FREDERIC WILLIAM MAITLAND. 905 



essays, most of which have been brought together into the three 

 volumes of his "Collected Papers," his most important works are 

 "Domesday Book and Beyond" (1897); "Township and Borough" 

 (1898); "Roman Canon Law in the Church of England" (1898); a 

 translation of Gierke's " Political Theories of the Middle x\ges" (1900) ; 

 a brilliant lecture on "English Law and the Renaissance" (1901); 

 a posthimious set of lectures on "The Constitutional History of 

 P]ngland" (1908); and the classic "History of English Law before 

 the Time of Edward I" (1895), published conjointly with Sir Fred- 

 erick Pollock but chiefly the work of Maitland. His last weeks in 

 Cambridge were given to the "Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen." 

 A full bibliography of his writings is appended to A. L. Smith's 

 "Frederic William Maitland" (Oxford, 1908), where many charac- 

 teristic passages are quoted. A biography, with a number of letters 

 illustrating his style and the charm of his personality, has been pub- 

 lished by Herbert Fisher (Cambridge, 1910). 



As an historian of English law Maitland has never been equalled. 

 He was a finished jurist without the lawyer's reverence for form and 

 authority; he combined the philosopher's power of analysis with the 

 faculty of seeing everything in the concrete; and he had the delicate 

 sense of evidence, the flashing insight, the vivid imagination, and the 

 human sympathy of the great historian. To him the history of law 

 was the history, not of forms, but of ideas; through it "the thoughts 

 of men in the past must once more become thinkable to us." Yet 

 law is not something abstract: its records "come from life," as he 

 said of the Year Books, and must return to life. "English law is 

 English history," he wrote; yet, first of English scholars, he saw it 

 clearly against its Continental background. Unlike many jurists, 

 howev^er, he did not seek to reduce the manifold complexities of life 

 to a few general principles and to clarify what had never been clear; 

 he avoided too definite conclusions and rather let his mind play about 

 a subject in all its variety and illuminate it from different angles. 

 To a masterly gift of exposition and a talent for apt illustration he 

 joined a marvellous style, pointed, witty, epigrammatic, lighting up 

 the dullest and most technical subject, and adorning everything it 

 touched. Confining himself to the history of institutions and ideas, 

 he did not enter the field of the narrative historian, so that the absence 

 of a common standard renders comparisons difficult; but the quality 

 of his mind justifies Lord Acton's judgment that he was " the ablest 

 historian in England." 



Charles H. Haskins. 



