to his 'Reports' and his 'Institutes' alike; and it has had very serious consequences on English law. His treatment of Pinnel's case is an example. By laying down as actually decided by the court what was at the most only a dictum not necessary for the particular decision, he made it a rule of our law that a creditor who on the day when his debt falls due accepts a smaller sum than is due to him in satisfaction of the whole, and executes no deed of acquittance, is not bound by the arrangement (Co. Lift. 212 b; and see Foakes v. Beer, L. R. 9 App. Cas. 605, 616). Judges are now more ready than they were formerly to scrutinise his law. It is less true than it used to be that his works have an 'intrinsic authority in the courts of justice, and do not entirely depend on the strength of their quotations from older authors' (Blackstone, i. 72). But in days when this intrinsic authority had a real existence, many of his doctrines were so firmly established by judicial decision that no judge can now disregard them. 'I am afraid,' said Chief-justice Best, 'we should get rid of a good deal of what is considered law in Westminster Hall, if what Lord Coke says without authority is not law' (2 Bing. 296).
The 'Institutes' are in four parts: the first is a reprint of Littleton's treatise on tenures, with a translation and a commentary; the second, the text of various statutes from Magna Charta to the time of James I., with a full exposition; the third is on criminal law; and the fourth is a treatise on the jurisdiction of the different courts of law. The first part, by which Coke is best known, and which is commonly described as 'Coke upon Littleton,' was intended as a law student's first book. The commentary is very minute. The meaning of legal terms is explained; their etymology is insisted upon as an invaluable aid to their right understanding; and Littleton's summary statement of the law is amplified by references to the year-books and the older writers. Coke's etymologies are of the quaintest and most innocent character. 'Parliament' of course comes from 'parler lament' (110 a); 'terra dicetur a terendo quia vomere teritur' (4 a); 'in French coine signifieth a corner, because in ancient times money was square with corners, as it is in some countries at this day;' 'moneta dicetur a monendo, not only because he that hath it, is to be warned providently to use it, but also because nota ilia de authore et valore admonet' (207 b); 'robberie . . . because the goods are taken as it were de la robe, from the robe, that is, from the person' (288 a). 'Coke upon Littleton' is almost everything that an institutional work should not be. Its text is a treatise in Norman French, which may be, as Coke, with a brotherly lavishness of praise, called it, 'the most perfect and absolute work that ever was written in any humane science,' but whose law was a century and a half old, and was fast growing obsolete. The commentary makes no attempt to bring into strong light the broad principles of law, the educational value of which nevertheless Coke himself seems to have appreciated. His evident anxiety is to let no legal crevice be unexplored, for Littleton is to be studied like holy writ. 'Certain it is,' he says in the preface, 'that there is never period, nor (for the most part) a word, nor an &c. but affordeth excellent matter of learning.' And in this spirit he writes throughout, distracting his patient reader with unimportant exceptions and 'divers diversities.' By binding himself, moreover, to Littleton's text, and by crowding together in his notes all the points which the text suggests, Coke could not avoid an arrangement of topics which to a student is hardly more useful, and is certainly not more attractive, than that of an ordinary digest. In short, there is much to be said for the opinion of Roger North, which has excited the indignation of Coke's admirers, that the 'comment upon Littleton ought not to be read by students, to whom it is, at least, unprofitable; for it is but a commonplace, and much more obscure than the bare text without it' (Lives, i. 17). Compared with such a scientific treatise as Fearne's 'Contingent Remainders,' it is only a learned collection of somewhat disjointed notes, not distinguished by any profound analysis of legal ideas. 'Truly,' said Hobbes, the severest and among the acutest of his critics, 'I never read weaker reasoning in any author on the law of England than in Sir Edward Coke's Institutes, how well so ever he could plead' (Eng. Works, vi. 144). His merits and the causes of his reputation are not far to seek. For the first time he made accessible in English the older learning, which till then had to be painfully gathered from the year-books and from forbidding abridgments. And so fully has the service been appreciated that since Coke's days the lawyers are few who have known their year-books at first hand. What was obscure and difficult even to the learned he put into language which, in spite of all its pedantry, and of the many unprofitable subtleties which it covers, is direct and clear. Bare justice has been done to his style. His legal propositions may often be unsound in substance, but in his mode of stating what he believes or wishes to be law he often reaches a perfection of form, exhibiting that freedom from flabbiness and that
