Inspired by the spirit of Blackstone, they have tried "to teach jurisprudence to speak the language of the scholar and the gentleman," and have reasserted and re-established the union between law and letters. They have begun a reformation in the study of the law of England which has already been crowned by an immense, if as yet unrecognised, success.

Consider the state of things as late even as 1850. At that date England possessed no body of legal literature. The history of English law was, in truth, unwritten. The year-books were unexplored. Reeves's History of English Law was unreadable and unread. Historians were blind to the intimate connection between the ideas of English law and the progress of the English people. Macaulay was a lawyer. He was a codifier of rare originality; his illustrative genius has fixed the form of all our Indian codes. He delighted to connect the political annals of England with the intellectual and social life of the people. Yet his celebrated description of the state of England in 1685, when the Crown passed from Charles II. to his brother, contains little, if anything, as to the development of our law during a most critical period. It contains not even an allusion to the Statute of Frauds, though the Act in more ways than one illustrates the condition of England. The omission to take any account of the growth of English law is the stranger, because Macaulay describes Lord Nottingham "as the man who first educed out of the chaos, anciently called by the name of equity, a new system as regular and complete as that which is administered by the judges of the Common Law;" and knew therefore of the immense change produced by the transformation of equity from a sort of arbitrary fairness into a legal system of ameliorated law. The untold effect, however, of legal ideas on the course of national and especially of English history, was in 1849 hardly understood, and awaited its revealer. Jurisprudence again, or in other words the general principles of law, hardly arrested the attention of lawyers or of moralists. Blackstone's doctrines concerning the nature of law and of sovereignty, as also the criticisms of the utilitarian school, had ceased to arouse interest.

Of foreign writers such as Savigny, English lawyers, as a rule, knew nothing.* Blackstone was not profoundly acquainted with • With a knowledge not possessed by his contemporaries, Mr. Westlake in

Roman Law, but he knew more about it than most English lawyers who flourished towards the middle of the last century. Turn now to the field of constitutional theory. No progress had there been made since the time of Blackstone, at any rate by English lawyers; they had forgotten the invaluable hints as to the real nature of constitutional law thrown out by Paley in his Moral Philosophy. Englishmen still accepted theories which, whatever their original merit when propounded by Montesquieu and accepted by Blackstone, had by the middle of the nineteenth century become all but inapplicable to the actual government of England and sorely needed criticism and revision. Of law books for the guidance of practitioners there existed of course in 1850, as there will always exist, a large number of treatises marked by varying worth or worthlessness. Of text-books which should lay down for the guidance of intelligent readers the elementary principles governing each department of law there were few, or none of any eminent merit. Such works when rising to any high degree of excellence have in most countries been the fruit of professorial lectures. The lack of good text-books probably resulted from the failure of our universities to take part in the teaching of law. However this may be, most of the works which fifty or sixty years ago were recommended to the attention of young gentlemen reading for the Bar, displayed little of logical power and really nothing of literary lucidity. A well-known treatise on the Law of Contract usually placed in the hands of students at least as late as 1860, did not attempt to analyse the nature of a contract and left on the mind of an ingenuous reader the impression that somehow or other at the very centre of the whole law of contract lay the fourth and the seventeenth sections of the Statute of Frauds. Law libraries, of course, were crammed with weighty volumes filled with masses of undigested information, but it would be unbecoming irony to attribute literary charm or lucidity to Sugden on Powers, or to Smith's, or White and Tudor's Leading Cases. The England then of 1850 did not possess a body of legal literature.

Note now the change effected within less than fifty years. 1858 applied doctrines gathered from Savigny, and other German authorities, to the elucidation of the conflict of laws, and thereby gave in several respects a new turn to the judicial development in England of that branch of the law,

It dates from 1861. In that year the publication of Maine's Ancient Law and the republication of Austin's forgotten The Limits of Jurisprudence Determined attracted general attention. Each book was the outcome of professorial lectures; each revived in England an interest in the growth of legal ideas and in jurisprudential problems. The lines of thought suggested by these two writers have now been followed out by disciples, mostly law professors, or what I may be allowed to call professorial lawyers, of marked distinction. Thus Holmes (now a judge of the American Supreme Court), who began his career as a professor at Harvard, has examined in his Common Law a mass of intricate questions, logical, jurisprudential, and historical, raised by the obscure history of English legal conceptions. Professor Thayer has in a work, of which a too early death prevented the completion, thrown an infinity of light on the nature and the development of that law of evidence which constitutes a most characteristic department of the law of England. Maine has, as a teacher of jurisprudence, carried out more directly than any other author one side of the work of Blackstone, by showing conclusively that legal ideas and rules might in the nineteenth, no less than in the eighteenth century, be treated with literary grace and charm. Meanwhile Professor Holland in his Jurisprudence has stripped Austin's dogmas of their pedantry, has freed them from needless and burdensome connection with the utilitarian polemics and has at the same time enriched jurisprudence with valuable and original ideas of his own. At this moment Professor Vinogradoff, who has made the law of every nation his province, is year by year helping us to see with increased clearness the inseparable connection between the ideas embodied in English law and the progress of the English people. For the movement, which I can describe only in the barest outline, has turned the full light of research on the records and history of our law. Inquirers of every kind begin to read the Year-Books. The Selden Society publishes each year new 10cuments illustrating the annals of English law. Pollock and Maitland have given us their monumental History of English Law down to the time of Edward I. The literary merit of the book must be patent to every man who will read with care as much as the first two hundred pages; yet a work which attracts every

student affords more of information and of judicious theory than the most learned teacher could easily master without strenuous thought. Dr. Holdsworth has this very year completed a History of English Law which, while it gives in a form suited for the use of learners the result obtained by Pollock and Maitland, extends to periods not covered by their work and contains original thought for which Dr. Holdsworth may claim the credit and accept the responsibility of parentage. Criminal law found in Sir J. F. Stephen, who before he was raised to the Bench lectured professorially at Lincoln's Inn, its historian, and but for the indifference or indolence of Parliament, would have found its codifier.

In 1867 Bagehot's English Constitution gave new life to the study of constitutional law. His English Constitution swept away the literary theory which concealed the actual working of English institutions, and forced upon the attention of every educated person in England or the United States who cared to understand the nature of parliamentary government, the immense importance and the nature of the English Cabinet. Bagehot, it is true, was not a professor. He was, however, influenced by the teaching of Maine. He participated in the movement for the renovation of legal literature. To that movement his own vivifying originality added untold force. It indirectly brought into view the distinction between constitutional law and constitutional conventions which lies at the basis of Anson's exhaustive treatise on the Law and Custom of the Constitution. It made it possible for the author of the Law of the Constitution to form a diffident hope that the labours of more than twenty-five years have revealed to the public the doctrine, or rather the fact of the sovereignty of Parliament. To the suggestiveness of Bagehot, and even more to the enthusiasm now felt in every land where the law of England prevails for the creation of legal literature, may be ascribed the production of two professorial works which are already acknowledged to be classics, Bryce's American Commonwealth and Lowell's Government of England. Nowhere are the fruits of the movement, of which the prophet, so to speak, was Blackstone, more clearly seen than in the improvement of our legal text-books. In this reform generous help has been received from colonial teachers such as Hearn and Salmond. But it is impossible

for me within the limits of a single article, to give more than one or two examples of a phenomenon traceable in every department of English law. The exposition of the Law of Contract was in 1867 rationalised by Leake's Elements of the Law of Contract. It is an invaluable legacy from the last of the special pleaders; it combines the sagacious accuracy of the old pleaders with the desire of the new school of writers to free the exposition of law from needless technicalities. Since his time work after work has carried further and applied to the law of England the analysis of contractual agreement. Professor Pollock's Principles of Contract solves problems, which have perplexed both students and learned lawyers, by the application thereto of ideas gathered both from foreign writers and from an elaborate study of English authorities. Anson's Law of Contract has supplied to the law students not only of the United Kingdom but also of the United States, one of the very best of legal manuals. Professor Kenny's Criminal Law elucidates his subject in a manner which proves conclusively, if proof were needed, that the art of treating legal topics with the literary skill which makes a legal text-book a work full, not only of instruction, but of interest, may be displayed to-day quite as markedly as in the time of Blackstone. Let it be noted that Anson's Law of Contract, Professor Bigelow's, or Professor Pollock's Law of Torts, or Strahan's Law of Property, as well as scores of excellent manuals, which I have not space here even to enumerate, form a class of books which, as I have insisted, did not exist in the England of 1850.

This revival of legal literature has produced two effects. Now that law has learnt to speak the language of gentlemen and scholars, laymen distinguished as moralists and thinkers have begun to interest themselves in legal speculation. Sir Leslie Stephen's Science of Ethics traces out with singular sagacity the relation between law and morality. Professor Sidgwick's Elements of Politics contains subtle criticism on the Austinian doctrine of sovereignty. The popularisation, again, of legal ideas has stimulated the effort to reduce the rules of English law to such a body of principles as is to be found in Stephen's Digest of the Criminal Law, or Chalmers's Digest of the Law of Bills of Exchange; and these unauthorised digests, some of which have already passed into Acts of Parliament, are laying the foundation of a complete code of