n among those who are competent to speak of such a matter. But
I think that he is scarcely likely to get all the credit that is due to
him for certain parts of the work which are especially interesting to
me, and which I have often read--I mean those parts which deal with the
middle ages. They seem to me full of work which is both good and new. I
take it that he had no great love for the middle ages, and wrote the
chapters of which I am speaking as a disagreeable task. I do not think
that he had from nature any great power of transferring himself or his
readers into a remote age, or of thinking the thoughts of a time very
different from that in which he lived: and yet I am struck every time I
take up the book with the thoroughness of his work, and the soundness of
his judgments. I would not say the same of some of his predecessors,
great lawyers though they were, for in dealing with mediaeval affairs
they showed a wonderful credulity. To me it seems that he has often gone
right when they went wrong, and that his estimate of historical evidence
was very much sounder than theirs. The amount of uncongenial, if not
repulsive labour that he must have performed when he was studying the
old law-books is marvellous. He read many things that had not been used,
at all events in an intelligent way, for a very long time past; and--so
I think, but it is impertinent in me to say it--he almost always got
hold of the true story.'

To write three thick volumes involving such inquiries within three years
and a half; and to do the work so well as to deserve this praise from an
accomplished legal antiquary, was by itself an achievement which would
have contented the ambition of an average author. But when it is
remembered that the time devoted to it filled only the interstices of an
occupation which satisfies most appetites for work, and in which he
laboured with conscientious industry, I think that the performance may
deserve Professor Maitland's epithet, 'marvellous.' He was greatly
interested in the success of the book, though his experience had not led
him to anticipate wide popularity. It was well received by competent
judges, but a book upon such a topic, even though not strictly a
'law-book,' can hardly be successful in the circulating-library sense of
the word. Fitzjames, indeed, had done his best to make his work
intelligible to the educated outsider. He avoided as much as possible
all the technicalities which make the ordinary law