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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES 
 
 ROBERT ERNEST COWAN
 
 LIBRARY ASSOCIATION OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 HENRY BRADSHAW 
 
 Librarian and Scholar 
 
 BY 
 
 DR. EWALD FLUGEL 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO 
 1904
 
 LIBRARY ASSOCIATION OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 OFFICERS, 1904 
 
 JOY LICHTENSTEIN, San Francisco Public Library 
 BERTHA KUMLI, Santa Rosa Public Library 
 FLORENCE B. WHITTIER, Mechanics' Institute, S. F. 
 MARGARET A. SCHMIDT, 1503 Powell St., S. F. . 
 
 President 
 Vice-President 
 . Treasurer 
 
 . Secretary 
 
 ADVISORY COMMITTEE 
 
 JAMES L. GILLIS, Librarian, State Library, Sacramento. 
 FRANK B. GRAVES, Librarian, Public Library, Alameda. 
 ""ALICE J. HAINES, Public Library, San Francisco. 
 MARY L. JONES, Librarian, Public Library, Los Angeles. 
 BERTHA KUMLI, Librarian, Public Library, Santa Rosa. 
 
 The members of the Adrisory Committee may be freely consulted for advice or direction upon 
 any point connected with library work.)
 
 HENRY BRADSHAW: LIBRARIAN AND SCHOLAR.* 
 
 THE facts of Henry Bradshaw's life are 
 well known, and can easily be traced in the 
 "Dictionary of national biography" or Proth- 
 ero's biography. His was a scholar's life of 
 no stirring events, but to me, although my 
 personal contact with this great man was of 
 the slightest, it represents the highest type of 
 scholarly service, and in him I have for years 
 admired the librarian of librarians. 
 
 Henry Bradshaw "belonged to the Irish 
 branch of an old English family," and was 
 born in London, on Feb. 3, 1831. He was 
 educated at Eton and King's College, Cam- 
 bridge, became a Fellow of King's in 1853, 
 and taught school near Dublin until 1856, 
 3? when he returned to Cambridge to accept a 
 " place as assistant librarian in the university, 
 ^Tor, as it used to be called, the Public Library. 
 ^5 It was here that the two great ideals of his 
 plater life made themselves first felt, and the 
 -, conflict first entered his heart whether he 
 - ; should devote himself to the library or to 
 scholarship. He found that the opportunities 
 for "work," for acquisition of knowledge, were 
 not sufficient, and, honest and logical as he 
 always was, he resigned in 1858, in order to 
 devote himself as a private scholar to the 
 study of the manuscripts and early printed 
 books of his university library. His knowl- 
 edge in these matters, and his zeal and ability 
 became recognized and the authorities created 
 a special place for him in 1859 at a nominal 
 salary, but without any restrictions, without 
 any control. This was a rather anomalous 
 situation which elicited the following remark 
 when (1867) M. Holtrop asked leave to ded- 
 icate to him his "Etudes bibliographiques" : 
 "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." (Life. p. 152.) 
 
 But even though his place was not official- 
 ly recognized, it was better so for Brad- 
 shaw's own development. It left him free to 
 work along his own lines, to gather the tools 
 for his great work wherever he could get 
 them; it helped him to obtain that phenom- 
 enal knowledge, that mastery in bibliography 
 and palaeotypography which only frequent 
 trips to other English and continental libra- 
 ries could give him, while his study of the 
 Cambridge mss. made him the first authority 
 on this subject, and led him to that long and 
 unbroken series of splendid discoveries which 
 made him famous in many a field of scholar- 
 ship. Among these there is first the discov- 
 ery of the "Book of Deer" in 1857, of the 
 Celtic glosses in the Juvencus ms. in 1858 
 (which meant practically the discovery of the 
 ancient Breton language), of the missing vol- 
 umes of Morland's Vaudois mss. and their 
 true date in 1862, of Colard Mansion's 
 "L'Estrif de Fortune et Vertu" in 1866, and 
 of Barbour's "Lives of saints and Siege of 
 Troy." 
 
 Besides these brilliant achievements he 
 mastered a multitude of languages, beginning 
 with Swedish and ending with Tibetan, Ar- 
 menian, etc., and worked in Chaucer, Wy- 
 cliffe, Caxton, "anatomized" (to use his own 
 phrase) the early Dutch printers, established 
 the rime-test for Chaucer, and the original 
 order of the Canterbury Tales, throwing light 
 on every subject which he touched. We find 
 him further exposing the lies of Simonides 
 the forger from a new corner, while he was 
 busily engaged in college politics, while he 
 fought successfully for the abolition of re- 
 ligious tests and against the "celibacy of Fel- 
 lows" and "idle Fellowships." 
 
 We can fully appreciate his sigh : "If I 
 can only keep from side-work," and the truth 
 of the witty answer when some one asked 
 
 *A paper read before the Association, January 8,1904. 
 
 .'507728
 
 HENRY BRADSHAW: 
 
 what Bradshaw was doing: "Oh, he's doing 
 something else." 
 
 But the way in which he had been "doing 
 something else" for eight years produced its 
 fruit, when, on March 8, 1867, he was finally 
 elected to succeed Prof. Mayor as university 
 librarian. To him this recognition of his 
 ability was by no means an unmixed joy; he 
 realized that it meant a great sacrifice, the 
 sacrifice of the opportunity of gathering the 
 harvest of his work as a scholar. It meant 
 that many favorite subjects which he had 
 at heart, some of which required just the 
 finishing touch, would have to be banished 
 into the background, since for him it was 
 more than a theoretical maxim that the libra- 
 rian's first duty was to put himself at the ser- 
 vice of others. 
 
 But, much as we may regret our loss from 
 the standpoint of the scholar, it was in his 
 position as librarian that those qualities were 
 fully developed, which brought him to the 
 front rank of English librarians of his time, 
 qualities which proved him to be also one of 
 the great men of his time. 
 
 From now on his tremendous and ever- 
 growing scholarship became more directly 
 helpful to others, and became, directly or in- 
 directly, a constant, never-failing source of 
 information. And it was not only the quality 
 and quantity, but also the way in which this 
 help was given that made him so prominent; 
 the frankness and fulness, as much as the 
 friendliness and kindness, the true generosity 
 of heart. We come across innumerable in- 
 stances of his unselfishness during these 
 years. We see how he transfers thou- 
 sands of his own Irish books to the library, 
 how he makes valuable gifts to colleges, 
 how he pays an unknown scholar's debts, 
 ?nd endows secretly the first chair of ar- 
 chaeology at his university a secret which 
 was strictly kept until after his death. We 
 are touched by the charming way in which 
 he insists on young Conway's accepting a 
 stipend from him in order to finish his study 
 of I5th century woodcuts. Conway was a 
 serious student, young, friendless, "in the 
 dumps." He had taken up a subject in which 
 Bradshaw had been deeply interested him- 
 self, and he felt that it was merely repaying 
 what the university had done for him when in 
 his own younger, friendless and penniless 
 years it gave him a "kind of endowment of 
 research post." And he was doing all this on 
 
 a salary of but $2000, and not so many years 
 after he had been obliged to sell by auction 
 the better part of his own library. 
 
 We find him in active correspondence with 
 Dr. Furnivall on the plans of the Early Eng- 
 lish Text Society, and with a score of other 
 scholars on their most special specialties. 
 
 In what a liberal spirit he hails ten Brinck's 
 "Chaucer studies" ! This man, in whom a 
 more selfish spirit would have seen a com- 
 petitor, became at once his friend. "At last," 
 he writes, "I have found the man whom I 
 have been longing to see for many years past, 
 and I feel sure you will forgive me for my 
 boldness in writing to you direct, to thank 
 you most warmly for the first part of your 
 'Studies on Chaucer,' which I have been 
 feasting on for a week or more." (p. 219.) 
 
 And when Mommsen came in 1885 to study 
 the Gildas ms. to which Bradshaw had de- 
 voted his energy years before it delighted 
 his heart to greet the scholar, and see him 
 work; "it is as good as a month's holiday to 
 see his method of working," he writes to a 
 friend, and Mommsen himself he almost begs 
 to ask questions. "Do not scruple to ask 
 a^y number of questions about the MSS. which 
 you think I am 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 happi- 
 ness to have lived to find the man. ... It is, 
 as you say, an extremely complex investiga- 
 tion; but it is its very complexity which in- 
 terests me so much, and induces me to try 
 my utmost to clear it up. I have done some- 
 thing towards this end in past years, but 
 from not finding any scholar to whom my 
 work could be of immediate 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 favor- 
 ite investigations of my own." (p. 315.) 
 
 As a return for his services he earned from 
 Mommsen the remark that he had been more 
 impressed by Henry Bradshaw than by any 
 other man in England, and that he (Momm- 
 sen) longed for a shorthand writer to take 
 down the information which he (Bradshaw) 
 poured forth on subjects of common interest. 
 And with great joy Mommsen told Professor 
 Robertson Smith an anecdote which is char-
 
 LIBRARIAN AND SCHOLAR 
 
 acteristic of Bradshaw's learning. "I will tell 
 you," Mommsen said, "one thing; it is a 
 small one, but it is characteristic. I told Mr. 
 Bradshaw of a contraction I had seen in a 
 manuscript of the British Museum, which, 
 with all my experience of Pandect mss. I had 
 never seen before. The British Museum peo- 
 ple, 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 ms. and showed me the very 
 thing." 
 
 To return to our summary of the events of 
 his life, there are only a few more facts to 
 be recorded after his appointment to the libra- 
 rianship. First of all we must mention the 
 clearing of the "Augean stable," as he occa- 
 sionally calls it, or as Prothero calls it, more 
 diplomatically, the reducing to order of the 
 "somewhat chaotic condition" in which he 
 found the library ; the reorganization of the li- 
 brary, the reforming of what is as he speaks 
 of it "by courtesy called the arrangement 
 of the books"; the systematizing of the cat- 
 aloging, the introduction of printed title- 
 - slips (years before the British Museum adop- 
 ted this method), the introduction of a sys- 
 tem of double-entry, with brief shelf-lists, the 
 most careful watching over the bindery (the 
 sheet arrangement of the Caxtons being 
 spoiled in all the English libraries but that of 
 Cambridge), etc., etc. This reorganization 
 was not entirely according to his taste, be- 
 cause he could not work well through sub- 
 ordinates, and unnecessarily weighed himself 
 down by attending to many things personally. 
 The latter fact is well illustrated by the 
 anecdote, that when the mss. were moved to 
 new quarters, he himself and alone carried 
 them "caressingly" from the old shelves. 
 
 In 1882 he presided over the fifth meeting 
 of the Library Association (the first had 
 taken place in 1877), and gave a splendid ad- 
 dress, which is followed in its printed shape 
 by a number of important "notes." In the 
 same year he was elected to the General 
 Board of Studies, the highest council of the 
 university. 
 
 His later studies were on the Lincoln Ca- 
 thedral Statutes, the Sarum Breviary, on the 
 early collection of canons, called the Hiber- 
 nensis (showing his wonderful knowledge of 
 continental church constitutions), and on 
 
 the Day Book of John Dome, the Oxford 
 bookseller of 1520. His notes show what a 
 loss it was to the world that he could not find 
 the time to give us a new Dibdin. 
 
 But in the midst of all this activity came 
 death, and deprived the world of Bradshaw's 
 inestimable services. He had returned 
 from supper, sat down to do a little more 
 work on Irish bibliography, late at night, 
 when the angel of death closed the book be- 
 fore him. The lamp had gone out, the fire 
 was burnt down, when on the morning of 
 Feb. n, 1886, his servant found him sitting 
 dead in his armchair before his desk. 
 
 Bradshaw was the first authority on early 
 English and Irish bibliography in England, 
 one of the first authorities on palaeography, 
 the first Chaucer scholar of his time, and in 
 the front rank of more than one special study ; 
 and, above all, he was a great man, a warm- 
 hearted, full-blooded, generous man, who had 
 given the best example of his teaching, that 
 the first duty of a librarian, and also his 
 chief glory is unselfish devotion to his fellow- 
 men. 
 
 The bulk of his published work seems small, 
 but if we merely run over the titles we are 
 astonished at the broadness of his scholarship, 
 and if we further consider what a stupendous 
 knowledge he brought to bear on the elucida- 
 tion of the smallest points, if we consider his 
 method, his ideals, his enthusiasm, the spirit 
 of his work, the clearness of his head and 
 judgment, his wonderful memory, retentive of 
 the smallest details, his "pouvoir divinatoire" 
 (as Jusserand calls it), his perpetual readi- 
 ness, then we realize that we shall not see his 
 like again. 
 
 Perhaps a few quotations from his writings 
 may make more clear how strong and how 
 l?igh were his ideals of a librarian's work. I 
 quote from his "Letters and papers" : 
 
 "The most delightful thing in the world is 
 to have people coming to you for help." 
 
 "Living as I do in charge of a very large 
 library, where all I find is instantly at the 
 service of my neighbors, I find but little leis- 
 ure to put my results into print, and I have 
 to content myself with the humbler position 
 of helping students by oral communication." 
 
 That, in helping others, he was not satisfied 
 with mere appropriation of his thoughts and 
 suggestions, is emphasized in his sharp words :
 
 HENRY BRAD SHAW: 
 
 "You are heartily welcome to anything I can 
 tell you, but don't publish my work, publish 
 your own.". 
 
 "My only wish has been to collect facts, in 
 order that others may form a judgment upon 
 them." 
 
 "As for 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 vigor- 
 ously and get them plainly before you, and 
 let them speak for themselves, which they 
 will always do." 
 
 Let me add from his presidential address 
 of 1882 the splendid definitions : 
 
 "What is a library f A library is a collec- 
 tion of books brought together for the use of 
 those who wish to read them; these readers 
 falling for the most part into the two very 
 distinct classes of readers of books and writ- 
 ers of books." 
 
 "What is a librarian? A librarian is one 
 who earns his living by attending 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 seek his services." 
 
 And condensing the history of modern li- 
 braries into a few sentences, he says: 
 
 "Libraries may be. said to go through sev- 
 eral successive stages, though the higher 
 stages are frequently never reached or even 
 contemplated. The most elementary kind ex- 
 ists only for readers. It is represented by the 
 lower class of circulating library, and by the 
 ' simplest form of branch, in places where cen- 
 tral free libraries exist. It must not be 
 thought that I am depreciating the value of 
 this elementary institution. It corresponds 
 to the boys' library of our schools, and 
 (though you will perhaps be surprised to hear 
 me say so) to the whole of our university 
 and college libraries here, as they existed in 
 the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their 
 object was exclusively practical; they were 
 collections of books brought together simply 
 for the use of those who wanted to read, and 
 had not the means to buy books for them- 
 selves. Education makes people want to read, 
 and the libraries exist to supply this want. 
 
 "A higher stage is reached when the funds 
 at the disposal of a library come to be in part 
 devoted to the acquisition of books, which 
 form the necessary working materials of those 
 
 who are engaged in writing books, but cannot 
 afford to buy all the books which they need 
 for their work. What is useful in this way 
 to one person will almost certainly be useful 
 to another, and thus it becomes worth while 
 to incur some outlay with this object, and so 
 to make the libraries available for study as 
 well as simply for reading what are called 
 readable books. 
 
 "The character, the higher stamp, thus given 
 to a library, soon produces results. We know 
 that 'to every one that hath shall be given, 
 and he shall have abundance.' When even 
 small resources are well husbanded and made 
 useful for a higher class of work by good 
 management, donations flow in; and men who 
 have spent half a lifetime and half a fortune 
 upon the formation of a library will leave or 
 even give their books to a place where they 
 feel confident that good use will be made of 
 them. This is the process by which all our 
 great libraries have been formed. I have no 
 reason to fear contradiction if I say that in 
 every library of note in this kingdom down 
 to the last fifty or sixty years the bought 
 books formed but a very minute portion of 
 the whole collection in comparison with those 
 which were given or bequeathed." 
 
 As the watchword of the university library 
 he states : "Liberty and Discretion." "We 
 say to those who use our library: 'The rule 
 is (i) liberty for you to go freely about the 
 whole library, examining what books you 
 choose and borrowing what books you like ; 
 and (2) discretion on our part, exercised in 
 putting such extremely moderate restrictions 
 upon your freedom, that the safety of the 
 more precious books is regarded, and the 
 presence of the books most constantly needed 
 for reference is secured, without undue inter- 
 ference with your access to the shelves or 
 your borrowing from the library." 
 
 Let me draw two important lessons from 
 Bradshaw's life and thoughts : 
 
 First, that the librarian must be a scholar, 
 able as well as ready to bring his scholarship 
 to the help of his public. 
 
 Second, that a library of any ambition must 
 be above a merely and exclusively practical 
 basis. 
 
 Formulating the latter point differently, I 
 should say, that since the library is no ephe- 
 meral institution, it ought not to bind itself 
 exclusively to present needs, to the present
 
 LIBRARIAN AND SCHOLAR 
 
 time; it should consider the future as well as 
 the present, it should take special care to 
 collect for the future. 
 
 Finally, I should like to emphasize Brad- 
 shaw's words on book bequests and their 
 place in the history of English libraries. 
 
 The library, by not being confined too close- 
 ly to present needs, will become naturally the 
 hospitable sheltering-plaee, the refuge for 
 private collections, it will become the magnet 
 to attract private collections formed for spe- 
 cial purposes, collections which may not ap- 
 peal to the present generation, but which will 
 become invaluable in later times. 
 
 The main point, at present, is to rid the 
 public of the mediaeval ideal of a library, the 
 kindergarten ideal, the frying-pan ideal, which 
 
 5 
 
 says that libraries exist exclusively or mainly 
 for present uses, for "readers" only (to use 
 the phrase of Bradshaw). 
 
 Our public must learn to regard the library 
 as a place for all time, a Temple of the Future 
 then only the library will be distinguishable 
 from a mere counting-house, a m'pre book- 
 stall. 
 
 When the library begins to consider tfie 
 future at least as much as the present, and to 
 count the scholar as belonging to its "Public," 
 then the old saying will become true, and the 
 library will become the University of th* 
 Future. And here we have again arrived at 
 the intimate connection between the library 
 and scholarship, so wonderfully represented 
 by Henry Bradshaw librarian and scholar.
 
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