ate no prepossessions in favour of the
method, and may be said to have been recruited, almost in spite of
himself, by the historical school. But it was impossible for anyone to
discuss the peculiarities of English Criminal Law without also being
plunged into historical investigations. At every point the system is
determined by the circumstances of its growth; and you can no more
account for its oddities or its merits without considering its history
than you can explain the structure of a bat or a seal without going back
to previous forms of life. The growth of the criminal law, as Fitzjames
remarks, is closely connected with the development of the moral
sentiments of the community: with all the great political and social
revolutions and with the changes of the ecclesiastical constitution and
the religious beliefs of the nation. He was accordingly drawn into
writing a history which may be regarded as complementary to the great
constitutional histories of Hallam and Dr. Stubbs. He takes for granted
many of their results, and frankly acknowledges all his obligations. But
he had also to go through many investigations of his own special topics,
and produced a history which, if I am not mistaken, is of the highest
interest as bringing out certain correlative processes in the legal
development of our institutions, which constitutional historians
naturally left in the background.

His early work upon the similar book suggested by his father had made
him more or less familiar with some of the original sources. He now had
to plunge into various legal antiquities, and to study, for example, the
six folio volumes called _Rotuli Parliamentorum_; to delve in year-books
and old reports and the crabbed treatises of ancient lawyers, and to
consider the precise meaning and effect of perplexed and obsolete
statutes. He was not an antiquary by nature, for an antiquary, I take
it, is one who loves antiquity for its own sake, and enjoys a minute
inquiry almost in proportion to its minuteness. Fitzjames's instinct,
on the contrary, was to care for things old or new only so far as they
had some distinct bearing upon living problems of importance. I could
not venture to pronounce upon the value of his researches; but I am
happily able to give the opinion of Professor Maitland, who can speak as
one having authority. 'About the excellence of your brother's History of
English Criminal Law,' he writes to me, 'there can, I suppose, be but
one opinio