Apart from their interest for the professional student of legal antiquities, Maitland's papers upon Trust and Corporation possess an enduring value by reason of the fine touches of legal and historical perception which are scattered so freely through them. A collection of acute and brilliant observations might without difficulty be made from this as from any other portion of his historical work. "All that we English people mean by religious liberty has been intimately connected with the making of Trusts. Persons who can never be in the wrong are useless in a Court of law. The making of grand theories has never been our strong point. The theory which lies upon the surface is sometimes a borrowed theory which has never penetrated far, while the really vital principles must be sought for in out of the way places. A dogma is of no importance unless and until there is some great desire within it. _Quasi_ is one of the few Latin words that English lawyers really love. English history can never be an elementary subject. We are not logical enough to be elementary." Such phrases, even if detached from their context, have a life of their own, but they cannot be so detached without the loss of the greater part of their significance. An epigram may be an extraneous flourish as irrelevant to all substantial purpose as the ornament of the bad architect. Maitland's wit was seldom otiose; it was a shining segment in the solid masonry of argument. In the summer of 1907 Maitland delivered the Rede Lecture at Cambridge, choosing for his theme English Law and the Renaissance. It was his object to show how, when Humanism was reviving the study of Roman law, when Roman law was expelling German law from Germany and winning victories over the relics of Anglo-Norman custom in Scotland, England succeeded in preserving her medieval law books despite their bad Latin and their worse French. The secret was to be found in an institution peculiar to this country, in the existence of the Inns of Court. "Unchartered, unprivileged, unendowed, without remembered founders, these groups of lawyers formed themselves, and in course of time evolved a scheme of legal education; an academic scheme of the medieval sort, oral and disputatious.... We may well doubt whether aught else would have saved English law in the age of the Reception." But the lecture, though based upon minute enquiries, was not purely historical. After pointing out that a hundred legislatures were now building on that foundation of English law--"the work which was not submerged"--Maitland surveyed the prospects for the future and pronounced that the unity of English law was precarious. Queensland had made her own penal code in 1895; other colonies might follow in the same way. The Germans, "by a mighty effort of science and forbearance," had unified their law upon a national and historical basis. Might not the British Parliament endeavour to put out work which