of the thirteenth 
 century, a subject which no one else had, apparently, 
 attended to. Mr Bradshaw's knowledge was as full and 
 accurate in this as in all else. It was simply marvellous to 
 me to see the extent and certainty of it He knew what I 
 asked, as if it had been his one speciality, instead of a 
 minute point among a vast number of greater things. 
 And he not only knew at once where to go among the 
 manuscripts, but to the point in any one where a peculiarity 
 was to be found." 
 
 At the same time, with all this knowledge, his modesty
 
 336 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 and diffidence led him to shrink from making decided 
 statements, even in a region which he had made so 
 thoroughly his own, unless he had positive proof for his 
 assertion.* Many paleographers are ready enough to 
 assign dates or localities to manuscripts on the mere 
 evidence of their senses. Bradshaw's instinct enabled him 
 to say readily enough what he thouglit of such matters, 
 but he never confused proof with probability. Mr E. M. 
 Thompson could not get him to make a formal statement, 
 even about a manuscript which he knew so well as the 
 "Book of Deer." His Socratic pretence of ignorance seemed 
 to some, who did not know how incapable he was of affecta- 
 tion, to be almost affected. But the limits of his knowledge 
 were always more visible to him than its extent. When 
 questioned about such points by experts, he would say, 
 " Oh, I suppose it is so and so, but you know better than 
 I." Professor Pollock remembers how "he always began 
 by saying that he knew nothing about the matter. During 
 this protest, if it was in talk, he would be sidling up to his 
 bookcase, from which he would take down a book in an 
 apparently casual manner, and produce it open at a page 
 having on it the exact reference or information wanted." 
 
 The following letter to Mr S. Sandars (1875) maybe 
 quoted as an example of the paternal affection and the 
 dainty care he showed for a pet book. " I am afraid you 
 will be shocked, but as I examined the manuscript you 
 were good enough to give us,t I found it was so precious 
 and so interesting that I could not resist the temptation of 
 taking it to pieces, which I did with the utmost care and 
 gentleness. I have put it into Mr Hawes' hands to rebind 
 .in a way worthy of it. It would have been quite im- 
 
 * The late Mr Coxe, Bodley's Librarian, and not Bradshaw, is the hero 
 of a story told in this connection in an article in Macmillan's Magazine for 
 April, 1886, p. 480. 
 
 t A little manuscript Rosary, or book of prayers to the Virgin, illustrated 
 with woodcuts.
 
 MANUSCRIPTS. 337 
 
 possible to get at the truth about it without doing what I 
 have done. . . . My usual tendency, I confess, is to unbind 
 a thing and leave it so, but for your sake I could not do 
 this with this manuscript. Several leaves were cruelly 
 misplaced, but I have made out the whole thing clearly 
 now, and I shall be very glad to show you how prettily it 
 all comes out. I did it all on the afternoon of the day you 
 were here." And then follow a number of interesting 
 observations on the little book. A final illustration of the 
 wide human interest which he could attach to a manu- 
 script, may be found in a conversation which Dr Norman 
 Moore has recorded. " One evening," says Dr Moore, " he 
 gave me an autotype of the deed * in which the Arch- 
 bishop of York recognises the supremacy of Canterbury, 
 marked with the rough 'signum Willelmi regis/ and the 
 fine ' signum Matilde regine,' and he pointed out the great 
 Hiberno-Saxon hand of the only Saxon bishop, 'Wulfstan 
 Wigornensis eps,' and the foreign hand of Lanfranc, and 
 the Italian writing of Hubert, the papal legate. He re- 
 marked how one page of writing brought the whole history 
 of the time before us ; the great king who made his rough 
 cross by way of signature, and the scholarly Lanfranc of 
 the new learning of that day, and Wulfstan of the old by- 
 gone English school ; and how it showed that the old 
 Norman part of Lincoln Cathedral was not yet begun, for 
 Remigius, who was to have been its builder and first 
 bishop, was yet at Dorchester, while the Norfolk bishop 
 was not at Norwich, but at Thetford, so that the transfer- 
 ence of bishops from villages to large towns had hardly 
 yet come in. He made the whole come out of that deed 
 without any word-painting or rhetorical ornament, but 
 merely by letting it tell its own story. This was the way 
 he learnt and taught history." 
 
 * The original is preserved at Canterbury, and is dated 1072.
 
 338 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 CELTIC ANTIQUITIES, ETC. 
 
 I have already mentioned incidentally most of Brad- 
 shaw's discoveries in this department.* His studies in it 
 were mainly linguistic and documentary. Though not 
 pretending to any intimate knowledge of Celtic dialects, 
 he could not have passed so many years in examining 
 Celtic manuscripts, and in discovering and transcribing 
 glosses, without gaining a considerable amount of linguistic 
 knowledge. Though he complained of his ignorance of 
 Celtic, " he knew enough," says Professor Rhys, " both of 
 Welsh and Irish not to be impeded in his palaeographical 
 researches by lack of acquaintance with those languages." 
 His "finds" in the manuscripts at Cambridge and Oxford, 
 in France and elsewhere, added immensely to the vocabu- 
 lary which had already been put together by Celtic 
 scholars. It is hardly too much to say that he almost re- 
 discovered the old Breton language. He not only found 
 many traces of it previously unknown, but he distinguished 
 its earliest remains, hitherto confused with Cornish or 
 Welsh, from those of the sister-dialects. In tracing manu- 
 scripts, thought to be of British origin, back to their con- 
 tinental home in the Armorican peninsula, he based his 
 conclusions primarily on palaeographical evidence, but, 
 having fixed his documents in a certain locality, he then 
 brought comparative philology to bear, and elicited im- 
 portant linguistic results. His distinctions between Breton, 
 Cornish, and Old Welsh have been adopted by Celtic 
 scholars ; for instance (as Mr Whitley Stokes informs me), 
 by Ebel, in his edition of Zeuss.f Professor Rhys, speak- 
 ing of the differences between these early languages, says 
 in a letter to me, " The difference is very small, but his 
 
 * For instance, the "Book of Deer" (above, p. 69), the glosses in the 
 "Juvencus," in"Martianus Capella," the "Hibernensis," etc. (pp. 72, 178, 
 229, 238). 
 
 t Zeuss, "Grammatica Celtica," 2nd edit., 1871.
 
 CELTIC ANTIQUITIES. 339 
 
 palaeographic evidence settles it;" * and again, "There was 
 nobody who knew so much about Celtic manuscripts, or, 
 at any rate, where to look for Celtic things." 
 
 Bradshaw's work on the early collection of ecclesiastical 
 canons known as the " Hibernensis " has already been 
 noticed (p. 306). In his introduction to the " Hibernensis " 
 (1885), DrWasserschleben, while discussing at considerable 
 length the origin of the code, confines his attention almost 
 entirely to an examination of its contents, and leaves out 
 of sight the palaeographical considerations on which Brad- 
 shaw lays so much stress. He hardly notices the connection 
 with Brittany which Bradshaw points out, and he dismisses 
 the question of authorship with the words : " It is, how- 
 ever, a matter of slight importance whether the author was 
 an Irishman or not: that the work was intended for the 
 Irish Church, and contains numerous ordinances of Irish 
 law, is indisputable, and that is the decisive point." f Into 
 the question where the code was drawn up, or where the 
 existing manuscripts were written, he hardly enters at all, 
 except in his remarks on Bradshaw's paper. 
 
 Bradshaw's attention was originally drawn to the " Hi- 
 bernensis " when Dr Stubbs and the late Mr Haddan were 
 preparing their work on the councils. Afterwards, while 
 engaged in looking for traces of the old Celtic languages, 
 a number of copies of the book came under his notice, and 
 his palaeographical and philological researches combined 
 led him to form certain theories respecting the origin of 
 the code and other points connected with it, which he set 
 forth very briefly in his " Memorandum " (No. 8) on the 
 subject. The chief of these conclusions may be summarised 
 as follows. 
 
 The existing manuscripts which contain copies of the 
 " Hibernensis " were all written on the Continent. Five of 
 
 * See Professor Rhys' "Lectures on Welsh Philology," 2nd edit., p. 259. 
 f " Die Irische Kanonensammlung,' 2nd edit., 1885 ; Einleitung, p. xiv
 
 340 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 them contain Breton, not Irish, glosses, and must have 
 been written in Brittany ; others, though not written in 
 Brittany, are closely connected with the former. Several 
 of these manuscripts show signs of having been derived 
 from still older manuscripts now lost, which were of Irish 
 origin ; while the titles of certain pieces, annexed in these 
 manuscripts to the canons, also point to Ireland. Brittany 
 is the only district on the Continent in which certain con- 
 ditions indicated by the manuscripts for instance, the 
 juxtaposition of British, Irish, and Prankish documents 
 were to be found. The books themselves were, on the 
 decay of Celtic institutions in Brittany, transferred from 
 their original homes to the great monasteries of the new 
 life, in which they remained till the Revolution removed 
 them to their present resting-places. These conclusions, 
 which Bradshaw sets forth in the barest and briefest way, 
 he unfortunately never lived to substantiate, though he 
 had collected a mass of evidence for the purpose. They 
 remain a series of assertions which it will be the duty of 
 other scholars to test, and probably to establish. 
 
 In the course of these investigations, Bradshaw was led 
 to inquire into the origin and nature of the curious Low- 
 Latin poems known as the " Hisperica Famina." These 
 poems were printed by Cardinal Mai in 1833.* He says 
 little about them, except that they are alluded to by the 
 grammarian Virgilius, and that any lover of classical Latin 
 would devote them to the Furies. He does not appear to 
 have been aware of any manuscript but that in the Vati- 
 can ; at all events, he does not mention the Luxemburg 
 manuscript. Bradshaw, who carefully examined the latter, 
 and collated it (with Dr. Luard's aid) with the Vatican 
 manuscript, was attracted to this strange relic of barbarous 
 Latinity by the Celtic glosses which it contains. In order 
 
 * In his " Auctores Classicie Vaticanis codicibus ecliti," vol. v. pp. 479-500. 
 Cf. above, p. 188.
 
 THE "HISPERICA FAMINA." 341 
 
 to ascertain their meaning, he had first to understand the 
 Latin. The following specimen will show that this was no 
 easy task. It is from what appears to be a description of 
 sunrise. 
 
 "Titaneus o\ympicum inflammat arotus tabulatww, 
 thalassicww illustrat vapore flustrww, 
 flammivomtf sectat pol;w coruso? supernww, 
 aim? scandit cameram firmament/. 
 . . . Aligera placorew/w reboat curia concentww, 
 tinulaj patuhV murmurat harmonic rostm, 
 concave aurium refoculant. mulcedine cliwj," etc. 
 
 These lines are printed by Mai as prose. Bradshaw 
 observed that the clauses of the original are, roughly 
 speaking, of about the same length, and that each clause 
 contains one or two pairs of rhyming words.* He came 
 to the conclusion that they were intended for lines of 
 poetry, a conclusion borne out by the style and language 
 of the production. The glosses and the words which they 
 were meant to explain threw mutual light on each other, 
 and eventually he succeeded in " construing " the whole 
 poem. Writing to Mr Hessels, in March, 1874, he says: 
 "The words I gave you are all from a poem called ' His- 
 perica Famina.' ... It is by an Irishman, and must be of 
 the ninth or tenth century. It has been an immense help 
 to me. I have copied the whole thing out (more than six 
 hundred lines) as verse, and I have so got the meaning of 
 numbers of words which have been puzzling me for many 
 years. ... It is very queer Latin ; but it happens to have 
 had a special interest for me. I want to print it with a 
 commentary." Unfortunately, he never carried out this 
 project, nor do I know whether he had any idea who was 
 the author.! 
 
 * I have italicised the rhymes to make the system, if such it may be called, 
 more apparent. What I have said in the text is based on my own recollec- 
 tion. I have been unable to ascertain anything further from others. 
 
 t Dr Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury, refers me to an epitaph in Hiibner's 
 " Inscriptions Hispanise Christianae," on a certain Bishop of Auria, in which
 
 342 LITERARY SURVEY, 
 
 In the early records of British history, the works of 
 Gildas and Nennius, Bradshaw was also much interested. 
 It was in connection with the former that his erudition 
 and originality made so much impression on Professor 
 Mommsen, whom he succeeded in convincing of the 
 authenticity, in the main, of the work attributed to Gildas. 
 In his conversations with Dr Norman Moore, Nennius was 
 a frequent topic. Bradshaw believed that a minute ex- 
 amination of the Latin text would reveal the original work 
 imbedded in twelfth-century additions and ornamented by 
 phrases from the Vulgate. He projected a journey to Rome 
 in order to examine the Vatican manuscript, and he wished 
 to see the oldest Irish fragment of Nennius, which dates 
 from about iioo, printed at the University Press. 
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL ANTIQUITIES. 
 
 There were few things which Bradshaw worked out 
 more thoroughly than the history of mediaeval service- 
 books, but almost his only published work in this direc- 
 tion is contained in the prefaces to the Cambridge edition 
 of the Sarum Breviary ; * in the appendix to Mr Hope's 
 " Chronicles of the Collegiate Church of All Saints, Derby," 
 for which he drew up a list and description of mediaeval 
 English service-books in general ; and in Mr Lawley's 
 edition of the York Breviary,f in which is a list of York 
 Breviaries drawn up by him. He declared himself more 
 than once to be ignorant of what is called liturgiology. 
 What he meant, apparently, was that he had not paid much 
 attention to the origins of mediaeval liturgies. But of the 
 services of the Church in the later middle ages he had a 
 profound knowledge, and he always considered this one of 
 his favourite subjects. Mr W. J. Weale tells me that he 
 
 the following lines occur: "Cuius area tenet hsec sacra membra, inaula 
 Personal esperio illius famine fota." It is possible that this may give a clue, 
 
 * See above, chap. ix. 
 
 t Surtees Society's Publications, vol. Ixxi p xjii.
 
 MEDIMVAL SERVICE-BOOKS. 343 
 
 never knew any one not a Catholic with anything like 
 the same knowledge of mediaeval liturgies. Bradshaw's 
 analytical skill stood him in good stead here. He anato- 
 mised his books and manuscripts, and, as has been said of 
 Johnson's criticism, he reduced everything to its elements, 
 and so traced the steps by which the English Prayer-book 
 and its Catholic predecessors grew up. And the knowledge 
 thus acquired, like that of all other subjects which he had 
 mastered, he had at his fingers' ends. Once in conversation 
 with Mr Wordsworth, the talk turning on Sarum Breviaries 
 printed in Queen Mary's reign, he tqok a sheet of paper 
 and wrote down from memory a full and accurate list of 
 these editions, seven in number, with dates, printers' names, 
 and other particulars.* This list, I need hardly say, had 
 not been previously drawn up by any scholar. 
 
 His knowledge of this subject won the admiration of 
 many distinguished students in the same field. Dr 
 Henderson,! dean of Carlisle, writes, " Of these books [Eng- 
 lish service-books] and their contents his knowledge was 
 equally exact and extensive, and I never put a question 
 to him, that I can remember, without getting a full and 
 satisfactory answer. His enthusiasm about the many 
 Cambridge ritual treasures was most delightful ; and most 
 encouraging, too, was his sympathy with research among 
 them." Mr J. Wickham LeggJ says, " His liturgical attain- 
 ments were something extraordinary. One had to go back 
 to the Benedictine ritualists of the beginning of the last 
 century to find his equal. And his head teemed with ideas, 
 far more sound and fertile than those of Claude de Vert." 
 
 The sympathy of which Dr Henderson speaks was 
 abundantly shown in the readiness with which he com- 
 municated his discoveries to other scholars. Mr French, 
 
 * See the Cambridge edition of the Sarum Breviary, fasc. iii. p. xlii., note, 
 t Editor of the Hereford Missal (1874), the York Pontifical (1875), etc - 
 J Author of "Notes on the History of the Liturgical Colours" (1882).
 
 344 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 of Trinity College Library (Dublin), remembers how 
 delighted he was at rinding there a copy of a York Bre- 
 viary and a York Missal not noticed by the authorities. 
 " He walked up and down the room, chuckling with 
 delight, and saying he would have a laugh at Dr Hender- 
 son, who had not mentioned the books in his list." And 
 he promptly wrote off to Dr Henderson to inform him of 
 his find. 
 
 The following extract from a letter to Mr Weale gives 
 his views on the best manner of editing mediaeval rituals : 
 "I should not adopt^a vigorously uniform spelling, or any- 
 thing like it. What people ordinarily do is to modernise 
 everything, as they call it, which is to write everything as 
 we were taught to write Latin when we were boys that is, 
 neither as the real ancients did it, nor as the most modern 
 scholars do. I should keep a normal Middle-Age spelling 
 without being pedantic in the matter, if that is possible. . . . 
 I mean that I should not mind being inconsistent, pro- 
 vided I didn't put my own crotchets in place of the old 
 scribe's habits." 
 
 Of his work on the Lincoln statutes I have already 
 spoken. He could not have done it without an extensive 
 knowledge of mediaeval cathedral organisation in general, 
 and he used that knowledge to elucidate the history of 
 other cathedrals as well. For instance, Bishop Abraham 
 informs me that, through his intimate acquaintance with 
 the relations between deans and canons in the twelfth and 
 thirteenth centuries, he was able to set right the history of 
 the Lichfield statutes in some important particulars, which 
 Dugdale had confused.* That he could bring his know- 
 ledge to bear on modern problems, the following remi- 
 niscences by Dr Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, will 
 testify. Dr Benson says 
 
 * See Dugdale's " Monasticon " (edit. 1830), vol. vi. part 3, pp. 12-55, 
 et seq.
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL ANTIQUITIES. 345 
 
 " The last piece of work he did with me and for me was 
 after the statutes for a new cathedral [Truro] had been 
 drafted in full detail, when it became necessary to re-examine 
 and verify the precedents of everything which was old, and 
 to make sure of the genuineness and consistency of the 
 principles of each point of departure into the modern world. 
 Busy as he was all day at Cambridge, how often would his 
 cab-wheels stop at the little door of Lollard's Tower late on 
 in the evening ; and he would sit carefully reviewing point 
 by point, illustrating with amazing and amusing erudition, 
 and emphasising thus : ' Yes, the bishop is of course a canon 
 among the canons ; first of them, but always a canon.' 
 ' What a misconception of the whole thing at Lincoln 
 Exeter, etc., to have separated their prebendal stalls from 
 the bishop and officers all for nothing ! ' ' No ; Bayeux, not 
 Rouen. The three great codes of Sarum, Lincoln, and 
 York came not from Rouen, as the founders themselves 
 believed, but only through Rouen, from Bayeux. The real 
 mother is Bayeux.' 'Osmund, Remigius and Thomas had 
 conferences. It is the only way in which these exact 
 correspondences and differences can be accounted for and 
 I find that they had.' ' Certainly ; no principle hinders the 
 bishop from acting as dean, if it is convenient, nor the 
 highest canon from being subdean.' ' Canon missioner ? of 
 course, if you want him. Quite analogical.' No labour or 
 research was too much if it set the smallest fact quite truly. 
 One question was of the exact relation of the great officers, 
 or departmental heads of cathedral work, to each other. 
 Between visit and visit he collected from authentic sources, 
 verified, and wrote out with his own hand, all the capitular 
 offices of the cathedral churches of France, and of other 
 parts of Europe beside a thickish volume of foolscap 
 just to exhibit how living and unmechanical such arrange- 
 ments had once been, and ought to be."
 
 34 6 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 CHAUCER, ETC. 
 
 In connection with this subject, something should first 
 be said on the state of Chaucer criticism twenty-five years 
 ago, in order that we may appreciate what Bradshaw did 
 for the poet. When he began to study Chaucer, the criti- 
 cism of that poet's works had hardly advanced at all beyond 
 the point at which Tyrwhitt left it nearly a century before. 
 The first collective edition of Chaucer, that of William 
 Thynne, was published in 1532. It formed the basis of all 
 subsequent editions for nearly two hundred and fifty years. 
 Thynne was not critical, but editor after editor followed 
 him with slavish fidelity, only adding now and then to the 
 body of spurious poems. Modern criticism of Chaucer 
 begins with Tyrwhitt, who in 1775-8 published his edition 
 of the " Canterbury Tales." * 
 
 Tyrwhitt made a great advance upon his predecessors. 
 He struck the true note of criticism by basing his emenda- 
 tions on a study of the manuscripts, and on the internal 
 evidence of the poems themselves. He was the first to 
 recognise that the " Canterbury Tales " were left by their 
 author in an unfinished state, and that the conventional 
 order in which they had been placed was incorrect. He 
 restored the "Tales" in some measure to their right order; he 
 rejected as clearly spurious the tale of Gamelyn and many 
 of the minor poems hitherto attributed to Chaucer; and he 
 based his sketch of the poet's life on the evidence of docu- 
 ments, instead of on the dangerous ground of supposed 
 allusions in his works. At the same time he had not fully 
 grasped the fragmentary nature of Chaucer's greatest work, 
 and he seems to have been unaware of any test beyond the 
 evidence of the manuscripts by which to try the authenticity 
 of the other poems. 
 
 * A second edition was published in 1798, with a few improvements and 
 additions.
 
 CHAUCER. 347 
 
 Subsequent editors, till a short time back, were content 
 to reproduce Tyrwhitt's edition, with very little change. 
 The only real advance made was due to Sir Harris Nicolas, 
 who published the first full and trustworthy life of the 
 poet in 1843, a life based almost entirely on documentary 
 evidence. This life is published in the Aldine (or Bell's) 
 edition of 1866, which, however, differs in very few im- 
 portant particulars from Tyrwhitt's. The edition of 1866 
 retains Tyrwhitt's order of the " Tales," except in one 
 instance, and inserts almost all the poems which Tyrwhitt 
 accepted, but which are now regarded as spurious, such as 
 the " Romaunt of the Rose," the " Flower and the Leaf," 
 and the " Cuckoo and the Nightingale." 
 
 It was about 1866 that Bradshaw, who had for some 
 time past been studying Chaucer, began to be known as a 
 master of the subject. In that year he projected a treatise, 
 which he entitled, " An attempt to ascertain the state of 
 Chaucer's Works as they were left at his death, with some 
 notices of their subsequent history." The introductory 
 pages of this treatise, which are all that I have been able 
 to find among his papers, state the author's intention of 
 examining what works were attributed to Chaucer by him- 
 self or his contemporaries ; what works we have still re- 
 maining which appear to correspond with these ; what 
 works are attributed to him before 1532, and subsequently 
 to that date ; and what works, not yet recognised as his, 
 may reasonably be assigned to him. This being done, he 
 proposed further to give some account of the history of the 
 text of each work, dividing them into five groups according 
 to their metre, the prose works being in a sixth group. 
 Unfortunately, he appears to have gone no further with 
 this plan. 
 
 What he ultimately did for the study of Chaucer may 
 be considered under two heads his work on the " Canter- 
 bury Tales," and hjs work on the minor poems. He was
 
 348 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 led by the study of the manuscripts to the conclusion that 
 the " Tales," as we have them, are merely a series of frag- 
 ments, written by Chaucer at different times, some early, 
 some late in life, and never compacted into a finished whole. 
 Chaucer went some way towards weaving these fragments 
 together by means of introductions, which the older editors 
 called prologues. Bradshaw preferred to call all these 
 introductory pieces "links," end-links or beginning- links, 
 a sort of hook-and-eye arrangement, capable of adaptation 
 or change. Long before the invention of printing, the 
 scribe-editors, finding discrepancies and gaps, had tried to 
 set things straight, by shifting the links from one place to 
 another, sometimes omitting them altogether and even 
 inventing fresh links of their own, in order to give the 
 poem the appearance of a complete and finished work. 
 
 To unravel all this confusion, Bradshaw went back to 
 the manuscripts, and, by means of analysis and comparison, 
 broke up the whole work into twelve fragments, or groups 
 of tales, some containing as many as five or six tales, 
 others only one. In his " Skeleton of Chaucer's Canter- 
 bury Tales," * after classifying the manuscripts in three 
 families, and pointing out the chief characteristics of each 
 family, he gives a table of these fragments, marking the 
 gaps, as shown by the want of fitting links, wherever they 
 occur. "The critics," he says (p. 17), "have unfortunately 
 looked upon Chaucer's great work as simply a collection of 
 twenty-four tales, each preceded by a prologue introducing 
 the next narrator. Until this notion is thoroughly up- 
 rooted, the poem must remain an inextricable mass of 
 confusion. On the other hand, as soon as we perceive 
 that the author composed the work piece-meal, with the 
 intention of finally working all his pieces into one har- 
 monious whole, this confusion disappears. Every one 
 allows that this finishing process was never reached by the 
 
 * Memorandum, No. 8 (1868).
 
 CHAUCER *s "CANTERBURY TALES." 349 
 
 author, so that it remains for us to make the best of the 
 several fragments that have come down to us. We must 
 look upon these fragments as so many portions of the 
 story of the Canterbury pilgrimage, into which the tales 
 are introduced ; the so-called prologues then become the 
 main line of the action of the poem, and in each fragment 
 we shall see that the story is taken up at one point and 
 dropped at another, without a clear reference to what has 
 gone before or what is to follow." 
 
 Of his relations to Tyrwhitt on this point Bradshaw 
 himself says, in a letter to Dr Furnivall (August 7, 1868), 
 " As for the originality, I, of course, never laid claim to any 
 new facts. My only point is my method, which I always 
 insist on in anything in bibliography arrange your facts 
 vigorously and get them plainly before you, and let them 
 speak for themselves, which they will always do. Tyrwhitt 
 saw that certain links, like the Merchant's, Squire's and 
 Franklin's prologues, had a much better meaning when 
 arranged according to the best manuscripts, than they had 
 in the confusion of the old editions ; but he was nowhere 
 near avowing the fragment system as a principle, nor of 
 distinguishing much between what was spurious and what 
 was cast off, except in two cases, nor of seeing that, if a 
 Tale was without a prologue in one manuscript and with 
 one in another, it is quite possible that Chaucer may have 
 written that prologue afterwards, with a view of linking 
 two tales together, which yet might quite well stand far 
 apart in a previous state of the composition." 
 
 After breaking the poem up into fragments, the next 
 point was to ascertain their order. Some improvement in 
 this respect had been made by Tyrwhitt, but the received 
 arrangement still introduced many incongruities and ab- 
 surdities. It was impossible to bring the mentions of time 
 and place into accordance with the facts of a journey from 
 London to Canterbury in the fourteenth century. Roches-
 
 350 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 ter and Sittingbourne, for example, were transposed, and 
 the journey was crammed into one day. The key to this 
 difficulty had not been found, until Bradshaw, acting on 
 the evidence of one of the best manuscripts, shifted his tenth 
 fragment into the third place. In a letter to Dr Furnivall, 
 dated September 21, 1868, he suggested this new view. 
 " Better and better," he says, " everything comes straight 
 with the ' Canterbury Tales,' more so than I could possibly 
 have dared to expect. I enclose you a pretty little pro- 
 gramme of the whole affair, and see if it does not look 
 charming." And then follow four closely written sheets, in 
 which the change of order and an extension of the time 
 occupied by the journey are shown to solve all, or nearly 
 all the difficulties. "At once," says Dr Furnivall,* "the 
 whole scheme came right. Rochester got into its proper 
 place, the journey turned into the regular three or four 
 days' one, and all the allusions to time, place, former tales, 
 etc., were at once harmonized." Many subsequent letters 
 passed between Bradshaw and Dr Furnivall on this and 
 kindred points. There still appears to be some doubt 
 about the duration of the journey, but Bradshaw's views 
 about the fragments and their order have been generally 
 accepted in principle, and his influence has drawn the lines 
 on which the Chaucer Society has worked.! 
 
 We may now pass to his work on the minor poems. 
 In distinguishing the spurious from the genuine, Bradshaw 
 applied two touchstones the evidence of the manuscripts, 
 and what has been called the " rhyme-test." He hardly 
 ever relied on one of these criteria alone. His criticism 
 was irresistible when it appeared that poems, for the 
 
 * Macmillari's Alagazine, March, 1874. See, too, Dr Furnivall's Temporary 
 Preface, Chaucer Society's Publications, 1868. 
 
 t Professor Skeat's views about the "Canterbury Tales" are given in his 
 edition of the " Prioresses Tale " (Clarendon Press Series), p. xii. What is now 
 believed to be the correct order is set forth in the Bohn Series edition (1878), 
 vol. ii. p. 352.
 
 CHAUCER'S MINOR POEMS. 351 
 
 authenticity of which the manuscripts refused to vouch, 
 gave way also under the other test. As to the verdict of 
 the manuscripts little need be said. For some pieces attri- 
 buted to Chaucer there is no manuscript evidence at all ; 
 for others it is too slight to hold out against attack from 
 other sides. The rhyme-test needs more explanation. 
 Professor Skeat has been kind enough to write tome about 
 it as follows : 
 
 " Long before much general interest was taken in 
 Chaucer's rhymes, Bradshaw perceived their great import- 
 ance as a critical test. In order to make use of this test, 
 he compiled a complete list of all the rhymes used in poems 
 attributed to Chaucer, keeping each poem separate. By 
 comparison of these lists, he was able to say, definitely, that 
 the rhymes occurring in poems known to be genuine 
 differed from those in poems which were probably spurious. 
 He told us, for instance, that Chaucer never rhymes a word 
 which, etymologically, ends in -y with a word which, etymo- 
 logically, ends in -ye. This test is quite independent of the 
 spelling adopted by the scribes, who constantly confuse 
 these suffixes ; it depends solely on the actual origin of the 
 word and its consequent pronunciation in the fourteenth 
 century. All adverbs which now end in -ly, such as trewely 
 (truly), feithfully (faithfully), and the like, belong to the 
 former class. On the other hand, there are a large number 
 of words which, in modern Italian, end in -ia, such as cor- 
 tesia (courtesy), follia (folly). These words, in Old French 
 likewise, had a final -e (in place of the Italian -a\ which 
 formed a distinct syllable, and the same syllable remained 
 distinct in Chaucer's English. That is to say, these words 
 were pronounced by Chaucer as curteisy-e (in four syllables), 
 and foly-e (in three). And just as, in Italian, it would be 
 absurd to suppose that a word like si could rhyme with 
 cortesi-a, so likewise, in Chaucer's English, we cannot ex- 
 pect that such a word as feithfull-y can rhyme with foly-e.
 
 352 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 But Chaucer's English is quite of an archaic character. He 
 kept up these distinctions at a time when the language 
 itself was rapidly losing them. Consequently, though these 
 rules are observed by himself and by Gower, later writers, 
 such as Lydgate, ignored them, and a large number of such 
 rhymes, which are not found in Chaucer, constantly appear 
 in imitations of him. To take an instance the ' Court of 
 Love,' a poem which some who are ignorant of the history 
 of our language impute to Chaucer, is really a production 
 of the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth 
 century. Consequently, it necessarily fails to fulfil such a 
 test as the above. Glancing at it, we find, in stanza 31, 
 that the monosyllabic pronoun / is rhymed with the dis- 
 syllabic present tense dy-e (I die) ; or, to take a more palp- 
 able and easier example, we find, in stanza 164, that the 
 word company-e (Old Fr. compani-e, Ital. compagni-d] is 
 made to rhyme with an adverb in -ly, v\z. faithf^tll-y. This 
 is, of course, quite enough to condemn it, and it is, at the 
 same time, an excellent example of Bradshaw's method. 
 He was thus enabled to say definitely that many of the 
 poems recklessly and persistently ascribed to Chaucer con- 
 stantly transgress the rules which Chaucer strictly observes, 
 and are therefore spurious." 
 
 Bradshaw was the first person in England to apply the 
 rhyme-test to Chaucer's poems. It was simultaneously 
 and independently applied by Professor ten Brink in Ger- 
 many, and these two scholars arrived at almost identical 
 results. Many lovers of Chaucer were naturally loth to 
 give up their cherished beliefs on the subject. Dr Furni- 
 vall fought hard and long for the " Romaunt of the Rose," 
 but was at length compelled to give way. Professor Skeat 
 found additional evidence against it in the fact that it is 
 written in a northern dialect.* Other well-known poems 
 
 * Cf. Professor Skeat's paper, " Why the ' Romaunt of the Rose ' is not 
 Chaucer's" (Chaucer Soc. Publ., and series, 1884).
 
 CHAUCEKS MINOR POEMS. 353 
 
 like the " Flower and the Leaf," " Chaucer's Dream," etc., 
 had also to be surrendered. Bradshaw's own position on 
 the subject is shown by the following letters. Writing to 
 Professor ten Brink on July I, 1870, he says, "About the 
 ' Romaunt of the Rose,' I cut the knot by saying that 
 there is no autliority whatever for considering this version 
 which we have Chaucer's, and therefore the onus probandi 
 lies with those who make it so. Of popular works we 
 know that there were several (sometimes four) English ver- 
 sions, and the rhymes, etc., exactly accord here with the 
 laws followed by the writers of the generation following 
 Chaucer." 
 
 On January 12, 1872, he writes to Dr Furnivall as 
 follows : " I am afraid you don't see my point about 
 ' Blaunche.' When a man tells me he wrote a poem on the 
 death of the Duchess Blaunche, who died in 1369, and I 
 find a poem on that subject in several volumes containing 
 undoubted poems of his, I accept that poem as his, until I 
 know that some one else wrote a poem on the subject and 
 that this is that. When a man tells me he made a transla- 
 tion of one of the most popular French works going, and I 
 find part of a translation, with nothing whatever in its sur- 
 roundings to point it out as Chaucer's, I do not accept it as 
 his until I have better ground for doing so. But I do not 
 deny it to be his, because denying is not my business. The 
 experience afforded by the Troy book,* warns me against 
 taking rashly any translation of a popular work to be the 
 very one I am in search of. ... The case of an original 
 poem is surely on a very different footing from a transla- 
 tion of a very popular work. 
 
 " The fact is, you want me to lay down the law dogmati- 
 cally, and I don't wish to do anything of the kind. I give 
 my reason for accepting certain pieces until they are proved 
 to be not his, and I also give my reasons for not accepting 
 * See above, p. 134. 
 
 2 A
 
 354 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 certain things which are not proved to be his. But in no 
 case do I lay down as a certainty either that the one set of 
 things are his, or the other not his. . . . 
 
 " In all this you observe there is no word of the final 
 e question. I had reached this point before I had any 
 cause to look at that matter. It was only on examining 
 the ' Parlement of Foules ' and one or two other poems 
 in the rhymes, in order to get at the normal forms used 
 by Chaucer (however much disguised by variety of spelling), 
 that I was led to observe a difference between the English 
 equivalents of terminations in -ere, -am, -iam, and of those 
 in -um, etc. The more I searched the more curious it 
 seemed, and at last, when I had been through and through 
 everything over and over again dozens of times, I could 
 not fail to be struck with the difference between those 
 poems which I had been led temporarily to accept as having 
 authority, and those which I had been led provisionally 
 to exclude for want of due authority. It was a coincidence 
 of a very taking nature, and I confess I was very much 
 taken by it. You must only do me the justice to allow 
 that I never did dogmatise on the subject. I am searching 
 for facts, and a provisional hypothesis is constantly the 
 only possible means we have of grouping any collection 
 of facts, for the purpose of getting us a step further. 
 
 "What you say of a life and death question, and an 
 infallible test of genuineness, is utterly and entirely out 
 of my beat, and appears to me utterly unscientific. We 
 never can know for certain what pieces are Chaucer's and 
 what are not, and yet we are never content without an 
 infallible test on the subject. I am quite content to know 
 that my work in that line has given me a firmer hold on 
 what little knowledge I have of early English than I should 
 ever have had without it." 
 
 It was like Bradshaw that he refused to claim any 
 credit for these discoveries. Letters on this subject by
 
 CHAUCER 's MINOR POEMS. 355 
 
 Mr Payne Collier having appeared in the Athenceum for 
 March, 1869, he wrote a letter to Mr Collier, dated April 
 23, 1867, from which the following is an extract : 
 
 " DEAR SIR, 
 
 "I have just seen the Athenczum, with your 
 request that I should say something about the prior critics 
 and the ' Testament of Love ' . . . 
 
 " I have been so constantly, for the last six years, 
 dinning into the ears of all whom I come across Mr 
 Furnivall and Mr R. Morris among the number the total 
 want of trustworthy evidence in favour of attributing to 
 Chaucer any of the following pieces : ' The Romaunt of 
 the Rose,' 'The Court of Love,' 'The Flower and. the 
 Leaf,' ' The Cuckow and the Nightingale,' ' Chaucer's 
 Dream,' 'The Testament of Love,' 'The Complaint of 
 the Black Knight,' and other smaller pieces, both from 
 an external and an internal examination of them, and that 
 not as a discovery of my own, but as self-evident to any 
 one who will take the trouble to apply the simplest canons 
 of criticism on the subject, that it seems that the writer 
 of the Early English Text Society's report had begun to 
 fancy that this was the recognised view. 
 
 " Living as I do in charge of a very large library, where 
 all I find is instantly at the service of my neighbours, I 
 find but little leisure to put my results into print, and 
 I have to content myself with the humbler position of 
 helping students by oral communication ; but I am only 
 too thankful to find, from such men as Ebert and Hertz- 
 berg and yourself, independent confirmation of my results 
 the moment any of you apply your criticism to the point. 
 I should be the last to wish to deprive you of the credit 
 of being the first to notice in print the incongruity of 
 calling the ' Testament of Love ' Chaucer's. 
 
 " Yours most truly, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW."
 
 356 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 The discoveries which I have mentioned, though they 
 were Bradshaw's most important contributions to Chaucer 
 criticism, do not by any means exhaust the list. To his 
 sympathetic and imaginative criticism is due, among other 
 things, as Professor ten Brink points out to me, " the 
 startling discovery of the hidden meaning of the ' Com- 
 plaint of Mars.'" He studied with much assiduity the 
 sources whence Chaucer drew his inspiration, though here 
 again he did not publish his conclusions. He only com- 
 municated them to Dr Furnivall and others, and the pub- 
 lication of them was anticipated by Professor ten Brink. 
 Writing to Mr Wheatley in 1883, he says, " It was this 
 very fact of Chaucer's uniqueness in the matter of acquaint- 
 ance with Italian literature, at his own time and for more 
 than a century afterwards, that led me first to give up the 
 early date of the poems, and to make his Italian embassy 
 a turning-point in his history and work. This conclusion 
 was arrived at independently by ten Brink, while Kissner 
 had already pointed out the Dante and Petrarch points." 
 He brought to light more than one poem of Chaucer's 
 previously unknown ; for instance, the " yEtas Prima," or 
 " Former Age," published by Dr R. Morris in his edition 
 of 1866, and the earlier version of the prologue to the 
 " Legend of Good Women," and he was even able to add 
 to or correct some particulars in Chaucer's life which the 
 researches of Sir Harris Nicolas had failed to ascertain. 
 
 The bibliography of the poet was, it is almost needless 
 to say, at his fingers' ends. " I wrote to him one day," 
 says Professor Skeat, " with a request for information as 
 to the old black-letter editions of Chaucer, not reckoning 
 the editions of separate works by Caxton and others. He 
 at once took a pen, and there and then, without a pause, 
 wrote out a complete list, with title, date, size, and other 
 particulars of each edition." * 
 
 * This list is published in Professor Skeat's edition of the " Astrolabe "
 
 CHAUCER. 357 
 
 Scattered up and down in the publications of the 
 Chaucer Society, and in the works of various Chaucer 
 scholars, will be found many references to Bradshaw's 
 labours, as well as grateful acknowledgments of his assist- 
 ance. Dr R. Morris writes, " Mr Bradshaw was very 
 helpful to me. ... His knowledge of the early English 
 manuscripts in the public library and elsewhere was un- 
 rivalled, and he was always willing to tell all he knew 
 to a scholar." Dr Furnivall, writing to him in 1879, says, 
 " In all important matters you have led me. My Chaucer 
 work was done for you." 
 
 Nor did he by any means confine himself to Chaucer. 
 He could not have done for Chaucer what he did had he 
 not been conversant with the whole range of mediaeval 
 English literature. Professor Skeat received valuable as- 
 sistance from him in editing " William of Palerne," and 
 adopted that title in deference to his suggestion. He 
 received still more aid in editing " Lancelot of the Laik," 
 and " Piers Plowman." The intensity of his love for these 
 studies is witnessed by the following extract from a diary 
 in which M. Jusserand, one of the most distinguished foreign 
 students of our literature,* noted down his recollections of 
 a visit to Cambridge in 1878: "Alles ensemble a la 
 bibliotheque de 1'Universite voir les mss. L'un d'eux, 
 un ms. de Chaucer,f contient un texte complet et excel- 
 lent. C'est un des favoris de M. Bradshaw. II en parle 
 avec amour et en touche les pages avec respect. II m'en 
 lit des passages et, au ton qu'il y met, on sent qu'il n'est 
 pas si uniquement homme de faits positifs qu'il le dit. II 
 sent, il se delecte, il est touche." 
 
 (Chaucer Society, ser. i., vol. 29, 1872), p. *xvi. ; and in the preface to his 
 edition of Chaucer (Bohn series), p. 3. 
 
 * Author of an Essay on "Chaucer's Pardoner: his character illustrated 
 by documents of his time " (Chaucer Soc. Publ. 2nd series, 1884) ; and " Les 
 Anglais au moyen age, etc." 1884. 
 
 \ Univ. Library, Gg. 4. 27.
 
 358 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 In conclusion, I cannot refrain from quoting the generous 
 testimony contained in the following letter from Professor 
 Skeat, which was written on the occasion of his election to 
 the Professorship of Anglo-Saxon in 1878 * : 
 
 " DEAR BRADSHAW, 
 
 " Now let me say what I wanted to say before, 
 but could not so well as now. You shall put your own 
 interpretation on your work and I will allow you to know 
 best. But, at the same time, it is for me to know what 
 you have been for me and what you have done for me. 
 In my beginning to study, I was, with the best of inten- 
 tions, all abroad. I could not read a manuscript ; I did 
 not know what a manuscript was. I wanted to read books, 
 but did not know what books. I wanted to understand 
 Chaucer's rhymes (or rimes) and his grammar, and his 
 ways in general, and I had none but vague ideas. And 
 in hundreds of ways I wanted to know (and I still want 
 to know) all sorts of things more or less connected with 
 manuscripts or literature. Well, it is the merest truth that 
 it is, practically, to you that I owe all my best ideas. You 
 have set me thinking where I was before thoughtless ; you 
 have helped me to read manuscripts ; you have told me 
 of this or that book or edition, over and over again, and 
 thrown out hints (so thankfully received), and told me of 
 points, and, in fact, helped me, in and out, in hundreds 
 of ways and thousands of times. Your remarks have 
 always been treasured ; some have seemed wrong to me 
 at first, but they generally came right, and I can only say 
 that I never remember a remark of yours that was not 
 received with profound thankfulness and with a determina- 
 tion to follow it out. It is merely and perfectly hopeless 
 
 * Professor Skeat, in a letter to me dated August 25, 1886, says, "Of 
 course I fully meant and mean it [the above letter], and you are at liberty to 
 do as you please with it."
 
 EARLY PRINTING. 
 
 359 
 
 for me to say how much more I owe to you than to any- 
 one else, be the others who they may ; how I have felt 
 this for years ; how it has underlain all my remarks to 
 you, even the most combative ; and, to speak in a word, 
 how great is the respect entertained for you by 
 
 " Yours most sincerely, 
 
 "W. W. SKEAT." 
 
 EARLY PRINTING. 
 
 The subject of early printing was one which occupied 
 Henry Bradshaw perhaps more continuously than any 
 other, and in none did he accomplish more. His retentive 
 memory and his extraordinary accuracy of eye were 
 qualities invaluable to him in this department of study. 
 The lapse of time never appeared to efface or even blur 
 the impression once made upon his mind. He never 
 forgot a specimen of type which he had once examined, 
 and a single page, or even a tiny fragment of a page, would 
 often enable him to name the book to which it belonged, 
 its printer, and its date. The mass of details in his mind 
 never led to confusion. Each fact was recorded and 
 retained for years, until it fell into its place as a link in 
 a long chain of evidence tending to some definite con- 
 clusion. 
 
 But the acute observation of varieties in type was only 
 one of many ways by which he approached the problems 
 connected with the early history of printing. He regarded 
 the printers of the fifteenth century as artists, and printing 
 as an art, almost in the same sense as that in which 
 painting and engraving are arts. Letters in those days 
 were not mere machine-made symbols : the hand of the 
 craftsman was visible in them ; they possessed a sort of 
 character and individuality, like the works of Durer or 
 Marc-Antonio. Masters in the art impressed their pecu- 
 liarities on their pupils ; we see Caxton using the sharp
 
 360 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 pointed letters which Colard Mansion loved. Each country, 
 each town, had its school or schools ; according to a favour- 
 ite theory of Bradshaw's, typography followed, like trade, 
 the course of rivers, so that books printed on the upper 
 Danube display special characteristics distinct, for instance, 
 from those printed on the Rhine or Main. Each printer 
 had his own habits, too, of following his trade, his own 
 way of using hyphens, or of finishing his lines. Thus the 
 study of early printing is like the study of any other art 
 a study of character and processes, of almost infinite 
 variety. 
 
 Keeping the printer before him as a man, not a machine, 
 Bradshaw studied all his peculiarities, his type, his paper, 
 his water-marks, his bindings everything, in short, that 
 could throw light on his history and his method. " The 
 only way," he writes to Mr Francis Fry, in January, 1882 
 "the only way really to find out about these things is 
 to take all a man's books which he is known to have 
 printed or, at any rate, such as can be got at and to 
 study his habits of printing ; not only his type and cuts, 
 but also his habits of using these materials. ... I have 
 done something among fifteenth-century printers, and 
 therefore know how to set to work ; but I really do not 
 know three people in Europe now living who study things 
 in this way." 
 
 The following extracts from letters to Mr G. I. F. 
 Tupper, written in November, 1863, illustrate the imagina- 
 tive sympathy which placed him so readily in touch with 
 the men whose works he studied. " I have just found," 
 he writes, " an ' Image of Pity ' *. . . . It is very curious 
 altogether, because it is not a separate quarto leaf, but 
 on the blank page at the end of a little book printed at 
 Antwerp by Matthias van der Goes about 1487. It is 
 
 * i.e. an Indulgence with a woodcut on it called by that name : see his 
 paper on it in the Communications of the Cambr. Ant. Society, vol. iii. p. 181.

 
 
 -f- 
 
 / 
 
 9
 
 L
 
 ' * 
 
 9 
 
 & 
 
 x 
 
 
 
 ^-
 
 EARLY PRINTING. 361 
 
 upside down, and not taken off in printing ink, but in a 
 pale brown sloppy stuff, which has not taken at all well, 
 and it is consequently not very pretty to look at. I have 
 no doubt the Antwerp book was lying in Caxton's shop, 
 and one of his men took a sort of proof impression in this 
 way. At least, some such explanation seems possible." 
 The explanation was not clear enough for Mr Tupper, 
 so two days later he writes again. " I don't wonder at 
 your not understanding my description of the ' Image of 
 Pity.' . . . Imagine a quarto pamphlet. . . . Fancy then the 
 book coming into your possession, and your having in your 
 room a wood-cut block with some type in the sill ; and 
 then fancy your running the block and type over, not 
 with lithographic ink, but with some extremely dirty water 
 or other pale brown thin liquid, and then pressing down 
 upon it the above-described blank page of the Antwerp 
 book, and your not caring enough about the matter to 
 notice that you were taking off the impression upside down 
 when compared with the printed matter on the other side 
 or recto of the same leaf. Fancy this, if you can, and you 
 have what we have here." 
 
 A letter written to M. Vanderhaeghen, of Ghent, in 
 April, 1870, gives an example both of his quickness of 
 observation and the retentiveness of his memory. " Yester- 
 day morning," he writes, " I received a book which I once 
 saw for a few minutes five years ago. ... It is a fine 
 copy of the Ghent edition of Boethius. . . . But the 
 interest to me lay in the fact that I had noticed, the 
 moment I first saw the book, that it must have been bound 
 by Ar. de Keysere himself, because every quire was guarded 
 down the centre by little slips of parchment which showed 
 traces of Ar. de Keysere's familiar type. You can imagine 
 my satisfaction yesterday, when, after waiting in suspense 
 for five years, I found," etc., etc. ; and then follows an ac- 
 count of what the slips turned out to be fragments of an
 
 362 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 indulgence, a hitherto unknown piece of de Keysere's work, 
 throwing light on several points in the history of Flemish 
 printing. 
 
 Of the importance of fragments of this kind preserved 
 in bindings, he writes in another place,* " Many specimens 
 of early printing have been recovered from the bindings 
 of other books ; and these sometimes afford very valuable 
 evidence as to their history.f Such fragments in the 
 binder's hands are either sheets of books which have been 
 used up and thrown away, and may be called binder's 
 waste, or else they are spoilt sheets or unused proofs 
 from a printer's office, and may be called printer s ivaste. 
 In early times the printers were frequently their own 
 binders. ... It becomes, therefore, a matter of considerable 
 importance to use all endeavours to ascertain where the 
 volume was bound which contains any such fragments. 
 If a fragment is found printed only on one side it has 
 hitherto been described as 'a remarkable specimen of 
 anopisthographic typography,! probably executed in the 
 infancy of the art, etc., etc.,' instead of which it is simply 
 a proof-sheet of the commonest description ; and in no 
 case does it seem to have inspired the discoverer to follow 
 up the scent, or to inform the world of the one single 
 fact which might give his discovery any real value." 
 
 In connection with the minuteness of the observations 
 which often started him on a train of discovery, it is re- 
 lated of him that he was one day observed by Mr Coxe 
 in the Bodleian Library, his attention riveted by a scrap 
 of early printing which he held in his hand. He stood 
 stock-still, gazing at the page, until at last Mr Coxe's 
 
 * " Memorandum," No. 3, p. 7. 
 
 t As an illustration of this, it may be mentioned that the discovery of 
 a leaf of the Bamberg Bible (36-line) in the binding of a Bamberg account- 
 book, which begins on March 21, 1460, tends to fix the date of this, the 
 second printed Bible, as about 1460 (Catalogue of Caxton Celebration, p. 54). 
 
 % Printing on one side of a sheet only.
 
 EARLY PRINTING. 363 
 
 curiosity could hold out no longer. Coming up to Brad- 
 shaw, he interrupted his meditations with a hearty slap 
 on the back, and the inquiry, " What on earth have you 
 got there ? " " Well, it's very odd," was the answer ; " I 
 never in my life saw a W like that before ! " 
 
 The Rev. S. M. Lakin records a little incident illustra- 
 tive of what M. Jusserand called his " pouvoir divinatoire " 
 which is really the rapid and unerring application of 
 knowledge. " There is," he says, "in the cathedral library 
 at Salisbury, a Dutch Psalter, containing the date, printer's 
 name (Eckert), and place of printing (Delft). The date is, 
 apparently, Mccccxxvui. Mr Botfield, in his ' Notes on 
 Cathedral Libraries,' supposes the numeral 'L 1 to have 
 dropped out, so that the date should be 1478. When I 
 called Mr Bradshaw's attention to this explanation, he imme- 
 diately said that in 1478 there was no printer of the name 
 of Eckert at Delft, and he suggested that the true date was 
 probably 1498 (MCCCCXCVlll). Since then the application 
 of a magnifying glass has revealed that the second ' X ' 
 was originally a ' c,' the paler colour of the ink used re- 
 vealing the alteration that had been made." 
 
 Mr Blades, the author of the " Life of Caxton," says of 
 him* and I can quote no better authority " From an 
 early period he perceived that to understand and master 
 the internal evidences contained in every old book, the 
 special peculiarities of their workmanship must be studied 
 and classified, much in the same way as a botanist treats 
 plants, or an entomologist insects. This he called 'the 
 natural-history system.' . . . To make his work more 
 effectual and scientific, he did that which many a biblio- 
 grapher has to his great loss omitted to do he made 
 acquaintance with the technicalities of book-making. He 
 knew how punches were cut, how matrices were struck, 
 and how types were cast. . . . To this he added a know- 
 
 * In the Printer's Register for March 6, 1886.
 
 364 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 ledge of how paper-moulds were used and water-marks 
 made. Such learning gave him exceptional advantages in 
 the study of old books, and enabled him to settle with 
 certainty many questions in palaeotypography which had 
 till then been a puzzle to bibliographers. I remember a 
 curious instance of this. About twelve years ago, a well- 
 known bookseller of London found two printed slips of 
 paper in the binding of an old book. Each slip measured 
 three inches by nine inches, and had been cut down from 
 the fore-edge of some waste sheets, the ends only of the 
 printed lines being preserved all the way down the page. 
 The type was of a peculiar bold Gothic character, and the 
 bookseller, who had never seen its like before, having to 
 visit Cambridge, took it with him and showed it to Mr 
 Bradshaw. After a few minutes' examination, our book- 
 oracle said, ' Yes, these slips are part of signatures b i and b ii 
 of a most rare book, called " L'Estrif de Fortune," printed 
 at Bruges about 1480 by Colard Mansion.' He had never 
 seen a copy of the book,* but this identification of fragments 
 through his knowledge of types was everyday work with 
 him. . . . He would show you when the various founts of 
 Caxton, Machlinia, and others were first used, when they 
 got old, and to whom they were sold when a new fount 
 replaced them ; and the simple delight which beamed 
 over his face if he found that you understood his evidences 
 and were interested in his proofs is a thing to remember." 
 
 Mr Blades alludes to what Bradshaw called his natural- 
 history method in bibliography. It was a phrase which he 
 was never tired of using. He appears to have meant by 
 it a careful and exhaustive ascertainment of facts, minute 
 observation of characteristics, thoughtful co-ordination of 
 the. results, and deductions made without prejudice and 
 untrammelled by preconceived ideas. With regard to 
 
 * This is not quite correct. He had once seen a copy of the book, eight 
 years before : see above, p. 133.
 
 EARLY PRINTING. 365 
 
 early printed books, in particular, it meant the arrangement 
 and classification of them, as natural objects are classified, 
 under families, genera, and species. His published lists 
 are illustrations of this system. I cannot do better than 
 quote his own words * respecting the principles on which 
 these lists are based. 
 
 " The method of arranging these early books under the 
 countries, towns, and presses at which they were produced 
 is the only one which can really advance our knowledge 
 of the subject. This is comparatively easy with dated 
 books, though there is no safeguard against the misleading 
 nature of an erroneous date. But the study is of little use 
 unless the bibliographer will be content to make such an 
 accurate and methodical study of the types used and habits 
 of printing observable at different presses, as to enable him 
 to observe and be guided by these characteristics in settling 
 the date of a book which bears no date on the surface. 
 We do not want the opinion or dictum of any bibliographer, 
 however experienced ; we desire that the types and habits 
 of each printer should be made a special subject of study, 
 and those points brought forward which show changes or 
 advance from year to year, or, where practicable, from 
 month to month. When this is done, we have to say of 
 any dateless or falsely dated book that it contains such 
 and such characteristics, and we therefore place it at such 
 a point of time, the time we name being merely another 
 expression for the characteristics we notice in the book. 
 In fact, each press must be looked upon as a genus, and 
 each book as a species, and our business is to trace the 
 more or less close connection of the different members 
 of the family according to the characters which they pre- 
 sent to our observation. The study of palaeotypography 
 has been hitherto mainly such a dilettante matter, that 
 people have shrunk from going into such details, though, 
 
 * "Memorandum," No. 2, p. 15.
 
 366 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 when once studied as a branch of natural history, it is as 
 fruitful in interesting results as most subjects." 
 
 The following letter, addressed to Mr J. J. Green 
 (August 1 8, 1882), is a good illustration of his biblio- 
 graphical method, and I am the more ready to quote it, 
 long as it is, because it is the only explanatory letter I have 
 come across in the whole series of his correspondence. 
 
 "DEAR MR GREEN, 
 
 "The precious parcel was delivered last night, 
 and I was extremely glad to find that they were four 
 consecutive leaves, the inner two sheets of a four-sheet 
 quire. . . . The book itself is easy to identify. . . . 
 
 " Let me show you how I reached my result, and you 
 will see how such studies are pursued. 
 
 " At first opening, it was clearly a fragment of a copy 
 of some sixteenth-century edition of ' Caxton's Chronicle,' 
 in the form it assumed when W. de Worde published it 
 in 1497, that is to say, practically, the ' St. Alban's 
 Chronicle,' with the ' Fructus temporum,' or ' Fruit of times.' 
 
 "The type was clearly and undoubtedly Wynkyn de 
 Worde's. Every now and then, instead of the regular J of 
 this fount of type, a J of his earlier type (used 1493-1502) 
 appears instead, and this alone would prove the work 
 to be de Worde's. The initials are familiar as being found 
 in so many of W. de Worde's books. 
 
 " Any common book told me that, besides two editions 
 by Notary (1504, I think, and 1515), there are the following 
 editions by de Worde: 1502, 1515, 1520, 1528. 
 
 " Books apart, I knew that the little line-end ornaments 
 were very popular from 1510 to 1515, and I was quite 
 prepared to find it a fragment of the 1515 edition. 
 
 "We have in college a 1528. I went to the library 
 to get it, and I saw at once that yours was older cuts 
 much less broken than in 1528, no line-end ornaments
 
 EARLY PRINTING. 367 
 
 in 1528, a much later device at the end of the volume. 
 Besides this a different number of lines on the page, though 
 the quires all begin and end alike. 
 
 "I then looked into Herbert's 'Ames/ p. 153, and I 
 found his description of Cough's copy of 1515, showing 
 that Caxton's large device was at the end. 
 
 "This was all I could do last night. This morning 
 I have looked at a few folios by de Worde to see his habits 
 of printing at different times, and I give you here a few 
 of the results that you may just see how, without any par- 
 ticular trouble, such things are worked out. They are all 
 books in folio, printed in double columns, and looking, 
 to an ordinary person examining them, very much the 
 same. 
 
 " i. ' Flower of Commandments.' 1510. 43-line page, 
 with abundance of line-end ornaments. 
 
 "2. 'Golden Legend.' 1512. 44-line page, with a fair 
 number of line-end ornaments. 
 
 "3. 'Nova Legenda Angliae.' 1516. 44-line page, 
 with line-end ornaments but rarely used. 
 
 "4. 'Golden Legend.' 1527. 46-line page, with no 
 line-end ornaments. 
 
 " Your fragment of the ' Chronicle of England,' with the 
 ' Fruit of Times,' has a 44-line page, with a fair number 
 of line-end ornaments, used not rarely and yet not 
 abundantly. 
 
 " Until I am able to find a copy of W. de Worde's 1515 
 edition, I should have no hesitation in describing your 
 fragment as probably belonging to that edition, and I think 
 you will see that such a ' probably ' is not a matter of 
 random speculation, as such things so frequently are. 
 
 " The whole matter has taken me less than half an hour 
 to investigate, and I certainly do not grudge it, since but 
 for your kindness in sending me the thing for examination, 
 I should not have worked up these test-characteristics
 
 368 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 of W. de Worde's printing, which will now be of service 
 to me in all future researches of the kind." 
 
 Of the actual discoveries which Bradshaw made in the 
 department of palaeotypography I cannot venture to give 
 an account. Some few have been alluded to in the fore- 
 going pages, but they are necessarily for the most part too 
 intricate and detailed in their nature to be mentioned in 
 a memoir of this kind. I may, however, give one or two 
 extracts from letters bearing on the date and the printer 
 of the earliest specimens of typography. Writing to Mr 
 Conway in September, 1880, Bradshaw says, "There are 
 two wholly separate Indulgences printed in different types, 
 and therefore at different presses, both in 1454. Of one 
 of them, the 31 -line Indulgence, the copy now at the 
 Hague was sold November 15, 1454, so that I always 
 consider this the birthday of /^/^graphy. Of the other 
 edition (in different types), thirty lines to a page, the 
 earliest copy known was not sold till February 27, 1455 * 
 (the date printed 1454 being altered with a pen to 1455). 
 ... So the earliest date of typography, or printing with 
 movable types, is November 15, 1454. Curiously enough, 
 an Indulgence of the same nature sold in October, 1454, is 
 all manuscript. So I have no doubt that printing with 
 types came out, so to say, in the autumn of 1454." 
 
 In April, 1882, he writes to Mr Tupper, "Now that two 
 distinct presses stand out clearly as existing side by side 
 in 1454, 1455, and 1456 one of which is now beyond all 
 question, I think, identified with Schoiffher working alone 
 on the 3O-line Indulgences of 1454 and 1455, and the 
 Mazarine Bible (42-line) of 1456, f and the 'Donatus' with 
 
 * This copy, belonging to Lord Spencer, was exhibited at the Caxton 
 Celebration, 1877. 
 
 t The copy of this Bible, exhibited at the Caxton Celebration (1877), is 
 described by Mr Bullen in his catalogue as "supposed to have been printed 
 by Gutenberg, assisted by Fust, at Mentz, 1450-55." The "Donatus" is 
 undated, but is supposed to have been printed in or before 1456. The earliest
 
 EARLY BIBLES. 369 
 
 Schoiffher's name and the Psalter initials ; and the other 
 with an unnamed printer (who may be Gutenberg) working 
 alone in the 3i-line Indulgences of 1454 and 1455, the 
 'Appeal against the Turks' of January I, 1455, and the 
 ' Conjunctiones et Oppositiones Solis et Lunae ' of January 
 I, 1457 (to which the 'Cisianus'* corresponds) it ought 
 to be more straightforward work, investigating all these 
 questions." 
 
 In May, 1885, he read before a meeting of the Library 
 Association a paper on early Bibles, f Some time before 
 this he had made up his mind on the subject of the first 
 printers. " I am happy to say," he writes to Mr Blades 
 in June, 1881, "I am now quite clear in my own mind 
 about Gutenberg and the rest. It all came suddenly upon 
 me on Monday last. After putting all speculation apart 
 for so many years, and trying to watch the compositors 
 in the different printing offices at work, it all comes out 
 quite comfortably. I honestly think I deserve to find 
 some conclusion worth having." The upshot of his remarks 
 on early Bibles was that Schoffer, and not Gutenberg, was 
 the printer of the famous Mazarine Bible, the earliest book 
 printed from movable types. It may be mentioned in 
 this connection that a personal examination of a copy of 
 the Mentelin Bible at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, which he 
 made in 1875, enabled him to fix the date of this, the third 
 printed Bible, as 1460-614 His conclusions on the origin 
 of printing are confirmed by the recent investigations of 
 
 dated book is the Psalter, printed "per Johannem Fust civem moguntinum 
 et Petrum Schoffer de Gernszheim anno domini MCCCCLVH." 
 
 * An early German rhyming almanack. 
 
 t Reported in The Printing Times and Lithographer, May 15, 1885. 
 "Unfortunately," says the report, "the written portion of Mr Bradshaw's 
 remarks formed only a small proportion of those to which he gave utterance." 
 I have been unable to find the notes from which he spoke. 
 
 t He had called attention to this fact as early as 1871 : see Mr Hessels' 
 translation of Van der Linde's " Haarlem Legend," preface ; and Mr Bullen's 
 ' ' Catalogue of the Caxton Exhibition," pp. 55, 92. 
 
 2 B
 
 370 LITERARY SURVEY. 
 
 Mr Hessels,* his most distinguished pupil in the science 
 of palaeotypography. 
 
 To the works of Caxton he paid, as his whole corre- 
 spondence with Mr Blades shows, especial attention. His 
 knowledge of Caxton formed, as he said himself, the start- 
 ing-point whence he proceeded to study the typography 
 of the Netherlands and Germany. He was anxious to do 
 all he could to facilitate the study of the subject, but when 
 Mr H. B. Wheatley started the idea of a society to publish 
 facsimiles of Caxton's work, he condemned the project as 
 impracticable. " Of course," he writes to Mr Wheatley, 
 in October, 1860, "I think the Caxton Facsimile Society 
 the most rampant piece of absurdity which has yet been 
 devised. This you can understand my saying ; but having 
 said this I have said all, and in spite of this, I shall be 
 heartily glad to give you any help in my power." 
 
 I have already had occasion to mention the keen 
 interest which Bradshaw took in the production of local 
 presses ; for instance, in those of Oxford and Cambridge, 
 of Belfast and Aberdeen. In connection with the former, 
 Mr F. Madan, of the Bodleian Library, relates a pleasing 
 incident. In November, 1884, he was passing through 
 Cambridge, on his way to Oxford, and had intended to 
 take the opportunity of consulting Bradshaw on some 
 points connected with the history of printing at Oxford. 
 He found, however, that he would have only forty minutes 
 to wait between his trains, and wrote to say he could not 
 come. The sequel may be guessed. When his train 
 arrived, there was Bradshaw on the platform. It was a 
 bitterly cold day, but he had walked to the station, bringing 
 with him a manuscript which was to go back to the 
 Bodleian, on purpose to talk to Mr Madan about his 
 favourite subject. The time flew by in unbroken talk, 
 and Bradshaw concluded by writing out for his friend, 
 
 * In his article on Typography, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1887.
 
 LOCAL PRINTING HERALDRY. 371 
 
 then and there, from memory, a complete descriptive list 
 of all the fifteenth-century books produced at Oxford 
 a list which, Mr Madan tells me, was to be found 
 nowhere else, and is, he believes, exhaustive and correct. 
 
 The last piece of work which he was able to complete 
 was his " Half-Century of Notes on John Dome ; " his last 
 serious correspondence was that with Mr Anderson, on the 
 Belfast press. There was a touching fitness in the fact 
 that he died with one of his Irish books before him, his 
 father's favourite study and his own. 
 
 HERALDRY. 
 
 Since writing the above, I have received a letter from Mr W. St. Jahn 
 Hope,* in which he calls attention to Bradshaw's knowledge of heraldry. He 
 says, "Although he professed not to be versed in the subject, a brief conver- 
 sation sufficed to show that, if he was not familiar with the jargon of modern 
 works on heraldry, he was completely at home with the mediaeval armorists. 
 He spoke in the highest terms of the great interest and beautiful simplicity of 
 the early armory, which the modern text-books studiously avoid reference to. 
 One of his theories, which he again and again reiterated, was that the science 
 of armory died with the conclusion of the Wars of the Roses and the founda- 
 tion of the College of Arms. He always spoke of the claim of the college to 
 regulate and grant armorial bearings as a direct contravention of the true 
 principles of ancient armory. Another of his maxims was, that we ought to 
 have a ' Grammar of Heraldry, ' in which should be set forth the laws and 
 usages of mediaeval armory, as exemplified by original authorities . . . such 
 as monuments, seals, rolls of arms, etc., beginning with the earliest period 
 when heraldry proper existed as a science. ... As a case in point, 
 Bradshaw raised the question, ' When were the arms of man and wife first 
 impaled ? ' Adding, ' I don't suppose you will find that stated in any of the 
 printed works on heraldry.' To test the point, we proceeded to the University 
 Library, and consulted every available work, with the result that in one book 
 only, so far as I recollect, we found the general statement that ' impaling ' 
 commenced in the reign of Edward I. This did not satisfy Bradshaw, who 
 maintained that such a statement ought to rest on the earliest known example, 
 and it was on these lines that the proposed ' Grammar' was to be written." 
 
 * Secretary to the Society of Antiquaries.
 
 ( 372 ) 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THIS memoir would not be complete without some review 
 of Henry Bradshaw's work in the library which was his 
 chief care for so many years, or without an attempt to place 
 on record a few of the impressions left by his remarkable 
 personality. 
 
 His management of the library was not, it may at once 
 be allowed, in every respect quite satisfactory. The con- 
 dition of that institution at one period during his term of 
 office caused, as I have already said, some discontent. 
 But, in the first place, the difficulties with which he had to 
 contend were very great. The staff under his direction 
 was numerically inadequate, the want of space was an 
 ever-present cause of confusion, and the publicity of the 
 library was an impediment with which no other guardian of 
 a similar institution has to contend. In the second place, 
 if he did not succeed in entirely removing all causes of dis- 
 satisfaction, no one who compares the present condition of 
 the library with its condition twenty years ago can fail to 
 recognise the vast improvement in every respect which was 
 accomplished by Bradshaw's unremitting zeal. 
 
 When he became librarian in 1867, great confusion had 
 lately been caused by the attempt to substitute a uniform 
 numerical notation for the various marks letters of the 
 alphabet, Roman and Arabic numerals, etc. by which the 
 various classes of books had been indicated. The reform, 
 however advantageous it might have been if it could have
 
 MANAGEMENT OF THE LIBRARY. 373 
 
 been carried through, was far too large a one for the limited 
 staff to accomplish, and the attempt was abandoned after 
 a considerable part of the work had been done. The 
 simultaneous existence of two entirely different systems of 
 notation, and the consequent confusion that ensued, may 
 more easily be imagined than described. The first thing 
 that Bradshaw had to do was to execute a retrograde 
 movement towards the old system, and this was necessarily 
 a work of time. He did not altogether give up the hope 
 of eventually simplifying the system of notation, but he 
 saw that it must be deferred. 
 
 There was, however, an immediate necessity for devis- 
 ing a plan for denoting the contents of the new building 
 which was completed soon after he took office, and those 
 of other rooms to be added subsequently. The plan which 
 he adopted was simple and effective. He denoted each of 
 the existing rooms by a single letter of the alphabet, and, 
 having regard to the historical growth of the building, he 
 named them in chronological order, beginning with the 
 catalogue-room as at once the centre and, probably, the 
 oldest part of the library. This exhausted the letters from 
 A to K. Then, following up this system, he denoted the 
 new rooms by the remaining letters, from L onwards. 
 The system was not actually applied to the old rooms, nor 
 has it been yet applied, for its substitution for the present 
 jumble of titles would be a long and costly task. But it 
 has been applied to all the rooms added since 1867, and 
 could at any time be introduced throughout, without alter- 
 ing the additions made since that date. 
 
 The completion of the new building involved extensive 
 changes in the arrangement of the books. Several classes, 
 including the manuscripts and early printed books, were 
 moved into the new rooms, and Bradshaw seems to have 
 contemplated a complete rearrangement of the library, 
 \uth a view to a classification according to subjects. But
 
 374 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 this task was too great to be accomplished by the existing 
 staff. For some time considerable confusion was caused, 
 and it was eventually resolved to discontinue the attempt. 
 
 To give an account of all the changes which were intro- 
 duced into the library during Bradshaw's tenure of office 
 would lead me too much into detail. Some of the most 
 important were the introduction of printed instead of 
 written slips into the catalogue, the formation of a code of 
 rules for cataloguing, the issue of a weekly bulletin giving a 
 list of all books added to the library, and the gradual elabo- 
 ration of the various stages through which the books have 
 to pass before they can be placed upon the shelves. The 
 rules for cataloguing are called by Mr Tedder* "probably 
 the most practically useful set of working rules yet issued." 
 Mr Wheatley,t in his report for 1880, says, "The rapid and 
 efficient system by which books are catalogued and shelved 
 and the title-slips pasted in the catalogue is very praise- 
 worthy. This is a feature in which I do not think the 
 library is surpassed by any with which I am acquainted." 
 The printing of the slips was introduced several years 
 before the British Museum had adopted the plan. It 
 is unnecessary to suppose that the whole credit for these 
 and other improvements was due to Bradshaw ; it is enough 
 to say that they were carried out under his direction and 
 during his librarianship. His prevailing aim was probably 
 rather to make existing arrangements work smoothly than 
 to alter the machinery which he found to hand. His idea 
 of a great library was hardly that of most modern librarians. 
 He regarded it in the light of a museum of literary and 
 typographical records quite as much as, perhaps even more 
 than, that of a collection of practically useful books. 
 
 The daily routine of management occupied far the 
 greater part of his time probably a larger share than was 
 
 * Librarian of the Athenaeum, in his report to the Syndicate, 1879. 
 t Librarian of the Society of Arts.
 
 HABIT OF PROCRASTINATION. 375 
 
 necessary, for the capacity of working through subordinates 
 was not one of his strong points. " He could not," says 
 one of the assistants, " bring himself to allow any one to 
 answer letters for him." His habit of not answering letters 
 has been described by one of his friends as " the only fail- 
 ing he had." It was not his only failing, but it was cer- 
 tainly one of the most prominent. He wrote an enormous 
 number of letters, but if he did not answer an inquiry at 
 once, it often had to wait for months. He used to carry 
 masses of unanswered letters about with him in his coat- 
 pocket, and would take them out and show them some- 
 times, not without a certain mischievous glee, saying in his 
 droll way, " I am too wicked ; what shall I do ? " He was 
 well aware of his failing, and one day said to Mr T. B. 
 Reed, who wanted some information from him, "You had 
 better come and get what you can by word of mouth. I 
 offend lots of my friends by not answering their letters, or 
 losing them like yours." On one occasion Mr Edwin 
 Freshfield, to whom he had long promised a visit, and who 
 could not get an answer to his invitations, sent him two 
 post-cards, on one of which was written " Yes," on the other 
 " No," and asked him to post one or the other. Bradshaw 
 promptly posted both. It is fair to say that by the next 
 post he wrote to say he would come, and did so. 
 
 It was the same with books. To get a book back from 
 him was like getting butter out of the black dog's mouth. 
 Mr Horner, of Mells, tells a story of how he once lent him 
 a little early service-book, one of a number of valuable 
 books which Bradshaw went over from Longleat on pur- 
 pose to see. When he had had it rather over a twelve- 
 month, Mr Horner wrote to ask him if he had done with 
 it. No answer was returned. He waited a month, and 
 wrote again ; again no answer. Then he presented his 
 compliments to Mr Bradshaw's executors, and asked them 
 to recover the lost property out of his residuary estate.
 
 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 This was too much. The book came back most carefully 
 packed, with a courteous letter, in which Bradshaw said 
 that he was extremely sorry, but that whenever he was 
 asked to send back an interesting book he " suffered from 
 a chronic paralysis of the will, and could not return it till 
 the fit had passed away." 
 
 Mr Charles Hargrove tells another anecdote illustrative 
 of what he calls his " truly phenomenal procrastination." 
 A senior fellow of his college possessed a copy of the Greek 
 Anthology, with the translation of Grotius, in four volumes, 
 excellent in all respects, except that it wanted the last leaf. 
 Bradshaw offered to make a copy of the leaf and put it in, if 
 the owner would send him the book. He did so, and never 
 saw it again. He inquired after it from time to time, and was 
 always told it should be restored at once. In course of time 
 he died, and left the book in his will to Bradshaw. One 
 day Mr Hargrove saw it in his rooms, and asked for the 
 loan of it. Bradshaw told him the story, with many ex- 
 pressions of repentance, and offered to give him the book. 
 Mr Hargrove accepted the gift, and, knowing his habits, 
 wanted to take it away at once. No ; he would send it 
 shortly, along with some other books which Mr Hargrove 
 had lent him. Of course the books never came. The years 
 went on, and allusion was occasionally made to the subject, 
 with no result. Bradshaw went so far as to do the books up 
 in a parcel, which he one day showed to Mr Hargrove, 
 saying he would send it by his gyp next day. But the 
 books never found their way to their owner, and when 
 Bradshaw died they were still unrestored. 
 
 This was, no doubt, downright inexcusable procrastina- 
 tion, altogether a vice ; and yet it was impossible to be 
 annoyed with him for it, or annoyed for long. His very 
 faults had something lovable in them. And, after all, in 
 matters of duty, in business which had to be transacted by 
 a certain date, he was seldom behindhand. The library
 
 WORK IN THE LIBRARY. 377 
 
 accounts, for instance, as more than one vice-chancellor 
 has assured me, were always ready at the right time, and 
 absolutely clear and correct. That he did not complete 
 more of what he undertook for instance, the catalogue of 
 his beloved early printed books in the library was princi- 
 pally due to the fact that he was so constantly occupied in 
 helping students who came to- him for aid. " Often at four 
 o'clock," says one of his library assistants, "after a day 
 spent in this manner, has he sat down, dead-beat, and said 
 to me, ' I've done absolutely nothing to-day. It's perfectly 
 fearful to think of;' and it was difficult to make him feel 
 that in reality he had done a great deal." 
 
 His relations with the library assistants were of the 
 friendliest. " To one and all of us," says the same assistant 
 from whom I have already quoted, " he was extremely 
 kind. He took a personal interest in us, and looked upon 
 us as his children. He commanded the confidence of the 
 staff, and was willing to be the sharer of their joys and 
 troubles. Nothing escaped his eye, and if" he thought 
 something was wrong, he could not be easy till he knew 
 what was the matter. There were times, however, when 
 he could be very severe, and say the most crushing 
 things. He would never listen to excuses, and would say 
 that if a man wanted to do a thing he would always find 
 time to do it. Whatever he did in the library he did 
 thoroughly, and tried to make others do the same ; he 
 could not endure seeing things half done. There was 
 nothing he hated more than hearing any one say, on being 
 shown the way to do a thing, ' What does it matter ? ' He 
 would say it ' shut him up.' He was very strict about 
 rules, and would very rarely relax a fine, whatever defence 
 a man might make. He was very particular, too, about 
 his young friends wearing their caps and gowns when they 
 came to see him in the library. If he saw an under- 
 graduate walking about with his gown on his arm, he
 
 378 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 always told him to put it on. He never permitted any 
 reader in the library to put one book open upon another, 
 and, if he saw it, would say to him, ' Oh, please let me take 
 that book off! ' Nor could he bear to see a pen lodged in 
 an ink-pot, on account of the danger lest the ink should 
 be spilt on the book." 
 
 Dr Zupitza, a great friend and admirer of Bradshaw, 
 tells me that he was one day making notes in ink from the 
 famous manuscript of Bede's " Ecclesiastical History" in the 
 University Library. Bradshaw happened to espy him, and 
 with the exclamation, " You Germans have no reverence," 
 rushed at the ink-pot and carried it away. So precious 
 a manuscript should not be approached, he thought, with 
 anything more dangerous than a pencil. 
 
 As an illustration of his kindness to the library assist- 
 ants, I may mention an incident for which Mr Hargrove 
 is my authority. One of them was observed by Bradshaw 
 to be in low spirits. He won his confidence, and found 
 the cause to be a debt of some 30, a large sum for a 
 married man with a salary of ^150 a year. He took it on 
 himself; but, not content with this, and thinking there might 
 be more behind, he continued to press him till he knew all 
 his circumstances, and found that his debts amounted to 
 about 80. "So I paid them all," said Bradshaw to Mr 
 Hargrove, "and set him on his legs again." This was not, 
 perhaps, in accordance with the principles of the Charity 
 Organisation Society, but if it was wrong, it was surely 
 a fault over which "the recording angel would drop a tear." 
 
 It was in the library, naturally, that his unselfish help- 
 fulness, his entire freedom from egotism, made itself most 
 apparent "A librarian," he said in his address to the 
 Library Conference, " is one who earns his living by attend- 
 ing to the wants of those for whose use the library under 
 his charge exists, his primary duty being, in the widest 
 possible sense of the phrase, to save the time of those who
 
 HELPFULNESS. 379 
 
 seek his services." Every day that he spent in the library 
 bore testimony to the manner in which he obeyed this 
 principle. It will be hardly possible for any one else to obey 
 it quite in the same way. He was fortunate in his oppor- 
 tunity, coming to the library, as he did, just at the time 
 when the work of cataloguing and rearranging the manu- 
 scripts and early books was in progress. He held a post 
 for the continuance of which, after he had done his work, 
 there was no further need, and he thus gained a first-hand 
 acquaintance with the contents of the library which it is 
 hardly likely that any successor will acquire. This unique 
 knowledge a knowledge depending on a long and labo- 
 rious apprenticeship, and the possession of uncommon 
 mental gifts was combined with a self-forgetfulness and 
 a disregard for fame rarely compatible with great intellec- 
 tual power. He was thus enabled "to save the time of 
 those who sought his services " to an extent which few who 
 did not seek them could appreciate. The list of scholars, 
 English and foreign, who received from him help and 
 information, is long and distinguished. To mention a tithe 
 of these would be impossible, but I cannot help quoting a 
 few extracts from among a large number of letters which 
 I have received on the subject. 
 
 Mr T. W. Jackson, for instance, writes as follows: 
 " I had no introduction to him when I first went to the 
 University Library to ask for his help. Two or three 
 questions, most gently but most skilfully put, showed him 
 that I had done some little work on the subject in hand, 
 and from that moment he not only gave me facilities, but 
 gave trouble and time of his own, with a kinclness which 
 nothing could exceed. ... It is difficult to say why he, in 
 a sense, fascinated people, myself included. It seemed to 
 come, if one may say it, from a courtesy of thought, quite 
 beyond and surpassing that of manner." Mr G. H. 
 Moberly, after describing the help which he received in his
 
 380 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 edition of Bede, says, " I cannot exaggerate the kindness 
 and courtesy with which it was done." 
 
 Mr J. B. Mullinger * says, " I shall never forget the tact 
 and geniality with which, when I first made his ac- 
 quaintance, myself a mere neophyte in literary research, 
 he sought to put me at my ease, in asking him questions 
 and giving him trouble, by endeavouring to make out that 
 he would himself be a gainer by the process. ' If, when you 
 have a little leisure,' or, ' That is just one of the points I 
 should like to go into with your assistance," and so forth, 
 always managing, though without any appearance of doing 
 it, to give me at the same time an amount of guidance 
 and criticism such as I could scarcely have found any- 
 where else. And all this was enlivened by a quiet humour 
 and occasional anecdote, in a manner which made him, I 
 think, the most delightful counsellor in literary matters 
 of whom I ever took advice." Dr Murray f says, "I con- 
 stantly applied to him in difficulties, and never in vain. 
 The disinterestedness of his help was something wonderful 
 and touching." 
 
 " He was bewilderingly enthusiastic," writes Mr T. B. 
 Reed.f "Having grasped what I wanted, he gave me no 
 time to interpose new questions or dwell on old ones, but 
 passed from topic to topic, and book to book. He told me 
 more than once that it was the duty of a librarian to help 
 others rather than to appear in print himself, but he added 
 that he received sometimes with impatience the compli- 
 ments of those who first praised his perspicacity, and then 
 calmly appropriated, without verifying or working them out 
 for themselves, his own investigations. ' You are heartily 
 
 * Author of a "History of the University of Cambridge," "The Schools 
 of Charles the Great," etc. 
 
 t Editor of the new English Dictionary, now in course of publication at 
 the Clarendon Press. 
 
 J Author of "A History of the Old English Letter Foundries, etc.," 
 1887.
 
 HELPFULNESS. 38 1 
 
 welcome,' he said, ' to anything I can tell you. But don't 
 publish my work ; publish your own' " 
 
 The following typical anecdote was communicated to 
 me by Mr S. S. Lewis.* " He once showed me a letter 
 from some wholly unknown correspondent, asking him to 
 verify a quotation from one of the Parker manuscripts in 
 my charge. When I offered to do it for him, he replied, 
 ' I mustn't lose the pleasure of having another look at your 
 books. When may I come ? ' ' To-morrow, as early as 
 you please/ I answered ; and on the morrow, and each 
 succeeding week-day for a fortnight, he came about 7.45 
 a.m., took a cup of cocoa from my breakfast-table, and 
 worked on happily far beyond the original object for which 
 he had come." " The most delightful thing in the world," 
 he said one day to a very young scholar, " is to have people 
 coming to you for help." 
 
 To foreigners who demanded his assistance, whether in 
 person or by letter, he was particularly helpful. He was 
 frequently engaged in collating transcripts, verifying quo- 
 tations, copying manuscripts for them, or giving them aid 
 in other ways. One day, an American professor, quite 
 unknown to him, came to the University Library to see if 
 he could find out anything about the " Family of Love," 
 in which he was interested. It happened to be one of 
 Bradshaw's favourite subjects. He at once introduced the 
 stranger to the valuable collection of books bearing on 
 the subject which exists in the University Library,f and 
 spent over two hours in explaining their connection and 
 discussing the whole topic. Many other American stu- 
 dents have had a similar experience. To Dr Zarncke, 
 who was engaged in 1875 in working out the history of 
 Prester John, he sent transcripts and descriptions of two 
 manuscripts at Corpus, and two others elsewhere, with 
 
 * Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 
 t Presented by the late Dr Corrie, Master of Jesus.
 
 382 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 seven or eight letters, all in the space of a couple of 
 months. And this is only one instance out of dozens 
 which might be quoted to illustrate the manner in which 
 he " saved the time of others " at the expense of his own 
 time and fame. 
 
 The following is from a letter to the distinguished 
 French scholar, M. Paul Meyer, to whom he had made 
 some promise which he had not performed : 
 
 "University Library, November 2, 1871. 
 
 " MY DEAR SIR, 
 
 " Your letter just received humbles me to the 
 dust. I cannot say more than that I am extremely sorry 
 for all the trouble and annoyance that my negligence has 
 caused you, and that I sincerely hope others beside your- 
 self may be gainers by the result. . . . About the Vaudois 
 manuscripts I cannot undertake to do anything at all for 
 print. I will give any one who comes here and wants to 
 use them, any help or any information which I have it in 
 my power to give ; but I am not a literary man, though 
 my friends are fond of assuming that I am, and I am 
 wholly destitute of the gift of writing. Anybody who is 
 worth giving it to, is at any time welcome to use freely all 
 I have to give, and I cannot say more. . . . 
 " Yours most truly, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 From among many letters from scholars to whom 
 Bradshaw rendered assistance, I choose the two following 
 as of some general interest : 
 
 " Eversley Rectory, Winchfield, November 21, 1867. 
 
 "MY DEAR BRADSHAW, 
 
 " I find I must ask you to send me the volume 
 of Theodoret which contains the Greek of the ' Philotheus ' 
 or ' Theophilus,' as I have only the Latin translation.
 
 HELPFULNESS. 383 
 
 Also I much want the little ' Life of St Guthlac in Anglo- 
 Saxon,' with the translation by I forget who. . . . You 
 are a shabby fellow, I tell you in all love. I wrote to you 
 this summer, asking you when you were coming to see the 
 Dogmersfield treasures, which are awaiting you, and you 
 never answered. But that will stand over till I come to 
 Cambridge in December. 
 
 " Yours ever sincerely, 
 
 " CHARLES KINGSLEY." 
 
 " Public Record Office, November 5, 1862. 
 
 " MY DEAR MR BRADSHAW, 
 
 " I cannot sufficiently thank you for your very 
 kind letter and valuable list of corrections. If two or three 
 such kind and competent critics would do the like for the 
 portions with which they are acquainted, we should soon 
 have a perfect catalogue of our historical manuscripts. . . . 
 " Believe me to be most sincerely yours, 
 
 " T. DUFFUS HARDY." * 
 
 As a final illustration of this side of Bradshaw's 
 character, I quote a few lines from the preface to Mr 
 J. W. Clark's "Architectural History of the University of 
 Cambridge." 
 
 " No language that I can think of can adequately 
 express what I owe to our late librarian, Henry Bradshaw. 
 From the outset of my work, he took it, so to speak, into 
 his hands, and treated it as if it had been his own. Not- 
 withstanding the incessant demands upon his time, he 
 always found leisure to help me, to teach me to read 
 difficult mediaeval handwriting, or to dictate to me some 
 document which I had reason to copy. On one occasion, 
 I remember, he took the trouble to travel from Cambridge 
 
 * Late Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records, and author of the " Descrip- 
 tive Catalogue of the Materials relating to the History of Great Britain and 
 Ireland" (Rolls Series), etc.
 
 384 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 to Eton in order to settle the signification of a single 
 contraction in one of the building-rolls, on which a good 
 deal depended, and about which I could not feel quite sure. 
 Not content with giving me advice on all questions of 
 arrangement of materials about which his singularly 
 lucid and orderly mind rendered him an invaluable coun- 
 sellor he insisted on reading all the proof-sheets, not 
 merely for the purpose of detecting clerical errors, but that 
 he might copiously annotate them, and show me how 
 difficult points in history and archaeology might be set in 
 the best light. Had it not been for his encouragement, 
 my labours would never have been brought to a conclu- 
 sion. My greatest pleasure would have been to show him 
 the completed work ; my greatest grief is that he can 
 never see it." 
 
 Of Bradshaw's influence in university politics there is 
 not much to say, for it was not till late in life that he 
 became prominent in this respect. He always felt strongly 
 and spoke strongly to his friends on university subjects, but 
 he avoided putting himself forward in public. Towards 
 the end of his life the value of his judgment began to be 
 more widely recognised, and his election to the Council 
 and the General Board was at once a sign of general re- 
 spect and an encouragement to him to use the influence 
 which was naturally his. The late Mr Coutts Trotter in- 
 formed me that his opinions on university matters carried 
 great weight on the Council, and that his knowledge of 
 university history was especially useful whenever a con- 
 stitutional question or the adaptation of old institutions 
 to modern requirements was under discussion. While a 
 member of the Council he employed his peculiar skill 
 in tabulation to draw up a sort of calendar of the business 
 that came before that body, by which means much time 
 was saved and many omissions avoided. 
 
 Professor Sidgwick says, " He was a most valuable
 
 INFLUENCE IN THE UNIVERSITY. 385 
 
 member of the General Board. His judgments, when he 
 gave them, were always well considered and carried weight, 
 but he did not usually take a leading part in the proceed- 
 ings. I recollect one important crisis perhaps the most 
 important that we have had at which he did take the lead 
 with great effect. There was a fundamental question re- 
 lating to the distribution of the first instalment of the 
 Common University Fund, on which the Board was 
 divided. Influential persons held that a large part of the 
 fund should be spent in raising the salaries of existing 
 professors ; another section thought that, in view of the 
 urgent demands for money to provide new teaching and 
 equipments, we should be fairly chargeable with being 
 unduly influenced by personal considerations, if we recom- 
 mended the former course. The question was one calculated 
 to lead to disagreeable and embarrassing discussions ; but, 
 under Bradshaw's management, this danger was felicitously 
 avoided. The matter would in any case, I think, have 
 been settled in favour of the latter alternative, but I always 
 attributed to Bradshaw's peculiar qualities his perfect 
 disinterestedness, his simple intensity of conviction, together 
 with his geniality and bonhomie, and his entire freedom 
 from dry doctrinairism that it was settled with so little 
 friction." Another member of the Council " well remem- 
 bers his determination that all should be frank and clear 
 as the daylight. ' No half confidences,' he would say. And 
 for any phrase suggested by grounds of policy, he would 
 substitute the simple words, and would remark as if after 
 that no answer was possible ' You mean it ; you had 
 better say it.' " 
 
 In illustration of this last characteristic, I may quote 
 a story told me by a well-known clergyman, a writer both 
 learned and brilliant. He was one day with Bradshaw, 
 when the latter introduced him to another visitor much 
 to his dismay and confusion as " one of the most learned 
 
 2 C
 
 386 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 men in England." " I was put out by the exaggeration. 
 ' Bradshaw,' I said, ' how can you talk in that way ? ' 
 Then, turning to the stranger, I said, ' You see, the great 
 librarian has not given up the arts of adulation.' Brad- 
 shaw, to my surprise, fired up, and was for a moment 
 really angry. ' I am not in the habit of saying what I 
 do not mean, and I shouldn't have said it if it wasn't 
 true.' " 
 
 In spite of perhaps I ought to say, in great measure 
 owing to this unspoken honesty and frankness, few men 
 have had more friends, real warmly attached friends, than 
 Bradshaw. The friends whom he made at school, unlike 
 many boy-friends, remained attached to him through life. 
 As an undergraduate he speedily made himself remarkable, 
 among those who knew him well, for the number and warmth 
 of his friendships. From that time onward he never ceased 
 to add to the number. The capacity for friendship is 
 generally limited, like other gifts, but Bradshaw's capacity 
 in this direction was infinite. 
 
 His manner of keeping hold of his friends was his own. 
 He never lost touch with a friend once made ; he never 
 forgot old associations. However long an interval had 
 elapsed since the last meeting, he could always take up 
 the intimacy where it had been dropped, and make an old 
 acquaintance at once at home. With many men such re- 
 vivals of intimacy are impossible ; the attempt only reveals 
 the severance that has insensibly taken place. Other friends, 
 other interests, other conditions of life, alter and estrange 
 those who once protested that nothing should diminish 
 their affection. When they meet, it is with a sense of 
 strain ; when they part, it is with a sense of relief. With 
 Bradshaw it was otherwise. Time and distance seemed to 
 have no effect. He wasted no regrets over inevitable 
 separations ; he never attempted to maintain that laborious 
 but fictitious intimacy which rests on occasional corre-
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 387 
 
 spondence, but he kept his eye on friends, however far 
 away. He contrived always to find out where they were 
 and what they were doing ; and when they gravitated 
 again to the old rooms in King's, as sooner or later they 
 were sure to do, they found no broken links to knit 
 again, no cold embers of ancient friendship to blow into 
 a lukewarm flame. He would let fall a word or two 
 which showed that he knew of their affairs, which proved 
 that his interest in them was not merely revived by the 
 meeting, that it had been continuous. 
 
 " I only know," says one of his earliest friends, who 
 saw him again after many years, "that he was a very 
 Jonathan in his affection. There was something so inex- 
 pressibly gentle and soothing in his lazy but earn.est 
 welcome, in his beaming smile coming back and back at 
 the pleasure of looking again in an old friend's face, in his 
 very touch so quaintly caressing." And another, much 
 younger, writes, " I always felt sure, on coming back to 
 Cambridge, that my knock at his door (an imitation of his 
 peculiar knock *) would be welcome, even though he 
 might happen to be at work. Then he would perhaps 
 only point with his pen to a chair, and work on, till at 
 last he would shut his book with a bang and come to you 
 with both hands stretched out, to say, ' How d'you do ? ' 
 properly. Then I felt as if I had never been away." 
 
 Changes of scene and occupation could not produce 
 the same result with him as with most men, for his friend- 
 ships did not depend on community of interests. It is true 
 that there was nothing he enjoyed more than discussing 
 with another scholar some subject which both loved ; and 
 common pursuits won him many fast friends. But after 
 all, even in cases of this kind, his friendships were at 
 
 * One of his quaint habits was that he used to beat a tattoo with the tips 
 of his fingers on a friend's door, instead of knocking in the ordinary way with 
 his knuckles.
 
 388 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 bottom friendships of the heart. Those who began by 
 coming to him for help, who were first moved by admira- 
 tion for his learning or gratitude for his generosity, ended 
 by loving him for himself. But the number of such friends 
 was necessarily limited. He would sometimes deplore, in 
 a half-humorous, half-pathetic way, his intellectual soli- 
 tude. " No one cares about what I care about," he would 
 say. Sympathy and encouragement were very necessary 
 to him, the sympathy of those who understood, if it could 
 be had which was rarely the case ; if not, even unintelligent 
 sympathy was welcome. He delighted in finding a sym- 
 pathetic listener, and would read Chaucer to such a one 
 by the hour together, or would explain to some under- 
 graduate ignoramus all the details of an intricate biblio- 
 graphical problem. He liked to hold some one by the 
 hand, so to speak, while his mind was at work. 
 
 But it was by no means in intellectual matters only, 
 or chiefly, that he felt this need. He hated solitude, and 
 craved for human companionship in his daily life. People 
 used to wonder why he did not marry. He had a con- 
 summate belief in the advantages of matrimony ; the one 
 thing he really cared about in the university reforms of 
 1882 was to abolish the enforced celibacy of older days.* 
 He rejoiced when his friends got married, acted as best 
 man at their weddings, stood godfather to their children, 
 knowing all the time that he did not lose them as friends. 
 In earlier days one can hardly suppose that thoughts of 
 marriage did not sometimes cross his mind, so full he was 
 of the love of home, of domestic tastes and associations, and 
 endowed with such an ever-flowing well of warm affec- 
 tions. But he was not rich, and he was immersed in study. 
 Some time after he became librarian, when he was already 
 past forty, he fell in love, and made a serious attempt 
 to alter his condition ; that failing, he resigned himself 
 * See above, p. 242.
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 3?9 
 
 to what he thought his fate. One day, in 1884, Mr 
 Tuckvvell was paying him a visit. " We compared," says 
 Mr Tuckvvell, " our lots in life mine full of care and tur- 
 moil, his calm and free from anxiety. ' But,' he said, ' you 
 have had domestic happiness, and I have missed it.' I 
 laughed out a ' Qui fit, Maecenas ? ' but he would not smile." 
 
 Of older friends, contemporaries of his own or slightly 
 differing in age, and resident at Cambridge, he had no 
 lack. He might have had more, but for many years 
 he went rarely into society, and had a reputation for 
 refusing invitations to dinner. Towards the end of his 
 life he relaxed in this respect, and in many houses in 
 Cambridge he was often a welcome guest. Still, these 
 older men, members of other colleges or living in their 
 own homes, could not give him the companionship which 
 he required. For this purpose younger men were better 
 adapted, and he had a strange power of attracting younger 
 men. Generation after generation of undergraduates passed 
 by, and hardly any without rendering him his toll, one, 
 two, or more devotees, who were perpetually in his rooms, 
 having tea with him or breakfast with him, reading or 
 talking or sitting with him while he did his work. " It 
 was characteristic of university life," he said, " that friends 
 must go, but others -come," and the sequence was hardly 
 ever broken. 
 
 All sorts of men used to meet in his rooms. He never 
 seemed to select his friends ; they were drawn to him 
 by some mysterious affinity, having often nothing in com- 
 mon but their liking for him. Athletes and students, 
 senior classics and pollmen, young dandies with faultless 
 collars and sizars whose outward man told only too plainly 
 of the res angusta domi, distinguished persons whose name 
 was in every one's mouth, together with the retiring and 
 unknown, sat on the same sofa and forgot their differ- 
 ences in the halo of his presence.
 
 390 LIFE AXD CHARACTER. 
 
 One class of men he was shy of "intellects," he used 
 to call them ; the men who dwell habitually on " higher 
 ground," and deal only with the loftiest topics of con- 
 versation. With such superior persons he was seldom him- 
 self ; he became reserved, ungenial, sometimes even waspish, 
 or took refuge in a chilling silence. And another class he 
 could not abide the genus "prig." If an incipient mem- 
 ber of this order entered his rooms, his tendency was at 
 once detected, and a vein of irony or sarcasm, gentle or 
 severe, as suited the occasion, was brought into play, 
 which either cured the malady or drove the sufferer to 
 more congenial climes. Nor was any humbug tolerated 
 in that society, for Bradshaw's insight was far too keen. 
 The one thing he demanded of his friends was that they 
 should be themselves ; it was of no use, indeed, to attempt 
 to be anything else in his presence he found it out at 
 once. 
 
 With these limitations, his society was open to all. 
 Prejudices and partialities he doubtless had. It was some- 
 times hard to say why he liked particular persons. He 
 would say himself, " I know all my geese are swans." 
 Not that all who came liked him. " Bradshaw doesn't seem 
 to care to see one," some would say, "is so often out, 
 says such queer things," and so on. ' An undergraduate 
 once described him as a " prickly person," and so he 
 seemed to many. His quick observation of peculiarities, 
 his irony, his sharp sayings, puzzled and frightened not 
 a few. Others whom he did not take to at first came 
 again and again in spite of rebuffs, and won him at last. 
 
 Why men were attracted to him it is not very easy to 
 explain. Nothing is more difficult than to analyse the 
 causes of friendship. To begin with, there was a sense 
 of domesticity about him. He easily dropped into a sort 
 of paternal relation. He was fond of using pet names, 
 and doing little kindly actions, such as only near relatives
 
 COLLEGE ROOMS. 391 
 
 as a rule do for each other. He was a strange mixture 
 of masculine vigour and almost feminine sweetness. " His 
 way of saying ' child ' to me always touched me," writes 
 one ; " it had such a sound of home." And this feeling 
 was strengthened by his material surroundings. They 
 were the reflex of himself. 
 
 He inhabited one of the best sets of rooms in college. 
 One room looked southward over the picturesque red roofs 
 and walls of St. Catherine's and Queen's ; two others 
 looked northward over the court toward the chapel, 
 with the tower of St. Mary's to the right, beyond the 
 college-screen. They were lofty, spacious, airy rooms : 
 one could not imagine him living in small rooms, with 
 little air or light. There was a feeling of comfort about 
 them, a sense of homeliness and domesticity. The furni- 
 ture was not very elegant, certainly not what used to be 
 called " aesthetic ; " it was not new and smart, nor was 
 it, on the other hand, old or dowdy. It did not look, 
 somehow, like university furniture ; nor was it, in fact, for it 
 came mostly from his old home. It was solid, good fur- 
 niture, the sort of furniture that carried you back in 
 imagination to a comfortable, well-cared-for house of forty 
 years ago. One felt it had associations ; so had the old 
 blue-and-white cut glasses on the chimney-piece, and the 
 vases on the table that in summer-time were seldom with- 
 out flowers, and the samplers worked by his great-aunts 
 that hung on the walls of his inner room. 
 
 To the associations of home and boyhood were added 
 those of later days. The rooms were full of little nick- 
 nacks left behind by friends who had gone down, or 
 brought home by others from their travels : a couple 
 of Tyrolese beer-mugs, a china sabot from Nevers, a 
 Thun jar with withered rose-leaves in it, the original of 
 Thackeray's famous drawing of Louis Quatorze. One of 
 his fire-screens had belonged to G. R. Crotch, another
 
 39 2 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 to a departed Kingsman. The tea-pot which he habitually 
 used was brought from Dresden by a friend, who break- 
 fasted with him on Sundays year after year ; the china stand 
 on which it stood was given him by another. One friend, 
 on going down, had bequeathed to him a vast sofa, another 
 an easy-chair ; the curtains in his front room were the 
 gift of a third. One of his toys had been a little wooden 
 model of a Long-Chamber bed. It met with a disastrous 
 fate. One day, an old colleger, a man whose life had been 
 made a burden to him at Eton, espying it on the chimney- 
 piece, and overcome by angry recollections, seized it and 
 threw it into the fire. All Bradshaw said was, " Did you 
 think that was necessary ? " 
 
 Over the chimney-piece in the south room hung a life- 
 size portrait of Mr Joseph Allen, the Quaker philanthro- 
 pist, in his knee-breeches and grey stockings. He had 
 owned a little property at Lindfield, in Sussex, and estab- 
 lished there a model school, where boys were taught the 
 elements of industrial arts, trade, and agriculture. When he 
 died, he left the property to Miss Susan Bradshaw, Brad- 
 shaw's aunt, and there, among the red-brick cottages and 
 thatched roofs of the quaint Sussex village, Bradshaw had 
 passed many happy boyish days. When Miss Bradshaw 
 died, she left Lindfield to her nephew. On another wall in 
 the same room hung some oil-paintings from his old 
 home ; on a third, an empty frame. This had once con- 
 tained a picture painted by his friend Ernest Muggeridge. 
 The artist had taken it back to finish, but had died before 
 his task was completed, and Bradshaw would never touch 
 the empty frame. 
 
 One side of this room, in which Bradshaw slept during 
 the latter part of his life he rather liked moving about 
 from one room to another was almost entirely occupied 
 by a gigantic chest of drawers, in plain unvarnished deal, 
 with about fifty drawers in it, which he had had made to
 
 COLLEGE ROOMS. 393 
 
 hold his papers. In the other large room was a grand 
 piano, with a heap of music near it, mostly old music, 
 songs and duets that he had sung with his sisters as a boy. 
 On the walls of this room hung several pictures by artist 
 friends : a water-colour of the head of Windermere, one 
 of his favourite haunts in the Lake district ; a clever 
 pen-and-ink drawing of the view from his old rooms up- 
 stairs ; three little pen-and-ink sketches of Killarney, done on 
 the backs of postcards and sent him from thence. Others, 
 too, there were, all possessing some association or other. 
 In the window-boxes of one room he kept small ever- 
 green shrubs ; in the other there were always red gera- 
 niums, and nothing else they were his mother's favourite 
 flowers. The very book-shelves had a character of their 
 own shallower at the bottom than the top ; the small 
 books below, the large ones above ; and so fixed that the 
 lowest shelf could be reached without stooping, the highest 
 without standing on a chair. 
 
 But the shelves did not hold all the books and papers. 
 They overflowed everywhere ; the wide window-seats were 
 smothered with them, and many of the chairs, and they 
 were often piled in heaps on the floor. Now and then 
 he would make a desperate effort to clean his Augean 
 stable, as he called it. He would transport a batch of 
 books to the library, tie up and put away magazines and 
 pamphlets, and get rid of heaps of old letters and papers. 
 On these occasions he would destroy, rapidly, the accu- 
 mulations of years ; but his tendency was never to tear up 
 anything, so the clearance was only temporary. He re- 
 joiced in any event a visit from a sister or his nieces, 
 for instance, which forced him to tidy up ; but these 
 events were rare, and he would deplore his inability to 
 put or keep things in order without such incentive. 
 
 In spite of this, the litter was never such as to give 
 any sense of discomfort. There was plenty of room for
 
 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 all his friends, even for the gatherings on Sunday even- 
 ings, which were comparatively numerous. Not that he 
 encouraged anything in the nature of a crush ; it was 
 seldom, if ever, that more than a dozen would be found 
 in his rooms at once. He never sought to bring crowds 
 together ; those who came, came to see him. There was 
 no other attraction, no lions to be listened to, no music 
 as a rule nothing but quiet talk. It was the charm and 
 originality of the man himself that attracted one. He was 
 not a great preacher or teacher, nor a man of ideas, nor a 
 brilliant talker ; his influence depended on personal contact, 
 and more even on what he ivas than on what he did or 
 said. " We did not love him for this or that quality," says 
 one, " but because he was more lovable than any one else." 
 But it was in small meetings of two or three, still more 
 in quiet conversations, tete-a-tete, prolonged often far into 
 the night, that the full attraction of his character was felt. 
 He was a busy man, it must be remembered, occupied 
 every day and all day long, and there could not be very 
 many at one time who enjoyed this intimacy. The wonder 
 was that he found time to see as much of his friends as 
 he did. 
 
 Over those with whom he came much into contact 
 his influence was very strong. The primary cause of this 
 was that his interest in his friends was deep and con- 
 tinuous. It was in the main a friendly, but it was also 
 a scientific, interest. He made a point of ascertaining all 
 about his friends, their home-surroundings, their relations, 
 their circumstances, all that made them what they were ; 
 he observed them under all conditions ; he made them 
 tell him what was in their mind. His kindly persistence 
 broke down the barriers of the most obstinate reserve. 
 To find one's self interesting to be treated by an older 
 man not as one of a multitude, but as an individual is 
 a delicate flattery that opens the heart. And Bradshaw
 
 INFLUENCE OBSERVATION. 395 
 
 had a way of treating you as if you were the one person 
 in the world whom he cared about. Not a few of his 
 friends still claim to have been his only intimate at some 
 particular period, quite unaware that they shared this 
 intimacy with others. 
 
 Thus, though he seldom made confidences, he never 
 failed to win them. And, the confidence once won, he 
 never lost it again. He never forgot what had been told 
 him ; he added to his knowledge from sources of which 
 one knew nothing. You had been to Newmarket, perhaps, 
 or had lost money at loo, and were ashamed to tell him, 
 but somehow he knew all about it, and would casually say, 
 as if continuing a conversation on the subject, " Was it 
 pleasant on the heath ? " or, " Silly boy ! I wonder who 
 were there last night ? " Nothing seemed to escape him. 
 It was almost impossible to tell him any Cambridge news ; 
 he always knew it first. As an instance of the unexpected- 
 ness of his knowledge, a friend (a Trinity man) says, " I 
 once mentioned the name of my bed-maker as Mrs Daw- 
 kins. He inquired closely where my rooms were, and then 
 pronounced with some decision, ' Darkins, you mean; not 
 Dawkins.' He would not say how he came to know this, 
 but it turned out afterwards that his 'boy,' as he called 
 him (alias his gyp), was the good lady's son-in-law." It 
 was just one of those coincidences that somehow were 
 always happening with Bradshaw. 
 
 His observation of external peculiarities was as keen 
 and humorous as his insight into character, and he was not 
 sparing of criticism. Little faults of manner, unpleasant 
 habits, he would cure in some quaint way peculiarly his 
 own. One friend used to keep his mouth habitually open ; 
 Bradshaw, when he saw him, would drop his lower jaw 
 with an irresistibly comic expression. Another was very 
 particular about his company ; Bradshaw would put his 
 finger to his nose in such a way as to suggest the nasus
 
 396" LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 aduncus, or whisper " \v. p." (worthless person) under his 
 breath when some one was mentioned who had been tried 
 and found wanting. He was quick to detect and censure 
 faults in dress or manners. " I remember," says one of 
 his younger friends, " he would always send us back to our 
 rooms if we came to see him in slippers." 
 
 But he could, on occasion, be much more severe, and 
 never minced matters when serious faults were to be 
 reproved. And no one could take offence, however severe 
 he was ; the reproof was given with such humanity, such 
 genuine interest, that it was easy to kiss the rod. No one 
 could be more sensitive, not from vanity, but from tender- 
 ness, than he was himself. The slightest resemblance of 
 a snub shut him up at once. The perversities which he 
 sometimes had to meet with in the library caused him 
 pain of which few have any idea. Much of his kindness to 
 undergraduates was due to gratitude for their kindness to 
 him, as he put it, in coming to see him. Nevertheless he 
 could blurt out to his friends home-truths the reverse of 
 flattering. One day the talk turned on fitness for various 
 professions. " What am I fit for ? " said one of the party. 
 " To be a rich man," was the somewhat crushing reply. 
 On another occasion, when some one tried to explain his 
 motives, he said : " I hope to judge you always by what 
 you do, not by what you say : I leave motives to take care 
 of themselves." 
 
 As he felt strongly in all things, his dislikes were as 
 strong as his attachments, and he took little pains to con- 
 ceal them. When he first became a member of the high 
 table at King's, he absented himself from hall for nearly a 
 year, because he could not put up with one of the seniors. 
 If he disliked a man he could show it in his manner, 
 which was at times so brusque as almost to be rude, 
 but he was incapable of a sneer. " That is a viper" he 
 would say, if some malicious remark had crept into a
 
 SEVERITY. 397 
 
 college fly-sheet submitted for his criticism, and the passage 
 stood condemned. Magnanimity was written clearly on 
 the fine-cut, severe features of his face a face, says Dr 
 Benson, " less changed from its boy-look than that of any 
 friend I know, only grown firmer and stronger." " Don't 
 be afraid," he said once, " of giving any one, however mean, 
 an advantage by confessing yourself in the wrong. A 
 triumph is so helpful to such a man when it is won by his 
 being in the right. And if you put yourself in the right in 
 this point at such a cost, he must feel how likely you are 
 to be right in the rest." 
 
 Strict and spotless as he was in his own moral dis- 
 cipline, he was largely tolerant of much at which the 
 mere moralist holds up his hands in horror tolerant, that 
 is, not in acquiescence, but in the hope of amendment, 
 which he would seek to bring about by gentle means. On 
 the other hand, an ungenerous thought or action, a paltry 
 excuse, anything in the nature of humbug or pretence, 
 never failed to fire his indignation, and his disapproval 
 was formidable. No one who knew him is likely to forget 
 the energy with which he stigmatised as "poison " some 
 demoralising argument, some ungenerous attribution of 
 motives, or some instance of the carping spirit, which he 
 detested almost more than anything else. 
 
 As an illustration of the outspokenness with which he 
 could sometimes administer reproof, I may quote the 
 following letter * : 
 
 " DEAR MR 
 
 " I have waited for a new Athenwim, on the 
 chance of there being some word from you, but as there is 
 not, I must give up altogether. I was very sorry to see 
 your suicide on the preceding Saturday, and was in hopes 
 
 * This letter is copied from a draft found among his papers. I have no 
 proof that it was actually sent.
 
 398 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 that my letters would do something to prevent s-uch a 
 catastrophe. I did not expect, of course, that you would 
 write with such needless humility as you expressed in your 
 letter to me, but I confess I was amazed at your power of 
 statement. 
 
 " Apart from the fact that in your postscript you make 
 me say the very opposite of what I did say, your own 
 account of the manuscript is as destructive of all you had 
 said previously, that it is difficult to conceive how any one 
 
 trained in the school of such a man as Mr can have 
 
 committed such a series of blunders in his own department. 
 That, after this, you have gone astray when dealing with 
 printed books is very little to be wondered at. I am only 
 thankful that it has rendered it quite unnecessary for me 
 to write to the Athencsum, Knowing your high position, I 
 could not help writing an earnest expostulation to you on 
 the subject, of which you clearly knew less than nothing, 
 and in which, after more than twenty years' hard work, I 
 am keenly interested. It would have been easy to write a 
 slashing letter to the Atkett&um or elsewhere, but there are 
 few things more offensive to me than the Saturday Revieiv 
 style of criticism, where a man is really working honestly 
 on a subject and unhappily makes a few blunders, which 
 the best are liable to make. 
 
 " Your printed letters only make me feel that I took 
 too great a liberty in writing to you at all, because the 
 only thing that could possibly justify me in writing as I 
 did was the conviction that you were really willing to 
 learn. I must now be content to leave you to continue 
 your researches after more valuable theories, instead of the 
 still more valuable facts which I should prefer to see 
 hunted up. 
 
 " Yours most truly, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSIIAW."
 
 FRANKNESS. 399 
 
 The frankness which marked his conversation, is equally 
 noticeable in his letters. One of his friends, in a letter to 
 him, says : "Among the many things you have taught me, 
 one was to put away over-politeness." He never feared to 
 lose a friend by saying what he felt when occasion required, 
 as the following extracts will show. 
 
 " MY DEAR , 
 
 " . . . ' Mock ' is your own word, not mine. 
 It is the furthest possible from expressing my feeling about 
 your tirades, which simply make me very unhappy. . . . 
 When a man, who might by his own deeper knowledge 
 help to make such an exhibition very much more interest- 
 ing and instructive, wastes his energies in writing as you 
 do, it naturally produces the impression that his main 
 object is to let the world see how much more he knows of 
 the subject than the idiots to whose care he says these 
 treasures are submitted. Those who know you know also 
 that that is not the object you have in view, but it is a 
 pardonable inference for ordinary people to draw. 
 
 " Everything you write about this shows such an ex- 
 traordinary absence of wisdom (by which I don't mean 
 knowledge or cleverness, both of which are abundantly 
 shown) ; but what pains me is, that it is all so diametrically 
 opposed to the whole spirit of yours on - , which you 
 sent me a paper which, as you know, delighted me more 
 than any words of mine can express. You have such a 
 fund of strong gentleness in you, that it is most cruel to 
 see the immense power that this gentleness possesses 
 simply wasted by a perversity as noxious as anything to 
 
 be found even in . I hope you will come on Tuesday, 
 
 and you can sit on me to your heart's content. Give my 
 love to P. 
 
 " Yours always, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW."
 
 4oo LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 " DEAR MR. , 
 
 "... As for your second letter, you write 
 frankly, so you must expect me to do the same. Your 
 letter shows me that you are blind to two things, which, if 
 you wish to get on and live happily, you must not only see 
 clearly, but keep constantly before you. If I don't make 
 myself clear, pray tell me, and I will try to do so. ... 
 About influence and influential people what you call in- 
 fluence, I call jobbery. I wish I could get you to see that 
 no testimonial is worth anything compared with the testi- 
 monial afforded by your own witnessed work. If you will 
 keep in the wise course you seem to have begun, you may 
 before long get precisely what you want, while no outside 
 influence could possibly give it you. . . . Can you see this ? 
 It is what I have always held and preached to you, but 
 you would not listen. I am quite aware that this must 
 take some little time, and that time is money. But here I 
 would gladly help if you would only be content to learn 
 and act methodically. I will gladly pay you for work if 
 you will do it in my way. 
 
 " Yours very truly, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 He says in another letter : " There is nothing so un- 
 pleasant as to ask a favour." Again : 
 
 " DEAR MR , 
 
 "... When you touch the question of money, 
 I feel at every line how much it were to be wished that 
 you had some plain-spoken friend at hand who could com- 
 mand both your confidence and respect. I have not the 
 least wish to offend you in the matter, or in any way, but 
 I must tell you plainly, that if any Englishman of my 
 acquaintance expressed himself as you always do on this 
 subject, I should tell him that it was simply humbug. There
 
 FRANKNESS. 401 
 
 is no other word in the language which expresses the state 
 of mind where the speaker is, as you unquestionably are, 
 perfectly sincere, and says all he says in perfect good faith, 
 while yet the whole thing is unsound. You write this 
 morning as follows : ' I undertook the work solely for the 
 purpose of making the subject known ; the pecuniary 
 question is entirely secondary. In fact, I should not have 
 
 thought about remuneration at all, if Dr had not 
 
 suggested it to me. The non-publication of the book as 
 a book would certainly prevent me from accepting any 
 money. . . .' 
 
 " The impression that you have always left on me is 
 that of a person who was somehow ashamed of being 
 thought to earn his daily bread by literary work. The 
 English are said to be a commercial nation, a nation of 
 shopkeepers, etc., and it may possibly be this which makes 
 it so repugnant to me to have it constantly brought before 
 one that in work of this kind money is a secondary object. 
 My view rather is, ' bread and butter first ; ' man must live, 
 and if he takes to literature, he must earn his bread by 
 literary work. The difference between one man and 
 another is then shown by the stamp of work done ; and in 
 this the good man comes out. In no case, unless you are 
 a millionaire, can you afford to do much work of this kind 
 as the employment of mere hours of idleness. In no case 
 can the expression of such sentiments produce anything 
 but repugnance in any one to whom they are addressed. 
 I must trust to you not to be vexed with me for writing 
 'to you in this way. I am not in a position which gives me 
 any right to speak to you thus ; but at the same time I 
 can see no one who is, and if we are to have any dealings 
 together, these things must be made plain. . . . 
 
 " Yours very truly, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 2 D
 
 4O2 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 Such letters, if taken alone, would give an impression 
 of a sort of sledge-hammer style, almost cruel in its 
 frankness. This was, however, by no means habitual to 
 him. As an antidote, I may quote the following extract 
 from a letter to an intimate friend, young enough to have 
 been his son. It displays the deep-set humility which was 
 not incompatible with the utmost boldness in speaking 
 where he thought it needful to speak out. 
 
 " MY DEAR , 
 
 "... You woiild not believe me if I Wrote 
 What I feel about you and your work, so I will not put it 
 on paper here; You make me feel very small, always, but 
 in doing so there is no sting, because you always make me 
 feel the power of rising to a higher and better level, and 
 I try to do so accordingly. So you are helpful to others, 
 even perhaps when you least think it. I only wish I could 
 sometimes see you more. 
 
 " Ever yours affectionately, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 Of the two following letters, the one, a letter of con- 
 gratulation on his appointment to the librarianship in 
 1867, illustrates the regard felt for him by his younger 
 friends ; the other, written by him nearly twenty years 
 later to a young scholar who had just carried off the "blue 
 ribbon " of the Cambridge schools, testifies to the warmth 
 of his sympathy and his affection for the college to which 
 he belonged. 
 
 " MY DEAR BRADSHAW, 
 
 " Accept the sincere congratulations of a 
 mouldy usher who has just exchanged 'Arnold's Exer- 
 cises ' for the University Intelligence. The friend of the 
 scholar, the patron of the bachelor, the mediating buffer
 
 SYMPATHY. 403 
 
 between all the discordant elements of the college, you 
 have left very pleasant impressions on my mind, chastened, 
 it may be, by the socratic apwvaa which was always 
 piquant, and not never intelligible. The chapel bells have 
 rung the old flat out and the new flat in, at your ' hebdo- 
 madal board ' on Sunday mornings ; and we are all ushers, 
 civil servants, or sucking clerks in the House of Lords, 
 except you alone, the unchanged. I am very proud, as a 
 member of the flat, that it has now got an ap\h upon it 
 
 But I must drop this, and go into schodl. 
 
 "Yours ever, 
 
 " X. Y. Z." 
 
 " MY DEAR BERRY, 
 
 "As I don't know where or when I may be 
 able to see you in the next day or two, I must write you 
 a line of heartiest and warmest congratulation, not only on 
 your place and on the ease with which you have got it, 
 but perhaps above all for the sake of the college. The 
 provost ought indeed to be pleased, to have lived to see 
 the full fruit of his resolute move which he made the 
 moment he was elected.* ... It was long before we saw 
 a pure unbracketed senior classic in the college, though 
 classics had been for centuries the staple of our education,- 
 ... It has, of course, taken far longer for the college to 
 climb the hill of what still remains arid must long remain 
 the chief Tripos in Cambridge. . . . There will be many, of 
 course, who will be delighted to see you in your place for 
 your own sake. There are others, who perhaps don't know 
 you personally, whose chief pleasure will perhaps lie in the 
 earnest that your work and your place give that the college 
 is quietly and steadily making its way to the front who 
 look to you and such as you, to make the college really 
 deserve the precedence which it happens to hold in the 
 * See above, p. 21.
 
 404 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 university on the purely accidental ground of its origin 
 Forgive me for writing at such length, but my heart is full 
 of many things, and I cannot help expressing myself. 
 " Ever yours most sincerely, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 Now and then, though rarely, his temper would betray 
 him into saying things which he afterwards regretted ; but 
 in such cases he never failed to make his peace and that 
 speedily, with the person whom he had offended. It will 
 be allowed that an apology like the following must have 
 made amends for the bitterest words : 
 
 " MY DEAR , 
 
 " I have to thank you for your letter just 
 received. . . . There is one point for which I have to thank 
 you most sincerely, and that is for drawing attention to my 
 language in hall. I feel that nothing whatever can excuse 
 me for having spoken as I did, and I only wish I could 
 say so more publicly. I met to-day two or three who 
 were there last night, and I did then express my regret 
 for having spoken as I did ; for, though put out at the 
 moment, I cannot for a moment excuse myself for using 
 strong language. My tongue gets the better of me some- 
 times, but, happily for me, I always pay the penalty for it. 
 I hope you will forgive me. 
 
 " Yours very sincerely, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 I take the following from another letter : 
 " The greater the wrong, the greater the need to ac- 
 knowledge it, if one has any wish to live peaceably and 
 happily. The greatest humiliation would, to my mind, be 
 better than the misery and discomfort of an unacknow- 
 ledged injury, for the very simple reason that the result is
 
 TOLERANCE. 405 
 
 far worse to the person who does the wrong than to him 
 who sustains it." 
 
 In talking about people whom he disliked or disap- 
 proved, he could be sarcastic ; in talking or writing to 
 
 them, he was not unfrequently ironical. " Mr ," he 
 
 said one day, " is one of those people who never by any 
 means discover they can be unpleasing to any one." 
 But such disapproval as he felt or uttered was confined 
 to the sphere of morals or conduct. In the matter of 
 opinion he was largely and genuinely tolerant. 
 
 One who has passed through several phases, and has 
 good cause to know, writes of him, " The more I think of 
 Bradshaw, the more I am struck by his perfect tolerance 
 of all religions and all opinions perfect in that it was 
 without a taint of indifference or contempt. He was 
 sincerely interested in the mental changes of all his friends, 
 and watched one going towards atheism and another 
 towards Romanism with equal respect, so long as he 
 believed both to be sincere. He seemed to regard opinions 
 without either sympathy or aversion, as phenomena of the 
 inner man." He displayed a " scrupulous reverence for 
 individuality, which he never interfered with except to 
 correct misstatements of fact. I think he would as soon 
 have tried to persuade a man to dye his hair as to alter or 
 not to alter his religious views." 
 
 It was, therefore, not in the region of opinion, but in 
 that of conduct that his influence was felt. He shrank 
 from dogmatic statement, except where facts capable of 
 scientific proof were concerned ; but in a question of right 
 or wrong, or in more delicate questions of taste and feeling, 
 there his instinct was unerring, and he never hesitated to 
 give it utterance. Still, his influence was due far more to 
 the subtle force of example than to outspoken precept. It 
 was the natural effect of contact with a character at once 
 independent and sympathetic, strong and gentle, unworldly
 
 406 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 and yet human to the core. " He carried his atmosphere 
 with him," says one who knew him well. " He coloured 
 the talk and the looks and the habits of those who were 
 much with him, without forcibly impressing himself on 
 them." And another remarks, " It is only what every one 
 has said, that one felt larger and better in his company, 
 for no pettiness could live in his presence." One might 
 well apply to him the lines of " In Memoriam * "- 
 
 " The stern were mild when thou wert by, 
 The flippant put himself to school 
 And heard thee, and the brazen fool 
 Was soften'd, and he knew not why." 
 
 Towards those who came to him for aid or counsel, 
 none could be more helpful, more wise, more sympathetic, 
 more considerate. In such cases, time seemed of no 
 account. He would spend hours in giving the help re- 
 quired, whether it were some old friend who came to talk 
 over a grave crisis in his life, some undergraduate in 
 trouble with the deans, or some college secretary unable 
 to draft without assistance the rules of an atheletic club. 
 A friend slightly younger than himself says, " I talked 
 with him with less reserve than with any other friend I 
 ever had. I have never known any one for whose judg- 
 ment on matters of feeling I cared so much ; one felt he 
 was always right." And many others might be quoted to 
 the same effect. One confided in him naturally both joys 
 and sorrows. But he never gushed. Perhaps he said 
 nothing at all, but as you passed him in the street he 
 would put out his hand a silent pressure and a look, that 
 said, " I know," and that was enough. He was the reverse 
 of demonstrative, but sometimes the warmth of his affec- 
 tionate nature would break out in spite of himself. Arch- 
 deacon Norris remembers how " his eyes filled with tears 
 and his heart came into look and voice " when he spoke to 
 him of his friend Wickenden,f then lately dead. 
 
 * "In Memoriam," ed. 1866, cix. 3. f See above, p. 203, note.
 
 GENEROSITY. 407 
 
 If he was so generous of his time, than which he could 
 give nothing more valuable, it is not surprising that he 
 was generous in other ways. I have given several illustra- 
 tions already ; many more might be given. His unselfish- 
 ness was the more striking because he always made it out, 
 if he could, to be mere selfishness. If he aided any beginner 
 with money to work and there were many cases in which 
 he practised this endowment of research he would always 
 justify it by insisting that he wanted the work done for 
 himself. So in small things too. Jf he gave up his bed- 
 room to a friend, and slept on the sofa, he vowed he liked 
 it best ; the sofa was so comfortable. Help in money he 
 was always ready to give. On one occasion he paid all 
 the expenses of an undergraduate's residence during the 
 Long Vacation. To one student he paid 35 for doing 
 a task which was the best possible training for his life's 
 work, and he contributed towards the expenses of a book 
 which he was desirous of publishing. Another he sent 
 abroad to study. For a third, who was anxious to edit a 
 certain manuscript, he obtained the admission of her work 
 among the publications of the Early French Text Society, 
 and the aid of the most accomplished scholars in the 
 subject. He did not approve of lending money, but he 
 would sometimes lend. " I was in considerable difficulty," 
 writes a friend, "on leaving Cambridge, about my debts, 
 which were large for a man who had nothing. He hap- 
 pened to hear of it, and immediately begged me to send all 
 my bills to him, and let him settle them at once and be my 
 only creditor. I have known similar and even more 
 generous deeds of unsolicited kindness towards others, 
 friends and servants." 
 
 First introductions to Bradshaw were often the occasion 
 for the display of some interesting bit of character. One 
 friend writes, " The first time I saw Bradshaw, my friend 
 Conway took me to see him. I well remember the second
 
 408 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 time I went. He was engaged in his outer room, and 
 motioned me to go into the inner room. Presently he 
 came in, and began poking the fire very deliberately without 
 saying a word. This was too much for the nerves of a 
 humble freshman. I remarked, with some precipitation, 
 ' Conway told me to call on you, sir.' A pause followed ; 
 after which he said, ' You mean to say, that nothing would 
 have induced you to call on me except extreme compul- 
 sion.' From that moment I felt I had a friend." 
 
 Another typical case is that of a friend who, having 
 been fascinated by him at their first meeting on the banks 
 of the river, found him, when he visited him in his rooms, 
 somewhat chilling, and did not go again for some time. 
 When, eventually, he plucked up courage to go again, it 
 was with others. " One by one the company dropped 
 away, and we were left alone. I rose to go, but he 
 detained me with some trivial question, and I saw that I 
 was meant to stay. Presently our conversation turned on 
 Ireland. He seemed to know Ireland well, and was 
 acquainted with many of my friends. He led me to speak 
 of my home and family ; and before long I had told him 
 all about my previous life and education, the history of my 
 family, the occupations and pursuits of my brothers, and 
 a thousand other details, which he listened to with the 
 greatest attention. The kindly interest which he showed, 
 untinged with any suspicion of curiosity, led me uncon- 
 sciously to speak to him as an old friend. The small 
 hours of the morning had gone by before we had finished 
 pur conversation. From that time hardly a day passed 
 without my visiting his rooms." 
 
 Another remembers how, on his first visit, he was ques- 
 tioned about his school, his home, and all the history of 
 his life. " Very soon I found he knew all about my family 
 much more than I knew myself. He told me we had a 
 common ancestor a century ago, and he brought out of
 
 FIRST INTRODUCTIONS. 409 
 
 his store old memoranda, pedigrees, and notes of family 
 history to show me." 
 
 Mr Arthur Sidgwick remembers how he first met 
 Bradshaw when, as a Rugby boy of thirteen, he was 
 invited to Cambridge for a week by one of the senior 
 Fellows of Trinity. " He asked several of the younger men 
 to meet me ; but I remember distinguishing Bradshaw 
 amongst them, as the one who took trouble to be kind to 
 me. I was a good deal out of my element, and probably 
 rather bored, and Bradshaw was the only one of the 
 seniors (as they seemed) who knew how to talk to a boy. 
 This was in 1853." 
 
 Another says, " I got to know him very early in my 
 career. At that time I am afraid I was rather outrt in my 
 costume ; and one of his first remarks was, ' Ah ! I've 
 long wanted to know who the man was that I saw going 
 about in a trouser-hat' * a remark which I do not think 
 now quite so complimentary as I did then." Mr. W. C. 
 Streatfield relates how he first met him in the University 
 Library when he was looking out a bit of genealogy. " I 
 was told he would help me. So he did ; not as I expected, 
 but with that droll, half-asleep knowledge of everything 
 which took away one's breath. The first thing he said 
 was, ' Oh yes, you are Streatfield ; your mother was a 
 daughter of Mrs. Fry ; ' and then came other details 
 brought out of an apparently boundless store of informa- 
 tion about all one's family concerns." 
 
 But these first meetings were not always so favourable. 
 Bradshaw was sometimes cross. One who afterwards 
 came to know him well, relates that on his first entering 
 the room Bradshaw was very civil, but that after a few 
 remarks had passed the conversation suddenly came to a 
 standstill. " There were five or six men in the room, but 
 
 * This was his regular name for a soft hat made out of the same sort of 
 cloth as trousers are made of.
 
 410 LIFE AND CHARACI^ER. 
 
 for some time nothing was to be heard but the tapping of 
 Bradshaw's fingers you know how many curious tricks he 
 had. With us had entered X., who had just become a 
 Fellow. There was about him a touch of self-importance, 
 and he took upon himself to relieve the oppressive silence 
 by making some remark, which drew Bradshaw. The 
 scene that followed was terrible. Bradshaw was a master 
 in the art of taking down, and poor X. had to submit to 
 be the victim of his skill. When he was in certain moods, 
 not even a wise man would have felt sure of his wisdom. 
 In a few minutes X. left the room in a towering rage, and 
 we soon followed him. During our stay there was some 
 tea, and somebody incurred Bradshaw's wrath for cutting 
 the bread as if it had been a cake." 
 
 He did not often lose his temper, but he did now 
 and then ; and when he was cross he was dangerous. I 
 once knew him give an undergraduate, who was teasing 
 him, a vigorous box on the ear ; but he apologised humbly 
 for it afterwards. Nothing annoyed him more than a 
 practical joke. No one would have dreamt of playing 
 one on him ; but the mere mention of such a thing 
 (with approval) made him very angry. On the other hand, 
 he did not the least mind being misunderstood. He 
 not unfrequently suffered from misconstructions ; but if 
 they hurt him he kept it to himself, and was apparently 
 only amused. He hated explanations, and there was a 
 vein of perversity in him which, so long as no one was 
 injured but himself, rather took pleasure in mystifying 
 those whom prejudice or stupidity led astray in their 
 estimate of him. On one occasion he wrote, "Newspaper 
 controversy is at all times such an unmixed evil in my 
 mind, that I would always rather even suffer in people's 
 estimation than give way to it." And again, " When 
 charges are so absolutely without foundation, I always find 
 them easy to bear."
 
 COINCIDENCES. 4 1 1 
 
 The coincidences that happened to him were often 
 astonishing. Dr Benson notices it as a peculiarity of his 
 younger days. " He always, whatever you asked him, just 
 happened to have been looking it up. ' How odd that 
 you should ask me that ! ' he would say. ' I stumbled on 
 the explanation last week.' " It was the same in latter 
 years. Every friend of his was struck by these accidents, 
 which hardly seemed as if they could be accidental. " It 
 was very much through Bradshaw's influence," says Mr 
 Yeld, "that I was appointed, in 1865, to a mastership in 
 Lincoln Grammar School. By one of the curious coinci- 
 dences which constantly happened to him, he was staying 
 at the deanery when I wrote about the post, and met there 
 at dinner John Fowler, the head-master. One can imagine 
 Bradshaw's delighted exclamation when, in the middle of 
 dinner, he was casually asked across the table, ' Do you 
 know a man named Yeld, of St John's ? ' What he said I 
 do not know, but I got the post." Dr Benson tells me 
 that a curious oriental manuscript was once sent to him by 
 a friend who could make out nothing about it. It turned 
 out to be Tibetan. Of course, Bradshaw had just been 
 learning Tibetan in order to decipher his own manuscripts, 
 and was able to tell his friend all he wanted to know. 
 Professor Sidgwick has noticed the same peculiarity. In 
 applying to Bradshaw, he says, for help about books, " I 
 became continually more and more impressed, not only by 
 his ever-ready helpfulness, but by the remarkable series of 
 coincidences as he represented them by which he always 
 happened to know what I happened to ask him. My 
 inquiries related to very various topics, but none seemed 
 to come amiss. Arabic manuscripts, mediaeval politics, 
 modern miracles whatever it was, he always knew just 
 what I wanted to know." 
 
 He delighted in giving, and in his gifts " he was," says 
 Dr Benson, " of all men the most d propos. An under-
 
 412 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 graduate friend had to recite a college oration in which 
 the strongly contrasted countenances of Bunyan and 
 Herbert were described. Two or three days later, Brad- 
 shaw dropped in to breakfast, having in his hand two 
 exquisite etchings of the very heads, procured by some 
 special pains. ' I thought you might like to have these 
 two faces to hang by your fire,' he said, as he laid them 
 quietly on a side-table." " It was dangerous," says Mr 
 Tuckwell, "to express a wish or to sound a note of admi- 
 ration in his presence. He was told I was collecting 
 Simonides literature, and I forthwith received the Mayer 
 facsimile. One day I searched the Dublin bookstalls in 
 his company for an original ' Anti-Jacobin.' He said 
 nothing, but wrote off to Cambridge for his own copy, 
 and placed it in my hands." Mr A. J. Butler tells how 
 one day, when as yet unacquainted with Bradshaw, he 
 " happened to go into Fred Pollock's rooms. I saw a 
 bunch of roses on the table, and sang out to Pollock, ' Who 
 gave you these roses ? ' ' Bradshaw,' he replied. ' Well, 
 then, I wish Bradshaw would give me some,' said I ; and 
 then I heard an inarticulate sound, and perceived that 
 Bradshaw was in the room. I suppose we were both rather 
 shy. However, a few days after, I was walking in King's 
 garden with some one, and met Bradshaw. He had a 
 bunch of roses in his hand, and as we passed he just 
 slipped them into mine without saying a word." 
 
 It will, perhaps, have surprised some readers of this 
 memoir that so little has been said of Bradshaw's conversa- 
 tion ; but nothing is so evanescent when not recorded on 
 the spot. In Bradshaw's case it was peculiarly difficult to 
 recall, for he did not utter epigrams, or say the witty 
 things which are treasured up for their felicity or compres- 
 sion. In ordinary talk he was direct and vigorous, going 
 straight to the heart of the question ; but it was rather the 
 .matter of his speech than the mould in which it was cast,
 
 CONVERSA TION. 4 1 3 
 
 that impressed itself upon his hearers. It was distinguished 
 for sound judgment, for practical wisdom, for insight and 
 observation, but not for brilliancy. It was always his own, 
 at all events. He was sometimes paradoxical ; as, for 
 instance, when, on a friend remarking of some old book 
 that he supposed it was very rare, he replied, " Oh no ; if 
 it were, it would be very common." But this was generally 
 when he was in the mood for puzzling people, not when he 
 was serious. " A paradox," he once remarked, is not 
 always true." 
 
 In exposition he was generally somewhat involved and 
 hard to follow. The frequency with which he would help 
 himself out by using the phrase " I mean," showed how 
 difficult it was for him to hit readily on the right way of 
 putting things. It was not that he thought obscurely, but 
 he did not think rapidly, and he was not very apt at 
 discussion. " His smiling silences," says Dr Benson, 
 " argued with you almost as much as his reasonable 
 proofs." He had no taste for dialectics or word-play of 
 any kind. But his talk was nervous and pregnant, never 
 vapid or feeble. It was, as was said of Burke's conversa- 
 tion, the natural overflowing of a full mind. He observed 
 the golden rule, to talk of things rather than persons, and 
 he was not by any means ready to give an opinion on 
 every subject that might turn up. With young folks he 
 generally kept his learning in the background ; and some 
 of those he liked best went through Cambridge without 
 ever having a notion how learned he was. 
 
 Whatever he may have been in his earlier days, he was 
 averse latterly from discussing religious topics, but he was 
 by no means disinclined to discuss the problems of socio- 
 logy and philosophy with one or two intimate friends. 
 What his religious views were, it is difficult to say with 
 certainty or exactitude. His wide intellectual sympathies 
 made him much more than merely tolerant : he was
 
 414 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 deeply interested in various creeds. As he grew older his 
 mind did not stiffen ; on the contrary, it seemed, with a 
 perpetual youth, to become more open to new ideas. His 
 interest in natural science was always strong. He grasped 
 and accepted the doctrine of evolution in its main outlines, 
 though his innate modesty and diffidence prevented him 
 from uttering positive opinions about a subject so intri- 
 cate as the ideas particularly associated with the name of 
 Darwin. Though by no means all things to all men, he 
 was remarkably capable of regarding a question from the 
 same point of view as his interlocutor, so much so that he 
 sometimes conveyed the impression of an agreement which 
 did not really exist. Thus it came about that different 
 persons formed different conceptions of his views ; and 
 I have been assured, on the one hand, that he was a High 
 Churchman, on the other, that he was an Agnostic. Those 
 who knew him best will probably agree that, while not 
 caring to formulate his belief too closely, he died, as he 
 had lived, a devout Christian, and a member of the Church 
 of England. 
 
 In politics he was a decided Liberal ; that is, he be- 
 lieved in the constant possibility of amelioration, and in 
 the potency of combined human effort to this end. He 
 voted for the Duke of Devonshire as chancellor, and for 
 Professor Stuart in the contested university election of 
 1882. But his Liberalism was that of a student of history, 
 coloured by a reverence for the great things of the past, 
 restrained by a conviction of the continuity of develop- 
 ment. He had much sympathy with the movement for 
 women's education, helped the members of Newnham 
 College to arrange their library, and did all he could to 
 further their cause. He sympathised neither with repression 
 nor with crude rebellion against authority. In the micro- 
 cosm of university life, he set his face equally against 
 donnishness and against the view cherished by some under-
 
 L IBERALISM. 4 1 5 
 
 graduates fewer, probably, now than formerly that a don 
 is their natural enemy. Thus to the end of his life he 
 remained, what he had been as a young Master of Arts, a 
 link between the two great classes of university society. 
 
 As an illustration of his Liberal-Conservative tenden- 
 cies, I may quote the following from a letter to Mr Coxe, 
 of the Bodleian, written in 1876, when the restoration, or 
 destruction, of Duke Humphry's Library was under dis- 
 cussion : 
 
 " I am really distressed to hear what you say about 
 your dear old reading-room. ... I could not have believed 
 such a thing was possible as that Oxford, however 'young,' 
 would want to destroy siich a noble specimen of work 
 which brings back so vividly the history of the past. I am 
 not one of those antiquaries who like to preserve every- 
 thing old because it is old ; the old must give way to the 
 new, or the world would never get on at all. If the places 
 had been clumsy or useless (only kept to be looked at as 
 curiosities, I mean), or still more, if they had been decay- 
 ing, let them go by all means, however keen a pang it 
 might cost ; but here there could be absolutely no reason 
 of the kind. I have tested by hours and hours of work 
 there the practical use of these old arrangements. ... I do 
 trust you will be able to avert a decision which would be a 
 real shame to Oxford.* 
 
 " Ever yours, 
 
 " HENRY BRADSHAW." 
 
 His aesthetic faculties were active and discriminating. 
 Though not pretending to be a connoisseur, he keenly en- 
 joyed works of art. Great pictures, like the " Last Supper " 
 at Milan, or the " Adoration of the Lamb " at Ghent, filled 
 him with simple delight. It need hardly be said that of 
 some branches of mediaeval art, of early woodcuts and 
 
 * Fortunately, Duke Humphry's Library is still intact.
 
 4i 6 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 engravings, his knowledge was wide and intimate. Of 
 architecture he knew much. I can well recollect how, on 
 one of our earliest walks, as we rested at Madingley, he 
 gave me a clear view of the various styles, with the dates 
 at which they began and ended, illustrating the divisions 
 by references to buildings at Cambridge and elsewhere, the 
 respective ages of which he had, like all his other know- 
 ledge, at his fingers' ends. But music was the art which 
 gave him the keenest pleasure. He seldom went to con- 
 certs, never, probably, unless he were " taken " by some- 
 body, but he would sit and listen by the hour while one 
 of his nieces or some musical friend played sonatas of 
 Beethoven or fugues of Bach. Of Bach he was specially 
 fond, preferring him to Handel, and this at a time when 
 Bach was less often heard than he is now. 
 
 His knowledge of music, the theory of it, and the 
 development from early church music, was considerable. 
 He had a good ear, and could put in a correct second. He 
 would sometimes get his friends to play the old music he 
 had brought from home, and would hum over the tunes 
 he knew. Among them was some Spanish music, and he 
 was especially fond of a piece, something like a Gregorian 
 chant, with the refrain, " No tocaran campanas quand' io 
 muerar " (" ring not the bells when I am dead "). The quiet- 
 ism of it seemed to appeal to him. References in letters 
 already quoted show how fond he was of the curfew, which 
 rings every night at nine o'clock from St Mary's tower. 
 " That blessed bell," he used to call it. He was, I think, the 
 only person I ever knew who could write out from memory 
 the well-known Cambridge chimes. When Dr Stanford 
 was composing his opera of " Savonarola," he asked Brad- 
 shaw if he knew of any old church tune which could be 
 made use of. Bradshaw said nothing at the time, but 
 some time afterwards he brought him the music of the 
 mediaeval hymn, " Angelus ad virginem," which he had
 
 READING. 417 
 
 found in an ancient service-book in the University Library. 
 It was very difficult to put the music into modern notation, 
 but he had done it, says Dr Stanford, quite correctly. 
 
 Of modern literature he was not a universal reader : 
 he used to say he read nothing. Nevertheless he read more 
 than most men. It was poetry, chiefly, and novels and 
 biographies, that he liked ; he hardly ever read travels, so 
 far as I am aware, or books on political economy, philo- 
 sophy, and the like. When he was travelling in France, 
 he read a great many novels, buying them at the railway 
 stations as he went. On one such occasion, when he was 
 in Brittany with Mr and Mrs Cornish, he bought all Mde. 
 Charles Reybaud's novels ; on another, he read five or six 
 Balzacs, and an equal number of George Sand, Daudet, 
 etc. He remembered them well, and took a Macaulay-like 
 delight in the details. When a book was given him, he 
 read it straight through at once, and when it was given 
 him by the author, he always bought another copy to 
 give away. He never bought a book which he did not 
 read. 
 
 Among modern poets his favourites were, latterly, 
 Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold ; among the 
 novelists, Thackeray, Kingsley, and George Eliot. A friend 
 remembers his reading aloud to him and another the whole 
 of " Pendennis " in the evenings of one long Vacation. 
 "Peg Woffington," "Christie Johnstone," "The Heir of 
 Redclyffe," " Cranford," were also favourite books. He was 
 fond, too, of humorous works, both English and American. 
 I do not think he cared much for Dickens. But his taste 
 was catholic, and his reading was to a certain extent deter- 
 mined by chance and the recommendations of friends. He 
 greatly admired the writings of Mark Pattison. In his 
 " Life of Casaubon," he had marked many passages espe- 
 cially appealing to him ; for instance, the following : " Ex- 
 haustive research is ... a process which, while it has much 
 
 2 E
 
 4i 8 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 fatiguing exertion of eye and memory, derives its whole 
 value from the intelligence which directs it and is engaged 
 in sifting the material " (p. 387) ; and again, " Love of truth 
 is the foundation of all research and all learning, and is, 
 indeed, only the desire of knowledge under another name " 
 (P- 5*9)- Such passages might have been taken as the 
 mottoes of his life. 
 
 He delighted in reading his favourite books aloud, and 
 he often found willing listeners. He used to read at home 
 to his sisters or his nieces, and he read at Cambridge to 
 his friends. No one who ever heard him read " The For- 
 saken Merman," or any other of his favourite poems, is 
 likely to forget the impressive tones of his sympathetic 
 voice, or the pathos of his delivery. He was equally infec- 
 tious, in another way, in his evident enjoyment as he read 
 aloud such books as " The Rose and the Ring," or " Alice 
 in Wonderland," or " The Water Babies." 
 
 It is not to be supposed, however, that he was always 
 in the humour for society. He suffered occasionally from 
 fits of depression " the dumps," he used to call them in 
 which he felt good for nothing, unable to do good work, or 
 to enjoy his accustomed pleasures. When he was in this state 
 he liked to have a friend with him, not necessarily to talk to, 
 but in order not to be alone, and this silent company was 
 his best medicine. Physical causes were generally at the 
 root of these temporary ailments. He suffered from severe 
 headaches and violent colds, things to which a man of his 
 sedentary life and full physique is often liable, and which 
 the irregularity of his habits did not tend to diminish. For 
 his habits were very irregular. His hours of rising were 
 never fixed. Sometimes he would get up early, and do a 
 couple of hours' work in the library before breakfast ; but 
 occasionally he would lie in bed till nearly the middle of 
 the day. Once long ago he was remonstrated with by the 
 dean about his irregular attendance at chapel. " I am never
 
 DAILY HABITS. 419 
 
 irregular," he replied ; " I always go, or I always don't go." 
 Perhaps he would promise to go for a Sunday walk at 
 eleven o'clock. His friend would come in, expecting to 
 find him dressed. Not a bit of it ; he was still in bed. 
 " Get up, Bradshaw ; it's time to be off." No answer, but 
 a groan from under the bedclothes. A second remon- 
 strance perhaps produced the plaintive reply of, " Oh, I 
 cant get up ; I wish I could. Do stay a minute." Had 
 he been left alone at this point he would not have moved, 
 but a few minutes' talk brought him round, and his visitor 
 had hardly left the room before he was out of bed. 
 
 On his visits to the Lakes, he would take long walks, 
 and towards the end of his life he took to tricycling, which 
 he continued vigorously for about a year, and then left off 
 entirely. Generally speaking, he took very little exercise, 
 and was loth to take it alone. He was grateful to any 
 friend who came to the library at four o'clock, when the 
 doors were closed, and forced him to come out. If no one 
 came, he probably went home. His diet was equally irre- 
 gular. He would often eat heartily, and then for days 
 he would take next to not'hing. It was an even chance 
 whether he drank wine or not at dinner he seldom touched 
 it in the middle of the day but I have known him drink 
 a whole bottle of port at a sitting, in order to cure a cold, 
 without the slightest visible effect. There was no saying 
 when he would go to bed ; he would sometimes turn in at 
 nine o'clock, or, if he was in the humour or had any special 
 work to do, would sit up several nights running till three 
 or four in the morning. He smoked occasionally, but seldom 
 more than a cigarette. In one point he was regular in 
 his attendance at the library. There he hardly ever failed. 
 It is easy to recall his portly figure as he paced along his 
 accustomed path, his head thrown back, his shoulders 
 slightly swinging as he walked, his books in his hand. He 
 never seemed to be in a hurry. I- have seen him walking
 
 420 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 
 
 home without an umbrella in a pelting rain, but he never 
 quickened his pace. 
 
 In summer-time he would often go down after hall to the 
 fellows' garden, to stroll round and watch the Evening Prim- 
 rose open its saffron petals, or pluck a bit of his favourite 
 Carolina All-spice, or listen to the chorus of song gradually 
 dying away in that " bird-haunted English lawn." Then, 
 as night fell, he would go back to his own rooms, where a 
 kettle was always ready, and tea could be drunk as one sat 
 at the window, and the curfew came pealing in across the 
 open spaces of the court. After tea he would set to work 
 at his table, with his books and large sheets of foolscap 
 before him ; or, if he was in the mood for talk, would sit in 
 his big chair, his legs crossed, his hands lying folded, one 
 in the other, in his lap, his spectacles pushed back on his 
 forehead, and talk on as if time and work had no existence. 
 
 " On one such evening," writes a friend, " I came to 
 his rooms, and was surprised to find him sitting with his 
 windows wide open. One or two other men were in the 
 room. They were not talking, and seemed to have the air 
 of waiting for something to happen, so I likewise sat down 
 in silence. In a few minutes the quiet evening air was 
 gently stirred, and the room was filled with a mysterious 
 mellow sound, soft yet strong. 'Ah, there it is!' said 
 Bradshaw. No one else spoke, and we all gave ourselves 
 up to listening. It was the muffled peal from St Mary's 
 tower, ringing for poor old Dr Bushby, who had been 
 buried that day. I have heard the same thing elsewhere, 
 but the bells of St Mary's seem to lend to the requiem an 
 especial charm. It was characteristic of Bradshaw to take 
 great delight in so beautiful a sound." 
 
 For him too the bells have now rung their muffled peal. 
 The crowd that accompanied him to the grave was not an 
 assemblage of the curious, nor a gathering whose object it 
 was to do formal honour to a distinguished man. In that
 
 DAILY HABITS. 421 
 
 crowd there were few who were not mourners indeed, for 
 there were few who did not feel that they had lost a friend, 
 few who had not received at his hands kindness or help, or 
 some of those nameless services which are the best record 
 of a good man's life. It was rightly spoken from the 
 pulpit of St Mary's on the Sunday after he died, that he 
 was " a man whom to have known and loved is a lifelong 
 possession ; to have lost, a lifelong regret." 
 
 " That low man seeks a little thing to do, 
 
 Sees it and does it : 
 
 This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 
 Dies ere he knows it."
 
 APPENDIX I. 
 
 Reprinted from " The Chronicles of the Collegiate Church or Free 
 Chapel of All Saints, Derby,'" by J. Charles Cox and W. H. St 
 John Hope. 
 
 NOTE ON MEDI/EVAL SERVICE-BOOKS. 
 
 In the old Church of England, the services were either 
 
 1. For the different hours (Mattins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, 
 None, Vespers, and Compline), said in the choir, 
 
 2. For processions, in the church or churchyard, 
 
 3. For the Mass, said at the Altar, or 
 
 4. For occasions, such as Marriage, Visitation of the Sick, Burial, 
 etc., said as occasion required. 
 
 Of these four all have their counterparts, more or less, in the Eng- 
 lish Service of modern times, as follows : 
 
 1. The Hour-Services, of which the principal were Mattins and 
 Vespers, correspond to our Morning and Evening Prayer. 
 
 2. The Procession Services correspond to our hymns or anthems 
 sung before the Litany which precedes the Communion Service in the 
 morning, and after the third Collect in the evening, only no longer 
 sung in the course of procession to the churchyard cross or a subordi- 
 nate Altar in the church ; the only relic (in common use) of the actual 
 procession being that used on such occasions as the consecration of a 
 church, etc. 
 
 3. The Mass answers to our Communion Service. 
 
 4. The Occasional Services are either those used by a priest, such 
 as Baptism, Marriage, Visitation and Communion of the Sick, Burial 
 of the Dead, etc., or those reserved for a bishop, as Confirmation, 
 Ordination, Consecration of Churches, etc. 
 
 All these services but the last mentioned are contained in our 
 "Prayer-Book" with all their details, except the lessons at Mattins 
 and Evensong, which are read from the Bible, and the hymns and 
 anthems, which are, since the sixteenth century, at the discretion of the 
 authorities. This concentration or compression of the services into one 
 book is the natural result of time, and the further we go back the more 
 numerous are the books which our old inventories show. To take the 
 four classes of Services and Service-books mentioned above :
 
 424 APPENDIX I. 
 
 1. The Hour-Services were latterly contained, so far as the text 
 was concerned, in the Breviariitm, or Portiforium, as it was called by- 
 preference in England. The musical portions of this book were con- 
 tained in the Antiphonarium. But the Breviary itself was the result 
 of a gradual amalgamation of many different books : 
 
 (a) The Antiphonarium, properly so called, containing the 
 Anthems (Antiphonce) to the Psalms, the Responds (Responsoria} to 
 the Lessons (Lectiones), and the other odds and ends of Verses and 
 Responds ( Versiculi et Responsoria) throughout the service ; 
 
 (b} The Psalterium, containing the Psalms arranged as used at the 
 different Hours, together with the Litany as used on occasions ; 
 
 (c) The Hymnarium, or collection of Hymns used in the different 
 Hour-services ; 
 
 (d) The Legenda, containing the long Lessons used at Mattins, as 
 well from the Bible, from the Sermologus, and from the Homiliarius, 
 used respectively at the first, second, and third Nocturns at Mattins 
 on Sundays and some other days, as also from the Passionate, con- 
 taining the acts of Saints read on their festivals ; and 
 
 (c} The Collectarium, containing the Capitula, or short Lessons 
 used at all the Hour-services except Mattins, and the Collects or 
 Orationes used at the same. 
 
 2. The Procession Services were contained in the Processionals 
 or Processionarium. It will be remembered that the rubric in our 
 " Prayer-Book 7 ' concerning the Anthem (" In Quires and places where 
 they sing, here followeth the Anthem ") is indicative rather than impera- 
 tive, and that it was first added in 1662. It states a fact ; and, no 
 doubt, when processions were abolished, with the altars to which they 
 were made, cathedral choirs would have found themselves in con- 
 siderable danger of being swept away also, had they not made a stand, 
 and been content to sing the Processional Anthem without moving 
 from their position in the choir. This alone sufficed to carry on the 
 tradition ; and looked upon in this way the modern Anthem Book of 
 our Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, and the Hymn-Book of our 
 parish churches, are the only legitimate successors of the old Pro- 
 cessionale. It must be borne in mind, also, that the Morning and 
 Evening Anthems in our " Prayer-Book " do not correspond to one 
 another so closely as might at first sight appear to be the case. The 
 Morning Anthem conies immediately before the Litany which precedes 
 the Communion Service, and corresponds to the Processional Anthem 
 or Respond sung at the churchyard procession before Mass. The 
 Evening Anthem, on the other hand, follows the third Collect, and 
 corresponds to the Processional Anthem or Respond sung " ettndo et 
 redeundo" in going to, and returning from, some subordinate altar in 
 the church at the close of Vespers. 
 
 3. The Mass, which we call the Communion Service, was con- 
 tained in the Missale, so far as the text was concerned. The Epistles 
 and Gospels, being read at separate lecterns, would often be written
 
 APPENDIX I. 425 
 
 in separate books, called Epistolaria and Evangeliaria. The musical 
 portions of the Altar Service were latterly all contained in the Graduate 
 or Grayle, so called from one of the principal elements being the 
 Responsorium Gradtiale or Respond to the Lectio Epistolce. In earlier 
 times these musical portions of the Missal Service were commonly 
 contained in two separate books, the Graduale and the Troparium. 
 The Graduale, being in fact the Antiphonarium of the Altar Service 
 (as indeed it was called in the earliest times), contained all the 
 passages of Scripture, varying according to the season and day, which 
 served as Introits (Antiphonce et P salmi ad Introitwn) before the 
 Collects, as Gradual Responds or Graduals to the Epistle, as Alleluia 
 versicles before the Gospel, as Offertoria at the time of the first oblation, 
 and as Communiones at the time of the reception of the consecrated 
 elements. The Troparium contained the Tropi, or preliminary tags 
 to the Introits ; the Kyries ; the Gloria in excelsis ; the Sequences or 
 Prosce ad Sequentiam before the Gospel ; the Credo in unurn ; the 
 Sanitus and Benedictus; and the Agnus Dei j all, in early times, 
 liable to have insertions or farsurce of their own, according to the 
 season or day, which, however, were almost wholly swept away 
 (except those of the Kyrie] by the beginning of the thirteenth century 
 Even in Lyndewode's time (A.D. 1433), the Troparium was explained 
 to be a book containing merely the Sequences before the Gospel at 
 Mass, so completely had the other elements then disappeared or 
 become incorporated in the Graduale. This definition of the Tro- 
 parium is the more necessary, because so many old church inventories 
 yet remain, which contain books, even at the time of writing the 
 inventory long since disused, so that the lists would be unintelligible 
 without some such explanation. 
 
 4. The Occasional Services, so far as they concerned a priest, 
 were of course more numerous in old days than now, and included the 
 ceremonies for Candletca^ Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, etc., 
 besides what were formerly known as the Sacramental Services. The 
 book which contained these was in England called the Manuale, while 
 on the Continent the name Rituale is more common. No church could 
 well be without one of these. The purely episcopal offices were con- 
 tained in the Liber pontificalis or Pontifical, for which an ordinary 
 church would have no need. 
 
 5. Besides these books of actual Services there was another, 
 absolutely necessary for the right understanding and definite use of 
 those already mentioned. This was the Ordtnale, or book containing 
 the general rules relating to the Ordo divini servitii. It is the Ordi- 
 narius or Breviarius of many Continental churches. Its method was 
 to go through the year and show what was to be done ; what days 
 were to take precedence of others ; and how, under such circumstances, 
 the details of the conflicting Services were to be dealt with. The 
 basis of such a book would be either the well-known Sarum Consuetu- 
 dinarium, called after St Osmund, but really drawn up in the first
 
 426 APPENDIX I. 
 
 quarter of the thirteenth century, the Lincoln Consuetudinarium 
 belonging to the middle of the same century, or other such book. By 
 the end of the fifteenth century Clement Maydeston's Directorium 
 Sacerdotum, or Priests' Guide, had superseded all such books, and 
 came itself to be called the Sarum Ordinale, until, about 1508, the 
 shorter Ordinal, under the name of Pica Sarum, " the rules called the 
 Pie," having been cut up and re- distributed according to the seasons, 
 came to be incorporated in the text of all the editions of the Sarum 
 Breviary. 
 
 From the Inventory of 1466, given above in the text, we learn that 
 the Church of All Saints, Derby, possessed at that time the following 
 books : 
 
 1. For the Hour Services, eight Antiphonaria and one Collec- 
 tarium. The absence of all trace of a Legenda might seem to imply 
 that one or more of the Antiphonaria were really what are sometimes 
 called noted Breviaries, containing the whole Breviary Service, only 
 with musical notation to the choral parts. 
 
 2. For the Procession Services, four Processionars. 
 
 3. For the Altar Service, two Missals, a Gospelar, and three 
 Grayles or Gradiialia. 
 
 4. For the Occasional Services, two Manuals. 
 
 5. Two Ordinalia, one good and one not worth much. 
 
 The Inventory of 1527 shows us, beyond these, one great Portos, 
 among the chained books, possibly a copy of the " Great Breviary " 
 printed in 1516 ; and three printed Missals, two of which were reserved 
 for the Altar of Our Lady, and one for that of St Nicholas. 
 
 H. B. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, 
 
 March 17, 1881.
 
 APPENDIX II. 
 
 LETTER ON CATHEDRAL ORGANISATION. 
 
 University Library, Cambridge, May 19, 1881. 
 
 DEAR MR NORRIS, 
 
 It is not a grateful task to criticise such a document as the 
 Report * of which you sent me a copy a few weeks ago ; but I should 
 nevertheless like to send you a few remarks on it, which you must 
 take for what they are worth. 
 
 Every one who wishes to see the Cathedral system extended, and 
 the Cathedral staff made the nucleus of a diocesan working body, 
 must sympathise fully with the endeavour to obtain what the Com- 
 mittee of Convocation proposes to call a " Diocesan Chapter." But 
 when the formation of this Diocesan Chapter is advocated as being a 
 revival of an organisation which existed some centuries ago, there is 
 surely a fundamental misconception as to the real nature of the old 
 state of things. 
 
 There are three passages in the Report on which I must say 
 something : 
 
 i. " Living under some sort of Rule, these Cathedral clergy came 
 to be called Canons " (page 2). 
 
 * This was the draft of a Report "on Cathedrals and their Reform," 
 drawn up by a committee of the Lower House of Convocation early in 1881. 
 The committee, desiring to see cathedral churches restored to their position 
 as "strong centres in our ecclesiastical organisation," recommended (i) the 
 formation of Larger or Diocesan Chapters, "consisting of Canons Non- 
 Residentiary as well as Residentiary, to deliberate on such matters as the 
 Bishop may wish to bring before them, and to take part in the election of 
 Bishop or Capitular Proctor ; " (2) the assignment of " such definite duties to 
 the Smaller Cathedral Chapter as shall oblige the Canons Residentiary to reside 
 during the greater part of the year." These recommendations were supported 
 by an historical retrospect, tending to show that they involve "only the 
 restoration and extension to all our cathedral churches of what anciently 
 belonged to those of the Old Foundation." Archdeacon Norris sent Mr 
 Bradshaw a copy of the Report, and asked him "to obelise any historical 
 blunders " in the draft. Mr Bradshaw's letter is an answer to this request. 
 
 G. W. P.
 
 428 APPENDIX II. 
 
 2. "... Estates called Prebends came to be attached to particular 
 stalls of the Church ; and thus some Canons became corporations sole, 
 in legal language. Canons, whose stalls were so endowed, were thence 
 called Prebendaries " (page 3). 
 
 3. "The Canons Residentiary shared . . . The non-residentiaries 
 had no share in the common fund. But all alike were summoned by 
 the Bishop to the Chapter meetings ; all alike, when so summoned, 
 had voice as well as seat in the Chapter Room " (page 3). 
 
 Any one reading these passages would, I think, naturally infer 
 (i) that the Rule under which the Canons lived was somewhat vague ; 
 and (2) that some Canons only were endowed with Prebends ; but 
 (3) that all Canons, whether Pr&bendati or not, had the full privilege 
 of a voice at meetings of the Chapter. 
 
 Now, in all I have read of the English Cathedral statutes and con- 
 suetudines, and of the Scotch ones derived from them and these last 
 illustrate most strikingly the working of the system in the early part 
 of the thirteenth century the thing which forces itself most promi- 
 nently upon my notice is the extreme sacredness alike of the Canoni- 
 catus and the Prcebenda. Whether Bishop, Dignitary, or ordinary 
 member of the Chapter, the man must be a " Prater et Canonicus* and 
 live under the Canonical Rule, before he could be in any way admissible 
 to the Chapter House. Further, the Prcebenda was so far of the 
 essence of the institution, that until a Canon became possessed of his 
 Prcebenda he was nowhere ; he had to take no oath of obedience or 
 fidelity even ; he simply had his stall assigned to him in the choir ; 
 and it is laid down with special emphasis that he could have no voice 
 in the tiegotia E 'celestes or secret a Capitnli. 
 
 In plain words, to be a full member of the Chapter he must be 
 possessed of a Canonry and a Prcebenda and have gone through a full 
 course of residence, so as to have mastered the whole business of the 
 position. He is a man living under the Canonical Rule, having the 
 serious responsibility of actual ownership of property in the country 
 (much more serious than we are now apt to think), who has, further, 
 mastered his business as a Residentiary. Otherwise he has only 
 certain Cathedral duties to perform, which he can perform from his 
 first appointment, and he cannot attend the Chapter meetings, unless 
 on some particular occasion his particular opinion may be desired 
 pro hac -vice, but not so as to serve in any way as a precedent for his 
 further attendance. 
 
 I will copy out the passages relating to these points, which are to 
 be found in the Registrant Ecclesice Londoniensis, or Statutes of St 
 Paul's, sanctioned about the year 1300, together with the parallel 
 passages of Bishop Alnwick's draft Novum Registrum Ecclesice 
 Lincolniensis, prepared in 1440. Alnwick's book is now known to be 
 nil as a body of statutes, having never been in any way sanctioned, 
 having never in fact reached any stage beyond that of an incomplete 
 draft. But, for the purpose in hand, this incompleteness and want of
 
 APPENDIX II. 429 
 
 sanction are of no consequence, as all the passages in it referring to 
 this question existed long before Alnwick's time, almost totidem verbis, 
 in the St Paul's Registrum Ecclesice Londoniensis, of which, indeed, 
 Alnwick's book is little more than a simple transcript, with certain 
 large modifications to suit the requirements of the Church of Lincoln. 
 Indeed, I give the passages from Alnwick's book chiefly because, 
 from the Bishop of Truro having taken it as his text, it is liable to be 
 more familiarly known than other less accessible statutes. 
 
 The first passage is the one which states broadly the nature of the 
 Chapter, showing its normal state apart from any of those qualifica- 
 tions which so materially affected its outward condition and appear- 
 ance. It forms in both Registers the concluding section of the 
 Particula Prima, which deals with the constitution of the Chapter. 
 
 REGISTRUM ECCLESIJE LONDO- NOVUM REGISTRUM ECCLESI^E 
 
 NIENSIS LlNCOLNIENSIS 
 
 Sanctioned about 1300. Prepared in 1440. 
 
 " De numero Canonicorum. " De numero Canonicorum. 
 
 " Triginta Canonic! ecclesie " Quinquaginta et sex Canonici 
 sancti Pauli cum capite suo epis- ecclesie beate Marie Lincolniensis 
 copo corpus et Capitulum con- cum capite suo corpus et Capitu- 
 stituunt, et ecclesie negocia et lum constituunt ; Ecclesie negoti.i 
 secreta tractant. Hii soli tri- et secreta tractant. Hij soli Cano- 
 ginta Canonici Episcopum et nici cum ceteris in Ecclesia ipsa 
 Decanum eligunt ; set ab Epis- [altered from nrd\, dignitates 
 copo canonicatus et prebendas obtinentibus, Episcopum et Deca- 
 assequitur. . . ." num eligunt, sed ab Episcopo 
 
 Printed edition, page 23. Canonicatus [altered from -mas] 
 
 et prsebendas assecuntur. . . ." 
 
 Printed edition, page 28 (cor- 
 rected by original draft). 
 
 This is the passage which is so commonly quoted in reference 
 to what the Committee of Convocation propose to call the " Diocesan 
 Chapter." This is the statement which has been supposed by some to 
 warrant the distinction between a Greater or Grand Chapter consist- 
 ing of the whole number of Canons, and a Lesser Chapter consist- 
 ing only of the Residentiaries. This, however, is quite untenable 
 ground. It will be seen directly that two further points, (i) the pos- 
 session of a Prebend (and that through personal installation, not 
 merely by proxy), and (2) a course of Residence, were absolutely neces- 
 sary to any Canon before he could take his place in Chapter under the 
 above statute. 
 
 As regards the Prcebenda take the following two chapters :
 
 430 
 
 APPENDIX .II. 
 
 REGISTRUM ECCLESI^E LONDO- 
 
 NIENSIS 
 Sanctioned about 1300. 
 
 " Intipit secunda Particula de 
 Canonicorum ingressu et installa- 
 tione. . . . 
 
 " Quod installatus in dignitate 
 sine prebenda non promittit obedi- 
 entiam vel fidelitatem nee commu- 
 nicat de secretis Capituli. 
 
 " Et si prebendam non habeat, 
 Decanus vel Canonicus ad hoc 
 deputatus ei ostendit stallum 
 assignatum in choro ; nichil am- 
 plius obedientie vel fidelitatis re- 
 quirens ab ipso donee prebendam 
 assequatur ; quia nullis tractatibus 
 secretis Capituli vel eleccionibus 
 intcrerit, donee fuerit in prebenda 
 sollempniter, ut premittitur, in-' 
 vestitus. 
 
 " De. absentibus per procurato- 
 rein installandis. 
 
 " Et si Episcopus conferat pre- 
 bendam alicui qui personaliter ad 
 ecclesiam non accedit, set mittit 
 procuratorem, illi procurator! os- 
 tenditur stallus illius prebende et 
 psalmi dicendi, et ei traditur 
 administratio illius prebende ex- 
 terioris. Set nunquam per pro- 
 curatorem admittitur aliquis in 
 Fratrem et Canonicum, nee in- 
 stallatur iuxta modum supra dic- 
 tum, nee eciam in tractatibus 
 secretis vel eleccionibus faciendis 
 admittetur, quantumcumque pre- 
 bendam tenuerit, nisi ad Eccle- 
 siam personaliter veniat, et, sicut 
 moris est, in fratrem et Canonicum 
 fuerit in Capitulo admissus et 
 installatus in Choro." 
 
 Printed edition, page 37. 
 
 NOVUM REGISTRUM ECCLESI^E 
 
 LlNCOLNIENSIS 
 
 Prepared in 1440. 
 
 " Incipit secunda Particula de 
 Canonicorum ingressu et installa- 
 tione. . . . 
 
 " Et si prsebendam non habeat, 
 Decanus vel Presidens ei ostendat 
 stallum assignatum in Choro ; 
 nihil amplius obedientie vel fideli- 
 tatis requirens ab ipso donee prae- 
 bendam assequatur, pro quovis 
 statu tamen [printed edition, 
 tituli] quern habuerit in Ecclesia ; 
 nee aliquid de communa perci- 
 piet ut Canonicus prebendatus ; 
 sicut nisi fuerit per Decanum et 
 Capitulum ex mandate nostro, vel 
 alicujus successorum nostrorum, 
 aut per ipsos Decanum et Capitu- 
 lum, ad aliqua Ecclesie pertrac- 
 tanda negotia convocatus. 
 
 " De absente per procuratorem 
 installando. 
 
 " Quod si forte investiendus 
 hujusmodi procuratorem ad hoc 
 duxerit destinandum, illi procura- 
 tori ostendatur stallus illius pre- 
 bende, et psalmi dicendi, et ei 
 tradatur administratio illius pre- 
 bende exterioris: sed nunquam per 
 procuratorem admittitur aliquis in 
 fratrem et canonicum, nee instal- 
 latur juxta modum supradictum, 
 nee etiam in tractatibus secretis 
 vel electionibus faciendis admit- 
 tetur, quantumcunque prebendam 
 tenuerit, nisi ad ecclesiam perso- 
 naliter veniat, et sic ut moris est 
 in fratrem et Canonicum fuerit in 
 Capitulo admissus et installatus 
 in Choro." 
 
 Printed edition, page 33.
 
 APPENDIX II. 43I 
 
 As regards the necessity of residence, compare the following : 
 
 From the Statutes of St Paul's, From Bishop Alnwick's Draft 
 
 made under Radulphus de Di- Novum Registrum Ecclesia: 
 
 ceto, when Dean, about the Lincolniensis, prepared in 1440. 
 
 year 1200.* Nee debet novus ille [canoni- 
 
 " Non debent intrare consiliis. cus,f] sic residens ante comple- 
 
 " Nee debent novi Canonici Re- tarn suam residentiam de negotiis 
 
 sidenciarii vel alii de negociis vel vel consiliis Ecclesiee vel tracta- 
 
 consiliis Ecclesie vel tractatibus tibus capitularibus, se intromittere 
 
 intromittere, vel eis interesse, nisi vel eis interesse ; % nisi ad hoc 
 
 ad hoc specialiter per Decanum specialiter per Decanum et Capi- 
 
 et Capitulum sint vocati." tulum sit vocatus." 
 
 Printed edition, page 129. Printed edition, page 40. 
 
 These three things then stand out : 
 
 1. Admission as Prater et Canonicus into a body living under Rule 
 and having inviolable secreta of its own ; 
 
 2. Possession of a Prcebenda, or estate in land with spiritual duties 
 as well as large civil privileges attached to it ; and 
 
 3. Residence at the Cathedral Church of such extent and duration 
 as to qualify a man for a thorough knowledge of his duties as a Canon, 
 however much he might be absent in after years. 
 
 It is clear that these three are the absolutely necessary qualifica- 
 tions for full membership of the Chapter. There is no trace of any 
 such distinction as a Greater or a Lesser Chapter. The whole number 
 of Canons certainly formed the Chapter ; but only those of their 
 number had any voice in the affairs of the body, who had qualified 
 themselves in the prescribed manner. At the same time, any one or 
 more, even though not thus duly qualified, might be called in to take 
 part in a particular affair, if it were thought desirable that he or they 
 should do so ; while this special invitation by no means placed such 
 Canon or Canons in the position of full members. 
 
 From reading the Report, it seems to me that the Committee have 
 assumed, at the outset, the existence in former times of a Greater and 
 Lesser Chapter ; and, acting on this assumption, have proposed to 
 revive this imaginary Greater Chapter as a definite organisation in 
 each Diocese. It is distressing to me to see a really admirable pro- 
 posal brought forward and made to rest upon a thoroughly unsound 
 and unhistoric basis. Would it not be wiser to devise, for essentially 
 diocesan work, some new body (call the members what you will), some 
 
 * This passage does not occur at all in the later St Paul's code followed 
 by Bishop Alnwick. 
 
 t Added by the Bishop. 
 
 J Amendment in margin, " Non requiritur licentia intrandi quia licite 
 intrare potest." This is drawn through, and the text is drawn through, and 
 the Bishop has written " vacat" against the whole clause in the margin.
 
 432 APPENDIX II. 
 
 new organisation, which should have the use of the Cathedral Church, 
 and of which the Dignitaries or Residentiaries should be ex officio 
 members ? They could meet in the Chapter House, they could have 
 stalls assigned to them in the Choir, they could be called (as now 
 proposed) the " Diocesan Chapter," as distinguished from the Cathe- 
 dral Chapter. But living under no Regula Canontcorum, they would 
 not, properly speaking, be Canons ; being possessed of no Prcebenda, 
 they would not in any sense be Prebendaries ; and, finally, having no 
 intention of keeping Residence, they would entirely contradict the old 
 idea of active members of a Cathedral Chapter, in which Residence 
 always formed a primary feature of active membership. 
 
 It would be wholly impracticable (even if in any way desirable) to 
 revert, in the present day, to the freedom of the old system of Vicarii 
 and recognised fluctuating non-residence, which was prevalent in the 
 thirteenth but had become practically extinct before the close of the 
 fourteenth century. The "governing body" of the Chapter necessa- 
 rily dwindled in number, as time went on, from the very severity of 
 the qualification for full membership. Altered circumstances, there- 
 fore, call for a distinctly new organisation. The one point in common 
 between the old state of things and that which is now proposed, is the 
 existence of clergy scattered throughout the diocese, and yet in some 
 way having personal connection with the Cathedral Church. If the 
 English Church has life, and the need of such an organisation is felt 
 in it, surely the need can be met without the discredit of what is neither 
 more nor less than a display of unreal antiquarianism. If antiquities 
 are worth studying at all, they must be studied intelligently, and, above 
 all, they must be allowed to tell their own story. Those who look 
 upon them as dead heaps from which to pick and choose just what 
 suits their purpose, while they ignore the surroundings, will surely find 
 the Nemesis for which they ought to be prepared. The " intelligent 
 study of antiquities " is one of the most serious duties of my calling in 
 life. If you ask me what I have to say on this matter, I am bound to 
 speak out, and to give you in reply what I honestly believe to be the 
 truth. 
 
 Yours very sincerely, 
 
 HENRY BRADSHAW. 
 
 The Rev. J. P. Norris.
 
 APPENDIX III. 
 
 PUBLISHED WORK OF HENRY BRADSHAW. 
 
 I. MEMORANDA. 
 
 1. Memorandum No. r, February 1868. The Printer of the Historia 
 
 S. Albani. is. 
 
 2. A Classified Index of the Fifteenth Century Books in the collection 
 
 of M. J. de Meyer, which were sold at Ghent in November, 1869. 
 (Memorandum No. 2, April, 1870.) is. 
 
 3. List of the Founts of Type and Woodcut Devices used by Printers 
 
 in Holland in the Fifteenth Century. (Memorandum No. 3, June, 
 1871.) is. 
 
 4. The Skeleton of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales : an attempt to distin- 
 
 guish the several fragments of the work as left by the author. 
 Printed 1868. (Memorandum No. 4, issued November, 1871.) is. 
 
 5. Notice of a Fragment of the Fifteen Oes and other prayers printed 
 
 at Westminster by W. Caxton about 1490-91, preserved in the 
 Library of the Baptist College, Bristol. (Memorandum No. 5, No- 
 vember, 1877.) is. 
 
 6. The University Library. Papers contributed to the Cambridge 
 
 University Gazette, 1869. (Memorandum No. 6, November, 1881.) 
 is. 
 
 7. Address at the Opening of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Library 
 
 Association of the United Kingdom, Cambridge, September 5, 
 1882. With an Appendix.* (Memorandum No. 7, October, 1882.) 
 is. 
 
 8. The Early Collection of Canons, commonly known as the Hiber- 
 
 nensis. A Letter addressed to Dr F. W. H. Wasserschleben, Privy 
 Councillor, Professor of Law in the University of Giessen.f (Me- 
 morandum No. 8, June, 1885.) is. 
 
 * This address is also printed in the " Transactions and Proceedings of 
 the Library Association at the Fourth and Fifth Annual Meetings," pp. 107-115. 
 
 t This letter is also printed by Dr Wasserschleben in his " Irische 
 Kanonensammlung " (2nd edition, 1885), Introduction, pp. Ixiii-lxxvi. 
 
 2 F
 
 434 APPENDIX III. 
 
 II. PAPERS COMMUNICATED TO THE CAMBRIDGE 
 ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY. 
 
 1. On the Recovery of the Long-lost Waldensian Manuscripts. Read 
 
 March 10, 1862. (C. A. S. Communications, ii, 203-218.) 
 
 2. Two Lists of Books in the University Library. Read November 
 
 17, 1862. (C. A. S. Communications, ii, 239-278.) 
 
 3. On an Early University Statute concerning Hostels. Read May n, 
 
 1863. (C. A. S. Communications, ii, 279-281.) 
 
 4. On two Hitherto Unknown Poems of John Barbour, author of " The 
 
 Brus." Read September 30, 1866. (C. A. S. Communications, 
 iii, 111-117. 
 
 5. A View of the State of the University in Queen Anne's Reign. With 
 
 a Facsimile. Read December 3, 1866. (C. A. S. Communications, 
 iii, 119-134- 
 
 6. On the Earliest English Engravings of the Indulgence known as the 
 
 " Image of Pity." With a Facsimile. Read February 25, 1867- 
 (C. A. S. Communications, iii, 135-152. 
 
 7. An Inventory of the Stuff in the College Chambers (King's 
 
 College), 1598. Read May 9, 1868. (C. A. S. Communications, 
 iii, 181-198.) 
 
 8. On the Engraved Device used by Nicholas Gotz of Sletzstat, the 
 
 Cologne printer, in 1474. Read November 21, 1870. (C. A. S. 
 Communications, iii, 237-246.) 
 
 Note on a Book printed at Cologne by Gotz in 1477, with two 
 j illustrations engraved on copper. (Ibid.) 
 
 9. On two Engravings on Copper by G. M., a wandering Flemish 
 
 artist of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with two Notes. 
 Read November 21, 1870. (C. A. S. Communications, iii, 
 247-258). 
 
 Note A. On three Engravings on Copper, fastened into the 
 Cambridge copy of the Utrecht Breviary of 1 574. (Ibid.) 
 
 Note B. On the Engravings fastened into the Lambeth copy 
 of the Salisbury Primer, or " Horas," printed by Wynkyn de Worde 
 about 1494. (Ibid.) 
 
 10. On the Oldest Written Remains of the Welsh Language. Read 
 
 November 20, 1871. (C. A. S. Communications, iii, 263-267.) 
 
 1 1. On the Collection of Portraits belonging to the University before 
 the Civil War. Read June 3, 1873. (C. A. S. Communications, 
 iii, 275-286). 
 
 12. Notes of an Episcopal Visitation of the Archdeaconry of Ely in 
 
 1685. Read May 24, 1875. (C. A. S. Communications, iii, 
 323-361). 
 
 13. On the A B C as an Authorized School-book in the Sixteenth Cen- 
 tury. Read May 24, 1875. (C. A. S. Communications, iii, 
 363-370.)
 
 APPENDIX HI. 435 
 
 14. Note on the Light of St Erasmus, and on the Various Spellings of 
 his Name in the Trinity Parish Accounts. Read November 17, 
 1879. (C. A. S. Communications, iv, 327-331.) 
 
 III. VARIOUS PAPERS, ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 1. Letter on Dr Simonides and the Codex Sinaiticus, January 26, 
 
 1863. (Guardian, January 28, 1863, p. 85.) 
 
 2. Catalogue of Books printed entirely or partially on vellum, in the 
 
 University Library, Cambridge.* (Le Bibliophile Illuslre, Sep- 
 tembre, 1863, p. 105 ; and Novembre, 1863, p. 123.) 
 
 3. On a Fragment of a Block-book in the possession of M. Weigel of 
 
 Leipsic. (Le Bibliophile Illustre", Decembre 1863, p. 141). 
 
 4. On the Possible Connection between Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress " 
 
 and the " Pelerinage " of Guillaume de Deguilleville. {Le Biblio- 
 phile Illustre, Janvier, 1865, p. n.) 
 
 5. On a Copy of the work entitled " Fr. Antonii Andreae Scriptum 
 
 super Logica," printed at St Albans in the fifteenth century, now 
 in the Library of Jesus College, Cambridge. (Annales du Biblio- 
 phile Beige et Hollandais, No. 10, Aout, 1865, p. 2). 
 
 6. Description of a Manuscript of Wyclif (B. 16. 2) in the Library of 
 
 Trinity College, Cambridge. (Shirley's " Catalogue of the Original 
 Works of John Wyclif," 1865, p. xiv.) 
 
 7. Letter on the Oriental Manuscripts at King's College, Cambridge, 
 
 and Eton College, November 12, 1866. (Catalogue of the Oriental 
 Manuscripts in the Library of King's College, Cambridge, by E. H. 
 Palmer ; Royal Asiatic Society's Publications, June 1867, pp. 1-3.) 
 
 8. Letter on the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, October 5, 1867. 
 
 (Times ; October 7, 1867.) 
 
 9. Letters on two Manuscript evayye\ia (Gospel-books of the Greek 
 
 Church) in the University Library, Cambridge. MSS. Dd. 8. 23, 
 Dd. 8. 49. (Notes and Queries, August 15, 1868, pp. 162, 163.) 
 
 10. Scheme of Mediaeval Latin Graces before and after meat. ("Early 
 English Meals and Manners," E. E. T. S. Publications, 1868, pp. 
 386-396.) 
 
 11. Letter to the Senate of the University of Cambridge on Mr 
 Kerrich's Bequest, June 4, 1872. 
 
 12. List of the Editions of Chaucer's Works. (Chaucer's " Astrolabe," 
 E. E. T. S. Publications, 1872, preface, p. xxvi. Also printed in 
 Professor Skeat's preface to Bell's edition of Chaucer, Bohn Series, 
 P- 3-) 
 
 * These papers are not signed, but are shown to be Bradshaw's, by letters 
 to him from the editor, M. Berjeau, who writes (December 22, 1863) : " J'ai 
 re9u avec votre lettre du 17 le supplement a Van Praet que j'ai immediate- 
 ment traduit en fra^ais," and (February I, 1864), "Je vous envoie par la 
 poste les epreuves de votre second catalogue."
 
 436 APPENDIX III. 
 
 13. Letter on Thynne's Edition of Chaucer (1532). (Thynne's "Ani- 
 madversions," Chaucer Society Publications, 1875, preface, p. xxvi.) 
 
 14. Lives of St Abbanus, St Abel, St Abranus, St Achea. (" Dictionary 
 of Christian Biography," vol. i, 1877.) 
 
 15. Letter on an Irish Monastic Missal in the Library of Corpus Christi 
 College, Oxford, January 5, 1878. (Academy, January 12, 1878.) 
 
 1 6. List of Editions of the York Breviary. (" Breviarium ad usum 
 insignis ecclesie Eboracensis," edited by Mr Lawley, Surtees 
 Society Publications, Ixxi, p. xiii, 1880.) 
 
 17. Letter on the Bodleian Manuscript, Auct. F. iv, 32. ("Hermes," 
 
 1880, pp. 425-427.) 
 
 18. Notes on Service-books, (a) On various Books " tyed with chenes 
 that were gyffen to Alhaloes Church in Derby." (" The Chronicles 
 of the Collegiate Church of All Saints, Derby," edited by Cox and 
 Hope, i88i,pp. 175-177) ; (b} "On the Service-books used in the 
 Church of England in the Middle Ages," dated March 17, 1881. 
 (Ibid., pp. 229-231.) Printed above, Appendix I. 
 
 19. Note on the Binding of the Mazarine Bible, preserved in the 
 Library of Eton College. (Notes and Queries, May 14, 1881, 
 
 p. 384.) 
 
 20. Godfried van der Haghen (G. H.), the publisher of Tindale's own 
 last edition of the New Testament in 1534-35. (Bibliographer, 
 No. i, January 1882, pp. 3-11). Privately reprinted by Mi- 
 Blades, 1886. 
 
 21. (a) Some Account of the Organisation of the Cambridge Uni- 
 versity Library. (" Transactions, etc., of the Library Association," 
 
 1882, appendix, pp. 229-237.) 
 
 (b) On Local Libraries considered as Museums of Local Author- 
 ship and Printing. (Ibid., pp. 237-238.) 
 
 (c) On Size-Notation as distinguished from Form- Notation. 
 (Ibid., pp. 238-240.) 
 
 22. Descriptions (a) of the Cambridge Manuscript of the " Historia 
 
 Ecclesiastica " of Bede, Camb. Univ. Libr. Kk. V; 16 ; (b) of the 
 " Book of Deer," Camb. Univ. Libr. li. 6. 32. (Publications of 
 the Palseographical Society, 1873-1883, vol. ii, plates 139, 140 ; 
 210, 211.) 
 
 23. Statutes for the University of Cambridge and for the Colleges 
 
 within it, made, etc., under the Universities of Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge Act," 1877. Edited by Henry Bradshaw. Cambridge, 
 
 1883, 8vo, pp. Iviii, 763. 
 
 24. On " Toyes of an Idle Head." (Notes and Queries, September 
 6, 1884, p. 187.) 
 
 25. Letter on a Copy of the Work entitled " Fr. Antonii Andreae scrip- 
 turn super Logica," in the Library of Wadham College, Oxford, 
 January 8, 1885. (Academy, January 17, 1885.) 
 
 26. On the Wants of the University Library, May 6, 1885. (University 
 Reporter, 1884-85, pp. 679-682.)
 
 APPENDIX III. 437 
 
 27. Letter to the Senate of the University of Cambridge on the Uni- 
 versity Registry, June 10, 1885. 
 
 28. John Siberch. (a) On the Books printed by John Siberch at Cam- 
 
 bridge in 1521 and 1522. (Introduction to reprint of Bullock's 
 "Oration," Macmillan and Bowes, 1886.) (ft) Note on the Varia- 
 tions in the first sheet of Siberch's edition of the " Hermathena " 
 of Papyrius Geminus. (Reprint, Macmillan and Bowes, 1886, 
 appendix.) 
 
 29. List of Editions of the Sarum Breviary, Diurnale, Legenda, Anti- 
 phoner, Ordinale, etc., Expositio Hymnorum, Expositio Sequen- 
 tiarum. Breviarium secundum usum Sarum, ed. Procter and 
 Wordsworth. Fasc. iii, pref. pp. xli-cxxx, 1886.)
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Aberdeen, Lord, impressed by Henry 
 Bradshaw, 33 
 
 Aberdeen, printing at, 317 
 
 Abraham, Bishop, connection with Henry 
 Bradshaw, 5, 8, 17 ; opinion of King's 
 College, 20 
 
 Academy, Royal Irish, Henry Bradshaw 
 intends to present books to, 8l ; be- 
 comes a member of, 243 
 
 Alexandrinus, Codex, compared with 
 Codex Sinaiticus, 97 ; quires of, 332 
 
 Allen, William, connection with Henry 
 Bradshaw, 3, 12, 393 
 
 Alnwick, Bishop, his "Laudum," etc., 
 275-287 
 
 Anderson, Mr, correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 316 
 
 Antiquarian Society, Cambridge, paper 
 on Vaudois manuscripts, 87 ; paper on 
 Barbour poems, 134; on portraits in 
 University Library, 162 
 
 Apocrypha, Irish, discovered by Henry 
 Bradshaw, 69 
 
 Arnold, Mattheiv, love of Henry Brad- 
 shaw for works of, 41, 248, 418 
 
 B 
 
 Balfour, Professor Francis, his death, 
 263 ; Henry Bradshaw's opinion of, 29 
 
 Barbour, poems of, discovered by Henry 
 Bradshaw, 134; edited by Dr Horst- 
 mann, 139. See Addendum 
 
 Bayeux, importance of its system, 282 
 
 Bede, Cambridge manuscript of, 194, 313, 
 377 
 
 Benson, Archbishop, early connection 
 with Henry Bradshaw, 30, 38 ; opinion 
 on Henry Bradshaw's letter to Arch- 
 deacon Norris, 278 ; correspondence 
 with Henry Bradshaw, 280, 282 ; re- 
 collections of Henry Bradshaw, 344, 
 397.4" 
 
 Bezce, Codex, compared with Codex 
 Sinaiticus, 97 
 
 Bibles French, 239; Mazarine, 255, 
 369 ; early, 306 ; Coverdale, 327 ; 
 Massachusetts, 328 ; Mentelin, 369 
 
 Bibliographer, The, Henry Bradshaw's 
 article in, 259 
 
 Bibliography, Henry Bradshaw's work 
 in, 239, 326-330. See Dome, etc. 
 
 Bibliophile, The, Henry Bradshaw's con- 
 nection with, 109 
 
 Bibliophilen, Antwerpsche, Henry Brad- 
 shaw a member of, 243 
 
 Bibliophiles, Societe de, Henry Bradshaw 
 made a member of, 198 
 
 Bindings, proposed exhibition of, 330 
 
 Blades, Mr W., his " Life of Caxton," 
 73> 75> 99> 2 55 ? correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 73, 99, 201, 255; 
 remarks on Henry Bradshaw, 363 
 
 Blakesley, Dean, correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 77 ; doubts authen- 
 ticity of Lincoln Statutes, 276, 277 
 
 Bodleian Library, Henry Bradshaw's 
 work in, 74, 89 ; poems of Lydgate 
 and Barbour in, 137 ; Dunstan manu- 
 script, 188 ; catalogue of early books 
 in, 201 ; Eutychius in, 230 
 
 Bradshaw family, 1-3 
 
 Bradshaw, Henry Chap. I., 1831-50: 
 Family connections, 1-4 ; early traits
 
 440 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 4, 9, 12, 14, 16 ; at Temple Grove, 4 ; 
 at Eton, 5-18 ; reading, 9, 14, 16 ; 
 scholarship, 15; discipline, 17 
 
 Chap. II., 1850-54: Enters King's 
 College, 19; reading, 23, 25, 31, 39; 
 interest in philosophy, 25, 26, 39 ; 
 religious views, 27, 28, 32, 35 ; friends, 
 21, 28, 32 ; habits, 30, 34 ; extracts 
 from diary, 39 ; elected Fellow of 
 King's, 42 ; Tripos, 43 
 
 Chap. III., 1854-57 : Goes to St 
 Columba's, 46 ; intends taking orders, 
 49 ; reading, 50, 51, 54; reminiscences 
 of him, 55 ; leaves St Columba's, 55 
 
 Chap. IV., 1857-63 : Becomes 
 principal assistant in University 
 Library, 63 ; resigns, 65 ; new appoint- 
 ment, 66 ; discovers Book of Deer, 69 ; 
 Celtic glosses, 72 ; typography, 73, 
 99 ; position in college, 76, 79 ; re- 
 appointment (1861), 80; work on 
 catalogue of manuscripts, 83, 103 ; dis- 
 covers Vaudois manuscripts, 84; letter 
 on Codex Sinaiticus, 93 ; Sarum 
 Breviary at Paris, 101 ; reappointment 
 (1863), 104 
 
 Chap. V., 1863-67 : Note-books, 
 106 ; proposed edition of Chaucer, 
 108 ; connection with the Bibliophile, 
 109 ; correspondence with M. Holtrop, 
 no, Dr Furnivall, 117, Professor 
 Shirley, 119 ; proposed edition of 
 Wyclif, 121 ; reminiscences of, 113 ; 
 scientific journeys, 112, 123, 127, 131, 
 J 33> J 43 5 share in college reforms, 
 129 ; becomes member of Roxburghe 
 Club, 132 ; connection with Dr Hook, 
 133 ; discovers Barbour fragments, 
 134 ; acquaintance with Le'on Lefebvre, 
 145 ; work on catalogue of manu- 
 scripts, 153; appointed librarian, 154 
 
 Chap. VI., 1867-75 : Devotion to 
 the library, 155; presents books, 158, 
 171 ; letter on Lambeth Library, 158 ; 
 contributions to " Dictionary of Chris- 
 tian Biography," 160; papers on history 
 of University Library (Memorandum 
 No. 6), 162 ; letter on Longleat Library, 
 169; abolition of tests, 174; Celtic 
 studies, 178, 187; N,ew Lectionary, 
 179; letter on Kerrich bequest, 181 ; 
 
 visit of Professor ten Brink, 185 ; work 
 in the Library, 189 ; connection with 
 Palaeographical Society, 193 
 
 Chap. VII., 1867-75 : Memo- 
 randum No. I, 196 ; No. 2, 199 ; No. 
 3, 208 ; No. 4, 213 ; index to Cule- 
 mann Collection, 200, to Bodleian 
 Collection, 201 ; letter on British 
 Museum, 205 ; correspondence with 
 M. Campbell, 207 ; work on Chaucer, 
 etc., 211-225; correspondence with 
 Dr Furnivall, 212, Mr Rossetti, 216, 
 Professor ten Brink, 219 ; proposed 
 edition of Chaucer, 223 
 
 Chap. VIII., 1875-82 : Discovers 
 Epternach Martyrology, 227 ; Celtic 
 studies, 228, 237 ; Memorandum No. 
 5, 232 ; Library Conference, 1877, 
 235 ; thinks of resigning librarianship, 
 236, 241 ; share in college reforms, 
 242 ; helps Mr Seebohm, 243, Mr 
 Conway, 245, Dr Waldstein, 250 ; 
 declines to stand for the Bodleian, 256 ; 
 article in the Bibliographer, 259 ; con- 
 nection with the Mediaeval and Modern 
 Languages School, 261 
 
 Chap. IX., 1878-86: Work on 
 Sarum Breviary, 264-274 ; letters to 
 Mr Wordsworth, 267-274, Lord 
 Beauchamp, 272 ; work on Lincoln 
 Statutes, 275-287 ; letters to Mr 
 Wordsworth, 278, Archdeacon Norris, 
 278, Dr Wordsworth, 279, Dr Benson, 
 280, 282, Mr Lawley, 282 
 
 Chap. X., 1882-86: Library Con- 
 ference (1882), 288; member of General 
 Board, 295 ; edition of University 
 Statutes, 295-298 ; Library Conference, 
 1883, 297 ; Vergauwen sale, 298 ; 
 Library Conference (1884), 299 ; mem- 
 ber of University Council, 302 ; gift to 
 Ushaw College, 305 ; papers on early 
 Bibles and the Hibernensis, 306 ; 
 Siberch's press, 310; report on library, 
 310 ; acquaintance with Professor 
 Mommsen, 314; correspondence with 
 Mr Reed, 315, and Mr Anderson, 316 ; 
 notes on John Dome, 319; death, 321 
 
 Chap. XI. : Nature of Henry 
 Bradshaw's work, 323-326 ; biblio- 
 graphy, 326-330 ; manuscripts, 330-
 
 INDEX. 
 
 441 
 
 337 ; Celtic antiquities, 338-342 ; ec- 
 clesiastical antiquities, 342-345 ; Chau- 
 cer, etc., 346-359; early printing, 
 359-371 5 heraldry, 371 
 
 Chap. XII. : Management of Uni- 
 versity Library, 372-378 ; procrastina- 
 tion, 375, 376 ; helpfulness to students, 
 378-384 ; influence in the university, 
 384, 385 ; friendships, 386-390 ; col- 
 lege rooms, 390-393 ; influence over 
 friends, 393~395 ; observation, 395, 
 396 ; magnanimity, 396, 404 ; severity, 
 397 ; frankness, 399-401 ; humility, 
 sympathy, 402, 403 ; tolerance, 405, 
 406 ; generosity, 407 ; first introduc- 
 tions, 407-410; coincidences, 411; 
 gifts, 412; conversation, 413; religious 
 and political views, 413-415 ; love of 
 music, 416; favourite books, 417; 
 daily habits, 418-421 
 
 Bradshaw, Henry (of Marple), I, 132 
 
 Bradshaw, John, his connection with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 2, 4 ; his pamphlets, 
 132 
 
 Bradshaw, Mr Joseph, Hoare, marriage, 
 2 ; settles in London, 3 ; death, 6 ; 
 his Irish books, 69, 172, 316 
 
 Bradshaw, Mrs J. H., letters of Henry 
 Bradshaw to, 10, 14, 17, 19, 22, 34, 
 36, 37, 46, 49, 127 ; her death, 169 
 
 Bradshaw, Capt. Richard, in the navy, 
 6 ; his conduct in 1879, 244 
 
 Bradshaw, Air Thomas, county court 
 judge, 6; his action in 1879, 244; 
 death, 302 
 
 Breviary, Saru/n (Venice, 1483), found 
 at Paris, 101, 267 ; Henry Bradshaw's 
 work on Sarum Breviary, 264-274 ; 
 York, 271, 342 
 
 Brittany. See Celtic 
 
 Bituyan, his " Pilgrim's Progress," pos- 
 sible origin of, 109 
 
 Burghley House, library of, 128 
 
 Caermarthen, Book of, 187 
 
 Campbell, Dr, correspondence with Henry 
 Bradshaw, in, 207; his "typo- 
 graphic neerlandaise," 209 ; visit to 
 Henry Bradshaw, 234 
 
 Canterbury Tales. See Chaucer 
 
 Cathedral Statutes, Henry Bradshaw's 
 knowledge of, 345 
 
 Caxton, studied by Henry Bradshaw, 73, 
 141, 360 ; Blades' Life of, 73 ; his 
 " Propositio Johannis Russell," 74 ; 
 "Directorium Sacerdotum," 164; 
 " Ars Moriendi," 203 ; "Fifteen Oes," 
 232; "Image of Pity," 360; speci- 
 mens of, at Vienna and Copenhagen, 
 91 ; Caxton celebration, 232 ; Caxton 
 Facsimile Society, 370 
 
 Celtic Antiquities, Henry Bradshaw's 
 studies in, 229, 270, 338-342 ; Juvencus 
 glosses, 72; Martianus glosses, 178; 
 Orleans glosses, 237 ; Hibernensis, 
 238, 241, 306 
 
 Chad, St, Book of, 187, 243 
 
 Chaucer, Henry Bradshaw's early love 
 for, 14, 23; proposed edition "of, 108, 
 143, 223 ; Lichfield manuscript of, 
 186 ; Henry Bradshaw's work on, 211, 
 346-359; "Canterbury Tales," 213, 
 215, 221, 241, 335, 348-35 ; Minor 
 Poems, 216, 350-355 ; rhyme-test, 
 
 35 r > 35 2 > Thynne's edition of, 329; 
 editions of, 346, 347, 356 ; Chaucer 
 Society, 214 
 
 Christian Antiquities, Dictionary of, 160 
 Christian Biography, Dictionary of, 160 
 Church Reading Society, or "The Chry- 
 
 sostoms," 29 
 Clark, Mr J. W., helped by Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 241, 252, 317, 383 
 Clark, Mr W. G., his connection with 
 
 Henry Bradshaw, 41, 132 ; proposes 
 
 to edit "The Pilgrimage of the Lyf 
 
 of the Manhode," 132 
 Collier, Mr Payne, Henry Bradshaw's 
 
 letter to, 355 
 Colonna, Guido de, his " Historia Tro- 
 
 jana," 134, 139 
 Commemoration of Benefactors, form for, 
 
 165 
 
 Conway, Professor, helped by Henry 
 Bradshaw, 245 ; correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 368 
 Cookesley, Rev. W. G., 5, 6, 13 
 Carrie, Dr, his action as vice-chancellor, 
 
 36 ; gift of books to University Library,
 
 442 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Cory, W. See Johnson 
 
 Coxe, Mr, correspondence with Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 152, 416 ; relations with 
 
 Henry Bradshaw, 204, 363 ; his death, 
 
 256 
 
 Crossley, Mr, his tracts, 131 
 Crotch, Mr G. R., 89, 90, 102 
 Culemann, M., his collection of books, 
 
 200 
 
 D 
 
 Daniell, Mrs, letters of Henry Bradshaw 
 
 to, 53, 108 ; her death, 311 
 Deer, Book of, 69, 336 
 Degiiilleville, G. de, his " Pelerinage," 
 
 no, 132 
 
 Denison Case, 51 
 Diiinna, Book of, 70 
 Dome, John, his Day-book, 319 
 
 E 
 
 Earle, Professor, his connection with an 
 
 edition of Chaucer, 108, 223 
 Early English Text Society, Henry 
 
 Bradshaw's connection with, 117, 211 
 Echternach Martyrology, discovery of, 
 
 227 
 Ecclesiastical Antiquities, cathedral 
 
 systems, 278, 280, 345 ; breviaries, etc., 
 
 342-345. See Lincoln 
 Enschede Collection, sale of, 157 
 Epternach. See Echternach 
 Eton College, its condition about 1840, 
 
 7 ; hours of work at, 19 
 Entychius, manuscript of. See Bodleian 
 
 Family of Love, pamphlets on the, 382 
 Family, The, Henry Bradshaw a member 
 
 of, 258 
 Freshfield, Mr E., correspondence with 
 
 Henry Bradshaw, 48, 37 
 Friends, Society of, Henry Bradshaw's 
 
 connection with, 2, 3, 33, 168, 294, 409 
 Fry, Mr, on the printer of Tindale's 
 
 New Testament, 260 ; correspondence 
 
 with Henry Bradshaw, 360 
 Furnivall, Dr, reminiscences of Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 109 ; correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 117, 211, 212, 222, 
 328, 350. 353 
 
 Ghostly Gztild, The, or " Cock and Bull 
 
 Club," 26 
 Gildas, studied by Henry Bradshaw, 120, 
 
 187, 239, 309 ; Henry Bradshaw's 
 
 opinion about, 314, 342 
 Gilly, Dr, his " Waldensian Researches," 
 
 86 
 Gordon, Sir A., reminiscences of Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 21, 27, 31, 32 
 Gorham Judgmmt, the, 29 
 Green, Mrf.J. letter of Henry Bradshaw 
 
 to, 366 
 
 Grenville Catalogue, the, 63, 207 
 Guest, Dr, his relations with Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 116, 255 ; his archaeological 
 
 papers, 254 
 
 Gutenberg, his press, 369 
 Gwynne, Dr, impressions of Henry Brad- 
 shaw, 55, 300 
 
 II 
 
 Haddan, Mr A. W., his letters on Simo- 
 
 nides, 94 ; helped by Henry Bradshaw, 
 
 118, 120 
 Hardivick, Archdeacon, draws Henry 
 
 Bradshaw's attention to Book of Deer, 
 
 69 
 Hardy, Sir T. D., correspondence with 
 
 Henry Bradshaw, 383 
 Hawtrey, Dr, his relations with Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 9, 13, 17 
 Herbert, Mr Algernon, his opinion about 
 
 the Waldenses, 85 ; about the Vaudois 
 
 manuscripts, 86 
 
 Hessels, MrJ. H., his work on the Gren- 
 ville catalogue, 207 ;. views on early 
 
 printing, 370 
 Heun, Mr, letters of Henry Bradshaw 
 
 to, 62 
 Hibernensis, The, Henry Bradshaw's 
 
 studies in, 238, 241 ; letter on, 306, 
 
 339 
 
 Hisperica Famina, studied by Henry 
 Bradshaw, 188, 195, 230, 239, 241,
 
 INDEX. 
 
 443 
 
 304 ; Henry Bradshaw's views of, 
 340, 412 
 
 Historia S. Albani, the printer of, 197 
 
 Holtrop, M., his "Monuments Typo- 
 graphiques," no, 140, 209; corre- 
 spondence with Henry Bradshaw, 101, 
 in, 140, 152 ; dedicates his " Thierry 
 Martens" to Henry Bradshaw, 152; 
 death, 200 ; Henry Bradshaw's feel- 
 ings towards, 207 
 
 Hook, Dr, influenced by F. D. Maurice, 
 41 j helped by Henry Bradshaw, 133 
 
 Horstmann, Dr, edits Barbour's poems, 
 
 139 
 Hort, Dr, early connection with Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 23, 30, 41 ; correspondence 
 
 with Henry Bradshaw, 52, 160, 298 ; 
 
 his opinion of Simonides, 92 
 Hnnterian Mtisenm, Glasgow, Henry 
 
 Bradshaw's discoveries in, 131, 133 
 
 Innes, Cosmo, letters on Barbour poems, 
 
 134, 138 
 
 Irish. See Celtic, Typography, etc. 
 Irish Books, given by Henry Bradshaw 
 
 to University Library, 171, 174, 316 
 
 Jackson, Dr, reminiscences of Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 304, 321 
 Jackson, Mr T. W., reminiscences of 
 
 Henry Bradshaw, 335, 379 
 Johnson, Mr W., his share in reforms at 
 
 King's, 130 
 Jones, Mr Winter, correspondence with 
 
 Henry Bradshaw, 72, 133, 205 
 Jusserand, M., reminiscences of Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 332, 357 
 Juvencus, glosses in manuscript of, 72, 
 
 1 88 
 
 K 
 
 Kells, Book of, compared with Book of 
 Deer, 70 
 
 l\\-rrich, Mr, his bequest (o the univer- 
 sity, i8p 
 
 Keyser, Martin de, his connection with 
 G. van der Haghen, 260 
 
 Key sere, Arend de, his Hone, etc., 299; 
 his type, 361 
 
 King's College, Cambridge, condition of, 
 in 1850, 19, 20 ; in 1857, 77 ; reforms 
 at, 21, 79, 129, 242 ; privileges of, 42 
 
 Kings College, Chelsea, proposed 
 foundation of, 159 
 
 Kingsley, Rev C., his books, 23, 39-42. 
 51 ; correspondence with Henry Brad- 
 shaw, 382 
 
 Lambeth Library, Henry Bradshaw's 
 letter on, 158 
 
 Lancelot of the Laik, edition of, 357 
 
 Landavensis, Liber, 187 
 
 Lawley, Mr S., correspondence, with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 271, 282, 289, 331 ; 
 his edition of the York Breviary, 271 
 
 Lectionary, the new, plan devised for, by 
 Henry Bradshaw, 1 79 
 
 Leeu, Gerard, books printed by, ill, 
 140, 246 
 
 Lefebvre, Leon, acquaintance with Henry 
 Bradshaw, 145-150 
 
 Lewis, Sir G. C. , letter on the Vaudois 
 manuscripts, 89 
 
 Library, Cambridge University, con- 
 dition of, in 1856, 60; state of the 
 manuscripts in, 66 ; books stolen from, 
 75) 99> IO1 5 addition to staff of, 156 ; 
 enlargement of, 1867, 157 ; Henry 
 Bradshaw's papers on history of, 162 ; 
 portraits in, ib. ; Henry Bradshaw's 
 management of, 189,373-378 ; arrange- 
 ment of early b%oks in, 198, 202 ; 
 needs of, in 1885, 310 
 
 Library Conference, of 1877, 235 ; 1882, 
 288 ; 1883, 297 ; 1884, 299 
 
 Lightfoot, Dr, his connection with Henry 
 Bradshaw, 30, 41, 117 
 
 Lincoln Cathedral, statutes of, 275-287 
 
 Lindfield, left to Henry Bradshaw, 2, 392 
 
 Lingard, Dr, his connection with Ushaw, 
 
 305 
 
 Luard, L]fo his report on condition of 
 manuscripts, 66 ; on Henry Brarlshaw's 
 work 011 catalogue of manuscripts, 83,
 
 444 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 153 ; correspondence with Henry Brad- 
 
 shaw, 241, 298 
 Lttgduno, Paupercs de, 85 
 Lupton, Mr, his edition of Colet, 162 
 Lydgate, his "Troy Book," 134, 137 
 
 M 
 
 Mackworth, Dean, his protest, 276 
 Macmillan, Mr Alexander, his connection 
 
 with Henry Bradshaw, 102, 108 
 Madan, Mr F., correspondence with 
 
 Henry Bradshaw, 304; edition of 
 
 Dome's Day-book, 319 ; reminiscences 
 
 of Henry Bradshaw, 370 
 Maitland, Dr, Henry Bradshaw'sadmira- 
 
 tion for, 31 ; letter about the Vaudois 
 
 manuscripts, 88 
 Mansion, Colard, master of Caxton, 1 10 ; 
 
 his "L'Estrif de fortune et vertu," 
 
 I 33> 364; his "Boccace," 143; 
 
 " Boece," 202 ; treated of by Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 196 
 
 Manuscripts, Henry Bradshaw's know- 
 ledge of, 330-337 
 Marsh, Archbishop, his connection with 
 
 Irish Apocrypha, 69 
 Martens, Thierry, books printed by, 142 ; 
 
 M. Holtrop's work on, 152, 198 
 Martiamts Capella, glosses in manuscript 
 
 of, 178 
 
 Maskell, Mr, his bibliographical dis- 
 coveries, 132, 234 ; correspondence 
 
 with Henry Bradshaw, 266 
 Maurice, F. D., his influence on Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 27, 41 ; and on Dr Hook, 41 
 Mayor, Professor, appointed librarian, 
 
 109 ; testimony to Henry Bradshaw's 
 
 helpfulness, 151; assigns librarianship, 
 
 152 
 
 Mazarine Bible. See Bibles 
 Medieval and Modern Languages, Tripos, 
 
 etc., 261 
 Memoranda, first scheme of, 196 ; No. I, 
 
 197 ; No. 2, 199 ; No. 3, 208 ; No. 4, 
 
 213, 348 ; No. 5, 232 ; No. 6, 162 ; 
 
 No. 7, 289 ; No. 8, 306, 339 
 Menteltn. See Bibles 
 Meyer, M. de, his collection of books, 
 
 170, 199 
 Meyer, M. Paul, reminiscences of Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 335 ; correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 382 
 
 Mill, Dr, his influence on Henry Brad- 
 shaw, 28 
 
 Mommsen, Dr, his opinion of Henry 
 Bradshaw, 314, 333 
 
 Monuments Typographiques. See Holtrop 
 
 Moore, Bishop, his library, 164 
 
 Moore, Dr N., helped by Henry Brad- 
 shaw, 249 ; reminiscences of Henry 
 Bradshaw, 337 
 
 Morland, Samuel. See Vaudois 
 
 Muggeridge, Rev. N. E., 186, 244, 252, 
 391 
 
 Murray, Dr, reminiscences of Henry 
 Bradshaw, 194, 380 
 
 Museum, British, Henry Bradshaw's work 
 in, 74 ; care of early books in, 201, 202, 
 205 
 
 N 
 
 Nasmith, his catalogue of manuscripts in 
 University Libraiy, 61, 87 ; of manu- 
 scripts at Corpus Christi College, Cam- 
 bridge, 121, note 
 
 Nennius, studied by Henry Bradshaw, 
 187, 314, 342 
 
 Nicholson, Mr, starts the Library Asso- 
 ciation, 235 ; his appointment to the 
 Bodleian, 257 
 
 Nicolas, Sir H., his life of Chaucer, 347 
 
 Nithsdale letters, 305 
 
 Nobla Leyfon, La. See Vaudois Manu- 
 scripts 
 
 Norris, Archdeacon, Henry Bradshaw's 
 letter to, 278, and appendix ; remi- 
 niscences of Henry Bradshaw, 406 
 
 
 
 Okes, Dr, introduces reforms at King's, 
 
 21 ; portrait of, 257 
 Osmund, St, his Sarum Consuetudinary, 
 
 282 
 
 Paheographical Society, Plenry Bradshaw 
 
 joins committee of, 193 
 Palmer, Professor, employed on Arabic 
 
 manuscripts, 128
 
 INDEX. 
 
 445 
 
 Parker, Archbishop, his connection with 
 
 Lincoln Statutes, 277, 286 
 Paul's, St, Cathedral, its system, 281 
 Pelerinage. See Degitilleville 
 " Pilgrimage of the Lyf of the Manhode" 
 
 edition of, 132 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress. See Bttnyan 
 Poore, Bishop, his work at Salisbury, 281 ; 
 
 not author of the Consuetudinary, 282 
 Parson, his recollections of Eton, 7 
 Printing. See Typography 
 Psalter, first English, in the British 
 
 Museum, 75 
 Pynson, printer of the " Pilgrimage of 
 
 Man," no 
 
 Quakers. See Friends 
 
 R 
 
 " J?" printer, not to be confused with 
 Mentelin, 206 
 
 Reed, Mr T. B., correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 315, 376 ; remi- 
 niscences of Henry Bradshaw, 381 
 
 Reeves, Dr, correspondence with Henry 
 Bradshaw, 71, 73, 228 ; visited by 
 Henry Bradshaw, 1884, 301 
 
 Rhys, Professor, correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 187, 229 ; remarks 
 on Henry Bradshaw, 338 
 
 Robertson, Joseph, begins to edit Book of 
 Deer, 71 ; letter on Barbour poems, 
 
 135 
 
 Roby, Mr H. J. , coaches Henry Brad- 
 shaw for the Tripos, 43, 44 
 
 Rotherham, Archbishop, his work in the 
 library, 163 
 
 St Columbofs College, origin, etc., 45; 
 
 condition in 1854, 46, 47 ; Henry 
 
 Bradshaw at, 45-58 
 Salisbury Cathedral, its system, 281 
 Sandars, Mr, correspondence with Henry 
 
 Bradshaw, 299, 336 
 Schiller-Szinessy, Dr, his catalogue of 
 
 Hebrew manuscripts, 128, 143 
 Schoffer, his press, 369 
 
 Seebohm, Mr, helped by Henry Bradshaw, 
 161, 243 ; correspondence with Henry 
 Bradshaw, 297, 318 
 
 Service-books, Henry Bradshaw's know- 
 ledge of, 342-344, and appendix 
 
 Shirley, Professor, his work on Wyclif, 
 118; visit to Henry Bradshaw, 1865, 
 127 ; death, 123 
 
 Siberch, John, his press, 310 
 
 Simonides, Dr, 92-99 
 
 Sinaiticus, Codex, claimed by Dr Simo- 
 nides, 92 ; letter of Henry Bradshaw 
 about, 95; discussed by Tischendorf 
 and Henry Bradshaw, 118 
 
 Skeat, Professor, his connection with pro- 
 posed edition of Chaucer, 224 ; on 
 Chaucer's rhymes, 351 ; on the " Ro- 
 maunt of the Rose," 352 ; helped by 
 Henry Bradshaw, 356-358 
 
 Smith, Dr, his scheme for a " Biogtaphia 
 Britannica," 83 
 
 Statutes, University, of 1882, Henry 
 Bradshaw's edition of, 295 
 
 Stokes, Whitley, receives Juvencus glosses 
 from Henry Bradshaw, 72 ; Martianus 
 glosses, 178; correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 188, 307 ; on the 
 Orleans glosses, 240 
 
 Stratford de Redcliffe, Lord, portrait of, 
 258 
 
 Stttart, John, his edition of the Book of 
 Deer, 70, 71 
 
 Ten Brink, Professor, visits Henry Brad- 
 shaw, 185 ; correspondence with Henry 
 Bradshaw, 219; work on Chaucer, 
 352, 356 
 
 Tests, abolition of, 174 
 
 Theological Society, origin of the, 29, 
 note 
 
 Thompson, Mr E. M., connection with 
 the Palaeographical Society, 194; cor- 
 respondence with Henry Bradshaw, 
 270 ; his edition of Codex Alexan- 
 drinus, 332 ; remarks about Henry 
 Bradshaw, 336 
 
 Thoresby, Archbishop, his "Mandatum," 
 121
 
 446 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Thynne, William, his edition of Chaucer, 
 
 3 2 9 346 
 
 Tindale, his New Testament, 259 
 
 Tischendorf, Dr, connection with the 
 Codex Sinaiticus, 92, 116; visited by 
 Henry Bradshaw at Leipsic, 96 
 
 Todd, Dr, connection with Henry Brad- 
 shaw, 45, 54, 55, 81 ; on the Irish 
 Apocrypha, 69 ; on the Vaudois, 85, 
 88 
 
 Trotter, Mr C., correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 298 ; reminiscences 
 of Henry Bradshaw, 385 
 
 Troy Book. See Barbour 
 
 Tube, Sir Brian, his connection with 
 Thynne, 329 
 
 Tapper, Mr G. I. F., correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, no, 203, 360, 368 
 
 Typography, Henry Bradshaw's work on, 
 1865, 140 ; 1867-75, '96 ff- 5 1877, 232 ; 
 1881, 255; 1885, 319; in genera], 
 359-371 5 Irish printing, 299, 316 ; 
 early Bibles, 306, 368, 369 ; Cambridge 
 press, 310; Oxford press, 370; type- 
 founding, 315 ; origin of printing, 368. 
 See also Caxton 
 
 Tynvhitt, his edition of Chaucer, 346, 
 349 
 
 U 
 
 Universities Act, 1856, 129 ; 1877, 242 
 Ushaw College, connection of Dr Lingard 
 
 with, 305 
 Ussher, Archbishop, his connection with 
 
 the Vaudois manuscripts, 84 
 
 V 
 
 Van der Hag/ien, Godfried, his connection 
 with Tindale, 259 
 
 Vanderhaeghen, Ferdinand, connection 
 with Henry Bradshaw, 144 ; corre- 
 spondence with Henry Bradshaw, 299, 
 
 36l 
 
 Vaudois manuscripts, discovery of the, 
 84-87 j manuscripts at Dublin, 84, and 
 at Grenoble, 166 ; copied by Miss 
 Shields, 128; neglect of, 164 
 
 Veldcner,John, his books, 112 
 
 Vergawtven sale, 298 
 
 W 
 
 Waldenses, to be distinguished from 
 Vaudois, 85 
 
 Wasserschleben, Dr, his " Irische Kano- 
 nensammlung," 227, 238 ; letters of 
 Henry Bradshaw to, 306-309, 339, 
 340. See also Hibernensis 
 
 Weale, Mr W. H. J., first meeting with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 144 ; remarks on 
 Henry Bradshaw, 343 ; correspondence 
 with Henry Bradshaw, 344 
 
 Westfalia, John de, printer, 140 
 
 Weston, Stephen, his tracts, 183 
 
 Wheatley, Mr H. B., correspondence 
 with Henry Bradshaw, 237, 259, 356, 
 370 ; his paper on bindings, 249 ; pro- 
 posal for exhibition of bindings, 330 ; 
 on University Library, 374 
 
 Wickenden, Rev. J. F. his work at 
 Lincoln, 283 
 
 Wilkins, new edition of his " Concilia," 
 120 
 
 William of Palerne, edition of, 211, 357 
 
 Williams, George, his connection with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 23, 28, 47 ; head of 
 St Columba's, 46 ; resigns St Colum- 
 ba's, 56 ; punctiliousness, 57 ; suggests 
 enlargement of University Library, 157 
 
 Williams, Rowland, story of, 15 
 
 Woodcuts, Henry Bradshaw's interest in, 
 202, 246 
 
 Worde, Wynkyn de, his "Chronicle of 
 England," 366 
 
 Wordsworth, Dr (Bishop of Lincoln), 
 publishes Lincoln Statutes, 275 ; cor- 
 respondence with Henry Bradshaw, 
 279 
 
 Wordsworth, Mr C., his edition of Sarum 
 Breviary, 264 ff. ; correspondence with 
 Henry Bradshaw, 267-270, 273, 278 ; 
 reminiscences of Henry Bradshaw, 333, 
 
 343 
 
 Wright, Mr W. Aldis, exposes Simo- 
 nides, 93, 94, 99 ; requested to join in 
 editing Chaucer, 108, 223 ; edits the 
 " Pilgrimage of the Lyf of the Man- 
 hode," 132 
 
 Wyclif, allusion to, in Vaudois manu- 
 scripts, 88 ; Dr Shirley at work on, 
 118; proposed edition of, 121
 
 . INDEX. 
 
 447 
 
 Yeld, Rev. C., correspondence with Henry 
 Bradshaw, 116, 124; reminiscences of 
 Henry Bradshaw, 239, 411 
 
 York Cathedral, its system, 282. See 
 Breviary 
 
 Young, Mr W. M., letter of Henry Brad- 
 
 shaw to, 150; reminiscences of Henry 
 Bradshaw, 165 
 
 Zarncke, Dr, his work on Prester John, 
 
 382 
 Zel, Ulric, books printed by, 157, 158 ; 
 
 books attributed to, 197 
 
 I'KINTED RV WILLIAM CLOWES AN'I) SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BRCCLF.S
 
 I 
 
 University of California 
 
 SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 
 
 Return this material to the library 
 
 from which it was borrowed. 
 
 AUG 1 6 1994 
 
 13 life 

 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000 743 924 3