Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/214

 200 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S some undiscovered continents. We may well doubt whether aught else could have saved English law in the age of the Renaissance. What is distinctive of medieval England is not parliament, for we may everywhere see assemblies of Estates, nor trial by jury, for this was but slowly suppressed in France. But the Inns of Court and the Year Books that were read therein, we shall hardly find their like elsewhere. At all events let us notice that where Littleton and Fortescue lec- tured, there Robert Rede lectures, Thomas More lectures, Edward Coke lectures, Francis Bacon lectures, and highly technical were the lectures that Francis Bacon gave. Now it would, so I think, be difficult to conceive any scheme better suited to harden and toughen a traditional body of law than one which, while books were still uncommon, compelled every lawyer to take part in legal education and every distin- guished 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 iu 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 ""Smith, Inaugural Oration, MS. Baker, xxxvii. 409 (Camb. Univ. Lib.) : "... At vero nostrates, et Londinenses iurisconsulti, quibuscum disputare, cum ruri sim et extra academiam, non illibenter soleo, qui barbaras tantum et semigallicas nostras leges inspexerint, homines ab omnibus suis humanioribus disciplinis et hac academiae nostrae instruc- tione semotissimi, etiam cum quid e philosophia, theologiave depromp- tum in quaestione ponatur, Deus bone! quam apte, quamque explicate singula resumunt, quanta cum facilitate et copia, quantaque cum gratia et venustate, vel confirmant sua, vel refellunt aliena! Certe nee dialec- ticae vim multum in eis desideres, nee eloquentiae splendorem. Eorum oratio est Anglicana quidem, sed non sordida, non inquinata, non trivi-