Much might be said by qualified persons as to the exquisite technique displayed in Maitland's contributions to the Selden Society. He spared no pains in the examination and collation of manuscripts, and although he modestly disdained expert paleographical knowledge, he need not, we imagine, fear comparison with the most accurate transcribers of medieval documents, or with those who have achieved a special renown for their studies in "diplomatic" or in the affiliation of manuscripts. He possessed other qualities which are not often combined with such a passion and gift for minute scholarship. In the first place he was exceedingly anxious to make his work practically useful and to ease the path for students whose tastes might lead them to attempt similar explorations. He takes the reader into his laboratory and exhibits the whole process of discovery, showing where the difficulties lie, pointing out hopeful lines of enquiry, and providing always a clear chart to the documents, published and unpublished, of his subject. Secondly he combined in an extraordinary measure the gift for hypothesis with the quality of patience. He did not aim at providing sensational or curious results;--"the editor," he writes in the introduction to the first Selden volume, "has not conceived it his duty to hunt for curiosities, the history of law is not a history of curiosities"--he wished for plain truth--to discover the course of medieval justice in all its natural and instructive monotony, in its common forms and in its everyday working garb. "It has been necessary," he writes, referring to his selection of manorial pleas, "to print some matter which in itself is dull and monotonous; a book full of curiosities would be a very unfair representative of what went on in the local courts. We cannot form a true notion of them unless we know how they did their ordinary work, and this we cannot know until we have mastered their common forms." Such a scheme no doubt involves repetition, but there is at least one student of English history who, despite some acquaintance with histories and chronicles, never understood the everyday working of medieval life until he had the good fortune to dive into the publications of the Selden Society.