yer it means the very source and spring of our printed law. Holding it within his hands he feels in a hitherto unsuspected way how singularly modest and unpretentious was the system of law, which, from being the common law of England, has become the common law of empires beyond the seas. But rare as this little treatise is from a collector's point of view, it is a rarer and more truly a treasure to the lawyer. Once the '•introduction to legal education from a hundred years before the publication of Coke's Institutes until fifty years after the publication of Blackstone's Commentaries," {with which treatise on Tenures the lawyer should be familiar at his peril) the little book has put off its earthly garments, as it were, and has become an historical document. As Mr. Wambaugh aptly says: "Nor has Lit tleton's reputation lessened with the lapse of time. It is true, that his famous book is no longer used as a daily key to existing law; but its diminishing utility in practice has been more than balanced by its increasing value as a picture of the past. . . . Here the his torian gets a picture of the law at the inter esting moment when from the middle ages were springing the beginnings of modern life, and reads one of the chief intellectual products in England of the fifteenth century, and, if he is wise, discovers that this little book—at first glance strangely out of place in the Wars of the Roses—was a natural and necessary product of an age when, de spite private and public warfare, or, more ac curately, on account of it, the English peo ple saw in law the only protection from op pression and anarchy. (Ixiv—Ixvi.) The first requisite in an editor is, it would seem, that he has genuine sympathy with his text; for editorial work is dry and repels many a well-disposed soul. This somewhat equivocal attitude often lends spice to the notes of the commentator; but inevitably operates to the detriment of the text, which silently but sensibly suffers in the process. In the next place, it would appear that the editor should possess, in addition to a sympathy for and appreciation of the text, a large and abundant understanding of the author's pur
pose and work to the end that the annota tion may bring out the meaning of the text, rather than blunt, confuse or sink it under a mass of superimposed learning. Mr. Puff's advice to the confidant in The Critic—to keep her "madness in the background"—ap plies in no uncertain way to an editor. And in the next, but in no means the last place, the editor should look upon the text as something sacred. A manifest misprint may well be corrected, an interpolation may well be inserted if indispensible, but the orig inal text of the author should remain, as far as possible, untouched. In this way the work is a new edition, not a new book. Of course, every emendation, or interpolation should be noted, so that the reader may not confuse author and editor. So-called liber ties with the text can find no justification either in law, morals, or good conscience. Mr. Wambaugh possesses these requisites in overflowing measure, and the text of Lit tleton appears, as it should appear, with no unnoted change; illustrated by a large and varied learning, and introduced by a bio graphical and critical essay, which outlines the life of the man Littleton, his relation to the times in which he lived, and the circum stances which led him to the composition of the little masterpiece on Tenures. It is often as perilous to study a man apart from his environment and the circumstances of his times, as to take the weed from the sea, to borrow an illustration from Emerson's exquisite verse. Littleton, so surveyed, is nothing but a lawyer, with little or no claim to human sympathy. Mr. Wambaugh has viewed his author as a product of the mid dle-age England; has given him a local habitation—indeed, he personally visited Lit tleton's birthplace, Frankier, and other places connected with his fame, and has brought him at various points of his career before the reader as a not unknown or ob scure figure of his time. Thus he makes him a contemporary, if not an intimate of Warwick (p. xxv.), and, in stating that he was recorder of Coventry, connects him with his famous successor and commentator Coke (p. Ixi, note 2). Indeed, in another
