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THE GREEN BAG

Madeira or the Grand Canary, which were at first simply exile from his work, became more tolerable after he had begun to edit the Year Books for the Selden Society. He was able to carry on this work effec tively far from the archives by having the manuscripts from which he was working photographed. And for the last few years also he was happy in the association of his pupil and colleague, J. G. Turner, who joined him for at least part of each winter. But it was at best an expedient. His malady made steady progress and nobody who had seen him in the later years was surprised when the news came that he had made his last voyage. The wonder was rather that we had had him so long — that the brave spirit and the high devotion to duty had sustained him through a struggle so severe and so protracted. Maitland's work as teacher and writer will be, for those who undertake to register the movement of thought in the nineteenth cen tury, a fact of the first order of importance. It would be premature to attempt now to put it in its right relations, but those who know how profoundly it has effected his torical and legal studies and how exten sively its influence has been felt, may well ask for some survey, however brief and incomplete, of its scope and character. Referring to the future study of early English history, Maitland wrote in 1897, "by slow degrees the thoughts of our forefathers, their common thoughts about commo'n things, will have become thinkable once more; there are discoveries to be made, but also there are habits to be formed;" and these words, I think, give the clue to the course, otherwise so difficult to account for, of his own development. Here was a man by temperament and education a philos opher, by training a lawyer, dealing with the law from a purely historical point of view as it would seem. "The history of institutions," he wrote, apropos of Stubbs' great work, "is the history of public law." That was a view that a generation ago would

scarcely have commanded the assent of many lawyers, or historians either. Well, I think that it may be said without para dox that Maitland treated the law histori cally rather than philosophically, precisely because he was himself a philosopher. It should be remembered in what state he found English legal history. There was the meritorious Reeves and Finlay's disastrous attempt to improve upon Reeves. There was Blackstone, to be sure, but even a gen eration ago men were shy of Blackstone's history. Then Coke had attempted to rear a structure of theory upon an historical basis — most of us will remember Mait land's own judgment of that attempt, "the disorderly mass of crabbed pedantry which Coke poured forth as 'institutes' of English law." Then, and I think that this is a factor of prime importance, there were Sir Henry Maine's brilliant but inaccurate gen eralizations about the early history of law. In one word it was apparent that no philos ophizing about legal history could be of any permanent value until that history had been put upon a sound historical basis. Pre cisely that work, meanwhile, had been going on in Germany since von Savigny and the Grimms had begun their labors, and Pertz had decreed that a whole section of the Monumenta should be consecrated to Leges. In France and even in Italy a like work, though on a smaller scale perhaps, was under way. With these familiar facts in mind, it will be easier to understand the drift of Maitland's work from the time of his return to Cambridge. His first lectures, delivered in the Lent Term of 1885, were on tort and contract, but in the autumn of that year he began to teach the law of real property and to lecture on the rise and progress of the laws of Eng land. In 1887 his course on real property was specialized on the period 1830-1 885, an early instance of the application of his wellknown method of working backward from the known to the unknown. In the same year he was lecturing on the civil govern