nal Law,' with an explanatory
introduction and notes upon the history of some of the legal doctrines
involved. It was published in the spring of 1877,[169] and, as he says
in a letter, it represented the hardest work he had ever done.

It coincided in part with still another hard piece of work. In December
1875 he was appointed Professor of Common Law at the Inns of Court. He
chose for the subject of his first course of lectures the law of
evidence. His Indian Code and the bill introduced by Coleridge in 1873
had made him thoroughly familiar with the minutiae of the subject. Here
again he was encountered by the same difficulty in a more palpable
shape. A lecturer naturally wishes to refer his hearers to a text-book.
But the only books to which he could refer his hearers filled thousands
of pages, and referred to many thousands of cases. The knowledge
obtained from such books and from continual practice in court may
ultimately lead a barrister to acquire comprehensive principles, or at
least an instinctive appreciation of their application in particular
cases. But to refer a student to such sources of information would be a
mockery. He wants a general plan of a district, and you turn him loose
in the forest to learn its paths by himself. Fitzjames accordingly set
to work to supply the want by himself framing a 'digest' of the English
Law of Evidence. Here was another case of 'boiling down,' with the
difficulty that he has to expound a law--and often an irrational
law--instead of making such a law as seems to him expedient. He
undoubtedly boiled his materials down to a small size. The 'Digest' in a
fourth edition contains 143 articles filling 155 moderate pages,
followed by a modest apparatus of notes. I believe that it has been
found practically useful, and an eminent judge has told me that he
always keeps it by him.

Fitzjames held his office of professor until he became a judge in 1879.
He had certainly one primary virtue in the position. He invariably began
his lecture while the clock was striking four and ceased while it was
striking five. He finally took leave of his pupils in an impressive
address when they presented him with a mass of violets and an ornamental
card from the students of each inn, with a kindly letter by which he was
unaffectedly gratified. His class certainly had the advantage of
listening to a teacher who had the closest practical familiarity with
the working of the law, who had laboured long and