To the deepest and most serious minds the literature of knowledge is also the literature of power. Maitland's outlook and ideal were at the period of intellectual virility greatly affected by two books, Savigny's _Geschichte des Römischen Rechts_ and Stubbs' _Constitutional History_. The English book he found in a London Club and "read it because it was interesting," falling perhaps, as he afterwards suggested, for that very reason "more completely under its domination than those who have passed through schools of history are likely to fall." Of the German he used to say that Savigny first opened his eyes as to the way in which law should be regarded. Justinian's Pandects only make precise What simply sparkled in men's eyes before, Twitched in their brow or quivered in their lip, Waited the speech that called but would not come[10]. Law was a product of human life, the expression of human needs, the declaration of the social will; and so a rational view of law would be won only from some height whence it would be possible to survey the great historic prospect which stretches from the Twelve Tables and the _Leges Barbarorum_ to the German Civil Code and the judgments reported in the morning newspaper. Readers of _Bracton's Note Book_ will remember Maitland's description of Azo as "the Savigny of the thirteenth century," as a principal source from which our greatest medieval jurist obtained a rational conception of the domain of law. Savigny did not write the same kind of book as Azo. He worked in a different medium and on a larger canvas but with analogous effects. He made the principles of legal development intelligible by exhibiting them in the vast framework of medieval Latin and Teutonic civilization and as part of the organic growth of the Western nations. Maitland's early enthusiasm for the German master took a characteristic form: he began a translation of the history. The translation of Savigny was neither completed nor published. Maitland's first contribution to legal literature was an anonymous article which appeared in the _Westminster Review_ in 1879. This was not primarily an historical disquisition though it displayed a width of historical knowledge surprising in so young a man, but a bold, eloquent, and humorous plea for a sweeping change in the English law of Real Property. "Let all Property be personal property. Abolish the heir at law." This alteration in the law of inheritance would lead to great simplification and would remove much ambiguity, injustice and cost. Nothing short of this would do anything worth doing. A few little changes had been made in the past, "for accidents will happen in the best regulated museums," but it was no use recommending timid subsidiary changes while the central anomaly, the source of all complexity and confusion, was permitted to continue. "It is not unlikely," remarked the author with grave irony, "that we are behind an age whose chief ambition is to be behind itself."