When one speaks of Bradshaw's "work," it is hard to make the uninitiated
quite understand either its extent, its importance, or its perfection.
He knew more about printed books than any man living--he could tell at a
glance the date and country, generally the town, at which a book was
published. And the enormous range of this subject cannot be explained
without a technical knowledge of the same. He was one of the foremost of
Chaucer scholars, a very efficient linguist in range (though for
reading, not speaking purposes), as, for instance, in the case of the
old Breton language, which he evolved from notes and glosses, scribbled
between the lines and on margins of Mass books--and his joy at the
discovery of a word that he had suspected but never encountered was
delightful to see. He could acquire a language for practical purposes
with great rapidity--as, for instance, Armenian, which he began on a
Thursday morning at Venice, and could read, so as to decipher titles for
cataloguing, on Saturday night. He had a close and unrivalled knowledge
of cathedral statutes and constitutions. He was an advanced student in
the origins of liturgies--especially Irish--and, indeed, in the whole of
Irish literature and printing he was supreme--and, finally, he was by
common consent the best palæographist, or critic of the date of MSS. in
the world.
The story of his adventure in the Parisian Library is worth recording
here: a book had been lost for nearly a century; he went over to Paris
to see if he could discover it. Search was fruitless, though there was a
strong presumption as to the part of the library where it would be
found. He stood in one of the classes describing its probable
appearance to the librarian, and to illustrate it said, "About the
height, thickness, and of similar binding to this," taking a book out of
the shelves as he did so. It was the missing volume.
So too he would refer Oxford men by memory to the case and shelf of the
Bodleian where they would find the book for which they had looked in
vain--and most characteristic of him was the explanation which he once
gave me of his enormous knowledge. "You know," he said, "I have never
worked at anything for myself, except, perhaps, at Chaucer, all my life
long: all the things that I do know I have stumbled across in
investigating questions for other people." How much of this knowledge
was merely held in solution in that amazing brain, how much was
committed to paper, I do not know--of the latter, comparatively little.
He had a long series of miscellaneous note-books, but most of them so
technical as to be unintelligible except to one as far advanced in such
knowledge as himself. His published works are but a few pamphlets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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