PISANUS fRAXI
19
demonstrate the extensive range of Ashbee's reading more than they
do the success of his method. Although Volumes II and III represent
an advance over the intellectually primitive alphabetical arrangement
of the
Index,
the topical subdivisions of those volumes are arbitrarily
placed and grouped; and the relations of the subdivisions are insig–
nificant and manifest no particular order or direction. They provide
Ashbee with a convenient way of displaying
his
reading, which is
what he wants to do; they cannot be thought of as imposing a
genuine intellectual order on the material, or as providing the dis–
tance which an intellectual instrument requires. On the other hand,
to expect an absolutely original effort, and especially in such a field
as this, to give us more than Ashbee has would be not merely arro–
gant and excessive but historically innocent.
Ashbee distinguishes himself from most previous bibliographers
by virtue of the attention he gives to the contents of the books he
examines. Bibliographers have hitherto, he remarks, confined them–
selves "to the outsides . . . of the books which they have described,
and have rarely penetrated further than the title page or the colo–
phon." Such records are naturally useful as far as they go, "but the
student requires to be informed of much more than this; he wants
to get at the contents, and this with as little loss of time as possible;
he must have an estimate of what is in the book, so that he may be
able at once to decide whether he has to read it, or to leave
it
alone,
and pass on to something else." To this end Ashbee has ventured
further than any earlier bibliographer "in giving frequent and copious
extracts ... a few lines by the author himself being, in my opinion,
a better guide for the appreciation of him and his book than a page
of description from another pen." And he has further collected "the
opinions of previous critics and bibliographers, so that the reader may
estimate the books rather from their remarks than from my own."
This quality of self-effacement is seldom met with outside of those
minds whose command of their subject is inwardly so secure that they
need not assert it.
The command Ashbee had achieved of his subject was equalled
by the assiduity and thoroughness with which he treated it and pre–
pared his work. This trustworthiness is indeed the hallmark of his
reputation. In his Introduction to the
Index
he lays it down as his
invariable, and italicized, rule
"never to criticise a work which I have
not read, nor to describe a volume or an edition which I have not
