So texts and books wander, and so do discoveries sometimes lie near our
hands. The moral is: Be inquisitive. See books for yourself; do not
trust that the cataloguer has told you everything. I am a cataloguer
myself, and I know that, try as he may, a worker of that class cannot
hope to know or to see every detail that is of importance. The creature
is human, and on some days his mind is less alert than on others. Nor is
he interested in everything alike: an apocryphal fragment or an obscure
saint will excite me, while a letter of St. Bernard which may be
unpublished leaves me calm. But in spite of the imperfections of
cataloguers, catalogues must be used, and they must be read and not only
referred to. The mere juxtaposition of treatises in a volume will often
reveal its provenance or its pedigree; besides, there is always the
chance I have suggested, that the describer of any MS. may have failed
through ignorance or want of attention to see that some article in it
is of extreme interest and rarity. So it was that in reading Lambecius's
(eighteenth-century) catalogue of the Greek MSS. at Vienna I noted down
an entry that seemed unusual; and some years after, when I had an
opportunity of getting a friend at Vienna to look at the tract in
question, it was found to be the unique copy of the very most heretical
(and therefore interesting) episode of the apocryphal Acts of St. John,
written in the second century, and copied, to our lasting astonishment
and perplexity, by some honest orthodox cleric in the fourteenth.
May discoveries infinitely more pleasing fall to the lot of many of my
patient readers!