Page:English Law and the Renaissance.djvu/40

 lawyer to read public lectures. That was what I meant when I made bold to say that Robert Rede was not only an English judge but 'what is more' a reader in English law.

Deus bone! exclaimed Professor Smith in his inaugural lecture, and what excited the learned doctor to this outcry was the skill in disputation shown by the students of English law in their schools at London. He was endeavouring to persuade his hearers that in many ways the study of law would improve their minds. If, he urged, these young men, cut off as they are from all the humanities, can reason thus over their 'barbaric and semi-gallic laws,' what might not you, you cultivated scholars do if you studied the Digest and Alciatus and Zasius? And then the professor expressed a hope that he might be able to spend his vacation in the Inns of Court. His heart was in the right place: in a school of living law. Even for the purposes of purely scientific observation the live dog may be better than the dead lion.