thought that they could write the history of medieval England without the Year Books." The Reports began in 1285, and from 1293 the stream was fairly continuous. "This surely is a memorable event. When duly considered it appears as one of the great events in English History. To-day men are reporting at Edinburgh and Dublin, at Boston and San Francisco, at Quebec and Sydney and Cape Town, at Calcutta and Madras. Their pedigree is unbroken and indisputable. It goes back to some nameless lawyers at Westminster to whom a happy thought had come. What they desired was not a copy of the chilly record, cut and dried, with its concrete particulars concealing the point of law: the record overladen with the uninteresting names of litigants and oblivious of the interesting names of sages, of justices, of sergeants. What they desired was the debate with the life-blood in it, the twists and turns of advocacy, the quip courteous and the countercheck quarrelsome. They wanted to remember what really fell from Bereford, C. J., his proverbs, his sarcasms: how he emphasised a rule of law by _Noun Dieu_ or _Par Seint Piere_! They wanted to remember how a clever move of Sergeant Herle drove Sergeant Toudeby into an awkward corner, or how Sergeant Passeley invented a new variation on an old defence: and should such a man's name die if the name of Ruy López is to live?" Maitland lived to complete three volumes of the Year Books. The French was printed on one side of the page, a translation executed in terse and faithful English on the other. Those who were familiar with the work of the Literary Director of the Selden Society had no cause for surprise at the exquisite finish of the editing. They were prepared for an elaborate _apparatus criticus_, for a careful account of the manuscripts, and for such notes as might be requisite to explain allusions and to elucidate obscurities. The great discovery, that the Reports were not official records but the private note books of law students, was so entirely in Maitland's happy and characteristic vein, that, although no one else had earned the title to make it, it was quite natural that it should be made by him. But there was one feature in the Introduction to the first volume which startled even his admirers. The editor took occasion to settle the grammar and syntax of the Anglo-French language, its nouns and its verbs, its declensions and its tenses. His friends had known him as lawyer, historian, diplomatist, paleographer, and no exhibition of excellence in any one of these departments would have afforded them the slightest sensation of novelty; but they had not divined in him the philologist and grammarian.