aneously with the 'History.'
The 'Digest' had led to the code and to the Commission. When the
Commission was over, he returned to the proposed new edition of the
'View.' But Fitzjames seems to have had an odd incapacity for producing
a new edition. We, who call ourselves authors by profession, are
sometimes tempted, and we do not always resist the temptation, to
describe a book as 'revised and corrected' when, in point of fact, we
have added a note or two and struck out half a dozen obvious misprints.
When Fitzjames said that his earlier treatise might be described as 'in
some sense a first edition' of the later, he meant that he had written
an entirely new book upon a different aspect of the old subject. The
'View' is in one volume of about 500 pages, nearly a third of which (153
pages) consists of reports of typical French and English trials. These
are reprinted in the 'History.' Of the remainder, over 100 pages are
devoted to the Law of Evidence, which is not discussed in the 'History.'
Consequently the first 233 pages of the 'View' correspond to the whole
of the three volumes of the 'History,' which, omitting the reported
trials given in both books, contain 4,440 pages. That is, the book has
swelled to six times the original size, and I do not think that a single
sentence of the original remains. With what propriety this can be called
a 'new edition' I will not try to decide.

The cause of this complete transformation of the book is significant.
Fitzjames, in his preface, observes that much has been said of the
'historical method' of late years. It has, he agrees, 'thrown great
light upon the laws and institutions of remote antiquity.' Less,
however, has been done for modern times; although what is called
'constitutional history' has been 'investigated with admirable skill and
profound learning.' As I have noticed, his original adherence to the
theories of Bentham and Austin had tended to make him comparatively
indifferent to the principles accepted and illustrated by the writings
of Maine. He had looked at first with some doubts upon those
performances and the brilliant generalisations of 'Ancient Law' and its
successors. He quotes somewhere a phrase of his friend Bowen, who had
said that he read Maine's works with the profoundest admiration for the
genius of the author, but with just a faint suspicion somewhere in the
background of his mind that the results might turn out to be all
nonsense. Fitzjames had at any r