ciently. There are few greater pleasures, certainly few were greater
to him, than the exercise of a craft which one has so mastered as to
have lost all the embarrassment of a beginner. He felt that he was not
only up to his duties but had superfluous energy to direct elsewhere.
The pleasantest hours of the day were those before and after business
hours, when he could devote himself to his literary plans.

In some of his letters to Lord Lytton about the time of his appointment,
I find unusual confessions of weariness. He admits that there is a
difference between forty and fifty; and thinks he has not quite the old
elasticity. I believe, however, that this refers to the worry caused by
his work on the Commission, and the daily wrangle over the precise
wording of the code, while the judgeship was not yet a certainty. At any
rate there is no more mention of such feelings after a time; and in the
course of the summer he was once more taking up an important literary
scheme which would have tasked the energies of the youngest and
strongest. He seems to have contemplated for a time a series of books
which should cover almost the whole field of English law and be a modern
substitute for Blackstone. The only part of this actually executed--but
that part was no trifle--was another book upon the English Criminal Law.
It was, in truth, as he ventured to say, 'a remarkable achievement for a
busy man to have written at spare moments.' We must, of course, take
into account his long previous familiarity with the law. The germ of the
book is to be found in the Essay of 1857; and in one way or other, as a
writer, a barrister, a codifier, and a judge, he had ever since had the
subject in his mind. It involved, however, along with much that was
merely recapitulation of familiar topics, a great amount of laborious
investigation of new materials. He mentions towards the end of the time
that he has been working at it for eight hours a day during his holiday
in Ireland. The whole was finished in the autumn of 1882, and it was
published in the following spring.

Fitzjames explains in his preface how the book had come to be written.
He had, as I have said, laid aside the new edition of the original
'View' in order to compile the 'Digest,' which he had felt to be its
necessary complement. I may add that he also wrote with the help of his
eldest son--now Sir Herbert Stephen--a 'Digest of the Law of Criminal
Procedure,' which was published contempor