* * * * * The legislative and judicial methods of the several governments are of the first importance to the understanding of New England history, for it was a slow process by which it came to pass that professional lawyers held any shaping hand in the making or the administering of laws. The first Superior Court of Massachusetts under the provincial charter had not a single trained lawyer on the bench, and its assembly was equipped more with persistency and shrewdness in working out its struggle with the crown officer who tried to rule them than with legal acquirements. E. G. Scott, in his _Development of Constitutional Liberty in the English Colonies_ (N. Y., 1882, pp. 31-58), examines the forms of the colonial governments and the political relations of the colonies. No one has better traced their relations to European politics than Bancroft. The legislation of the several governments has had special treatment in Emory Washburn’s _Sketches of the Judicial History of Massachusetts, 1630-1775_ (Boston, 1840); in T. Day’s _Historical Account of the Judiciary of Connecticut_ (Hartford, 1817); in John M. Shirley’s “Early Jurisprudence of New Hampshire,” in the New Hampshire Historical Society’s _Proceedings_, June 13, 1883. Cf. also H. C. Lodge, _Short Hist. of the English Colonies_, pp. 412-419. Of the legislation of Massachusetts, Dr. Moore says[370] that it is “a record which, notwithstanding all its defects, has no parallel in any other American State.” The first edition of the Province Laws, under the new charter, was printed in 1699, and it was annually supplemented by those of the succeeding sessions till 1714, when a second edition was printed, to which an index was added in 1722, and various later editions were issued.[371] In 1869 the first volume of a new edition, of historical importance, was published by the State, with the title _Acts and Resolves, public and private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, with historical and explanatory notes, edited by Ellis Ames and Abner C. Goodell_. Mr. Ames has since died (1884), and the editing is still going on under Mr. Goodell; five volumes, coming down to 1780, having been so far published.[372] =B.= MEN AND MANNERS.—Dr. George E. Ellis, in an address[373] which he delivered in October, 1884, on the occasion of erecting a tablet to Samuel Sewall’s memory in the new edifice of the Old South church, in Boston, of which that last of the puritans had been a member, said:—