Some years ago it was proposed in Cambridge to issue, with due comment and annotation, Maitland's Collected Papers. 'The Syndics of the University Press did not, however, see their way to a new edition on these lines, and another project was suggested. This was to select certain of the papers likely to be most useful to students in law, history, and politics, to edit them and publish them in one volume.… The editors venture to think that they (the students to wit) have here all that is of practical use to them; and they have put them upon their inquiry as to where they can find the rest.' In other words, if you want to get marks, you will read Maitland's Selected Essys: if you want to waste your time, you will read Maitland.

I cannot think this attitude accords either with the function of an Academic Press, or the respect which a university ought to show to the memory of a master. Granted that some of Maitland's work, now forty years old and more, is 'touched with obsolescence', no passage of time can dull the genius which vibrates in every paragraph he wrote. As Bentley said of Bishop Pearson, 'the very dust of his writings is gold'. But it does not follow that the dust heap is the proper place for them: and such an edition as Professor Hazeltine and his colleagues first proposed would be not only a noble memorial to a scholar of incomparable inspiration, but a history of the progress of the studies in which he was a master. I hope it will still be undertaken. After all, Syndics are not like other publishers. They can always cover their losses by bringing out a Prayer Book in red white and blue, or a new Bible with camera studies of Behemoth and the Pygarg.

Someone may ask what right I have to speak, and I fully admit that much of Maitland's work is above my head. But it so happens, thanks to a good teacher, that on one subject which he treats of I am not altogether uninformed, and never shall I forget the evening when I took down Domesday and Beyond; and read, and read, till the owl in the fir tree began audibly to wonder why the lamp was still burning; the little breezes that stray down the dene from Wansdyke turned chilly; and the dawn came. I have just opened it again, and if I do not shut it quickly, this paper will not get written to-day, or to-morrow: no great loss, perhaps, were it not that I have one or two things to say about Maitland which I believe to be worth saying, and, at this particular time, needful to be said. In passing, I invite the Syndics (and Delegates) to look at the last paragraph of that book—and blush, if Delegates (and Syndics) can.

But before I go any further, I should like to define to myself the character of Maitland's mind: and the first thing that strikes me is its companionable quality. He is never telling you: he is always, most genially and modestly, arguing, never so far ahead that you cannot follow, with a deliberate invitation at every turn to tell him something of your own, and an unforced humour playing over the whole debate. Our intelligent Press periodically sets as a competition: Whom would you most like to take a country walk with? The entrants must be much less modest or self-conscious than I am, because, of their two favourites, I doubt if Dr. Johnson would have thought me worth talking to, and I am sure I should cut but a poor figure after ten miles' unmitigated Socrates. I should without hesitation choose Maitland, not so much for anything he might have to say, as to observe his gift of entering into 'the business, projects, and current notions of right and wrong' in other ages; and his power of 'making the thoughts of our forefathers, their common thought of common things, thinkable' once more.

By taking the history of law and institutions for his province, Maitland planted himself in the position where his genius for thinking other men's thoughts could operate with most effect. Law, as he understood it, is fundamentally a system of common thought about common things: the things and the thoughts, the actual doings, for example, of a villain or a trade unionist, and the reflections thereon of Bracton or the judges in the Taff Vale Case, reacting on each other, and modifying each other into a pattern of such shifting intricacy that the most comprehensive vision will not take in the whole pattern, and the keenest eye will misread some of the incidents. They say now that his theory of the defensive origin of the boroughs is 'wrong', or, what is worse, 'imaginative'; and I am reminded of the warning in my school edition of Julius Caesar: 'Do not talk about Shakespeare's mistakes: they are probably your own.' But very likely his critics are right. As he says himself, 'the new truth generally turns out to be but a quarter truth, and yet one which must modify the whole tale': and in a world so perplexingly contrived as this is, a frank and joyous acknowledgement of ignorance is the only way of wisdom. 'We must go into the twilight, not haphazard, but of set purpose, and knowing well what we are doing'; and, when all the other classes have been abolished, there will remain the distinction between those who know that all hypotheses, interpretations, creeds, programmes, and what not, are questions, and those who suppose them to be answers.

At no time did this truth need to be more frequently or emphatically restated than to-day, and I am glad that the Syndics have allowed the editors to print the essay on the Body Politic, written apparently for a dining club, in which Maitland delivered his profession of faith, and his warning against the facile acceptance of systems. So entirely does he seem to belong to our own world, that it is with surprise one remembers that he was born in 1850, and was nine years old when Macaulay died. But he grew up in a time when systems were the mode, when Auguste Comte had turned the history of the world into a commodious suburban residence—theology on the ground floor, metaphysics above, and the clear light of positivism shining in at the top floor windows: and young Darwinians, going far beyond anything that Darwin would have countenanced, were tracing the development of society with as much assurance as if they had been there all the time: just as, with not less confidence, their grandfathers had propounded the Scheme of Redemption or the Wage Fund Theory, and their grandchildren now propound the materialistic conception of history.

So long as historic systems are in vogue, so long that warning voice will be needed. How plausible they all are, each in its day! How much they explain that was dark before! How easy they make things! How much trouble they take off our minds! Very well: then answer this question on any system you like. In the nineteenth century, the European nations borrowed from us the criminal jury which they had abandoned, and we had kept. Why had we kept it? Try it on Positivist or Evolutionary or Materialistic principles, and see where you get to. Maitland's answer comes with a flash which makes even his editors blink. 'Tut tut,' their footnote says, 'this is a built-up area, and he went through at thirty-one.' I do not know whether the answer is right, but I quote it as the best example in this volume of the soar and swoop which marks Maitland out as the most inspiring of all historical companions. He made of history the Gay Science. To account for a detail of legal history, he lifts to the third century, and watches the Manichean heresies streaming for a thousand years along the Mediterranean coasts to Languedoc. But we were an Orthodox Island. Therefore the Church had no need here to enforce the inquisitorial process proper for the detection of heresy. Therefore we kept the jury. And the next moment he is on the ground, searching the year-books for such grains of truth as that a use in law is not a usus but an opus, and that medieval lawyers sometimes liked to show their superior education by spelling it oeps.

The swiftness with which Maitland moves over the field, and the microscopic observation which never seems to weary on the longest flight, together make him, it seems to me, an almost faultless example of what Bacon called the intellectus purus et aequus, 'never distracted by study of particulars and never lost in contemplation of the entirety', the intellectus simul capax etpenetrans, over which the Idols of the Cave and the Theatre have no power. This volume has set me reading again his Canon Law in the Church of England, which of all his works I have always most admired for the logical dexterity with which the argument is sustained, and most enjoyed for the dainty and respectful malice with which he plants his barbs in the great Bishop. Here he is fencing with an equal, exchanging secret professional jokes between the bouts. In his Constitutional History and the chapter on the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion, which some may regard as his masterpiece, he is speaking tutorially. Elsewhere, and for the most part, he is the explorer reporting his travels as he goes. It is unfortunate for his fame—which he would not in the least have minded—and, what is more to be regretted, for his influence, that so much of his work was involved in technical matters. But I doubt if he left a page, I am sure he did not leave an essay, which has not startled some fit reader, not so much by the range or the precision, as the appropriateness of the learning revealed—the right detail coming exactly at the right moment—or made him glow with that sense of confident and delighted energy which only the highest genius can communicate. And they who have received it will impart it as they can.

Goethe (or someone else) said of (Winckelmann, I think, but I see that this quotation is not going to be so impressive as I intended): 'Man lernt nichts, aber man wird etwas.' One learns nothing, but one becomes something. I certainly do not think it any more desirable that we should all become historians than that we should all take courses in dentistry, plumbing, and cookery. But it is, I believe, of some concern to the Commonwealth that we should all brush our teeth, wash with reasonable regularity, and eat well-chosen food well prepared, and in the same sense and degree a right historical attitude seems to me of special consequence in an age when a wrong attitude is being so diligently inculcated for partisan ends. The materialistic conception of history is no more than the sectarian perversion of the great and truly philosophic doctrine—first adumbrated by the French and English historians of the eighteenth century—that all historic forces are interconnected. But historic forces have their seat in human observation, reflection, and purpose: 'in business, projects, and common notions of right and wrong': they act through the minds of men, they reveal themselves in—at the last analysis they are—their 'common thought of common things'. There they must be looked for, and there only will they be found. And of Maitland we can say that, in his chosen field, no man ever searched more diligently, and no man ever saw so much.