Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 04.pdf/71

54 holds a similar opinion, and while expressing surprise that so little is known of " the chief branch of Latin literature," declares that "it was the only literature of the Romans which has any claim to originality; it was the only part of thdr literature in which the Romans themselves took any strong interest, and it is the one part which has profoundly influenced modern thought." In the history of English law not so much can be said for its literature, but nevertheless much of that literature is far from mean. The early liter ature is in Latin or Norman-French, from the influence of which the lawyers were long in escaping. Of the modern legal literature, that of Blackstone, Kent, Maine, Pollock, and some others, is worthy to stand beside the best literature of theology and science, as specimens of style perfectly fitted to its purpose. Of case-law writers the list is too long even to begin an enumeration; but among recent jurists the names of Sir George Jessel and Francis M. Finch will occur at once to all readers of the reports as two

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authors whose opinions are as classic in style as the essays of Lowell or Curtis. This discussion has led us far afield, but it may serve to make clearer a fact too often forgotten, — that law touches at some point every conceivable human interest, and that its study is, perhaps above all others, pre cisely the one which leads straight to the humanities. It is not strange, in view of its history, that so many of its followers stray into the more attractive fields of literary art. It is not strange that so many literary artists seek in it the subject-matter of their art, or that the greatest poem of the age, " The Ring and the Book," should reproduce the archaic phenomenon of a poetic legal treatise. And perhaps we may now be able to appreciate better than ever before, the admirable restraint which the accomplished editor of the "Albany Law Journal " has ex hibited in not turning the entire body of English law into what would doubtless be instantly welcomed as the Great English Epic.