In the summer of 1892 Maitland advertised a course of lectures upon "Some Principles of Equity," and from that date onward till 1906 a course upon equity--"Equity more especially Trusts" was the favourite title--figured in the yearly programme of the Downing Professor. At first the subject was packed into the Lent term; then the lectures grew and overflowed into the summer. "I put in some business," he would observe gaily, "the business" consisting of recent decisions of the Chancery division, for the lectures were revised year by year to keep pace with the march of knowledge and the requirements of the practical student. Of these discourses there is the less reason to speak, even if the present writer were entitled to be heard, seeing that they have now been given to the world, thanks to the labour of two distinguished and devoted pupils. Maitland explained to his audience the whole system of modern equity, and when a lawyer is unfolding the Administration of Assets or the doctrines of Conversion, Election and Specific Performance to qualified persons, the layman would do well to keep his peace. It is, however, a quality in Maitland that much as he enjoyed the technicalities of law, he was never content to be purely technical. The same gifts which shone out in his conversation, the genius for perspicuous and graphic description, the quick darting flight to the essential point, the fertile power of exhibiting a subject in new and original aspects were conspicuous in his handling of the least promising topics, and these lectures could never have been written by a man who was nothing more than a sound Chancery practitioner. What is equity and what is its relation to the common law? So simple and fundamental do these questions appear to be that one would imagine that the correct answer to them must have been given again and again. It is one of those numerous cases in which a truth which appears to be quite obvious as soon as it is pointed out has lain if not unperceived, at least imperfectly perceived, because the proper perspective depends upon an unusual combination of studies. Maitland, doubly equipped as an historian and a lawyer, found no difficulty in demonstrating two propositions which had never been clearly stated before, first that "equity without common law would have been a castle in the air and an impossibility," and second "that we ought to think of the relation between common law and equity not as that between two conflicting systems but as that between code and supplement, that between text and gloss." Such observations will soon savour of platitude. That equity was not a self-sufficient system, that it was hardly a system at all but rather "a collection of additional rules," that if the common law had been abolished equity must have disappeared also, for it presupposed a great body of common law, that normally the relation between equity and law has not been one of conflict, for the presence