Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History (September 1907) Volume 1:
DE QUINCEY, in one of his Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected, quotes Dr. Johnson's pronouncement upon French literature (and it was the kindest thing he had to say about it), that "he valued it chiefly for this reason: that it had a book upon every subject." Even so much as this could hardly be claimed for our own literature in English. To this day it has no complete book upon the history of its own law. The attempts of Blackstone, Crabb, and Reeves are of a past epoch. The progress of a century of historical thought has fixed a great gulf between us and them. To-day, this branch of our literature dates virtually from Mr. Justice Holmes' " The Common Law " and Sir Frederick Pollock's and Professor Maitland's "History" the first writers in this field (as Hallam says of Montaigne among French classical writers)" whom a gentleman is ashamed not to have read."
The present state of our knowledge of the history of our law may be likened to an unfinished building, whose foundations have been laid and whose frame and beams have been erected. The roof, the walls, the floors, the furnishings and decoration, are yet lacking. Its scope and internal plan, its architecture and its relation of parts, can be already plainly seen. But it cannot yet be inhabited; and many kinds of workmen must labor longer upon it. These foundations are the volumes of Sir Frederick Pollock and Professor Maitland, resting upon the still deeper Germanic caissons of Professor Heinrich Brunner and his co-workers. This frame and these cross-beams are, on the one hand, the few larger monographs, from Mr. Justice Holmes' “The Common Law " and Professor Bigelow's " Anglo-Norman Procedure," of thirty years ago, to the Selden Society's source-books and Mr. Holdsworth's recent first volume; and, on the other hand, the more numerous essays and chapters of the authors represented in these present volumes.
But, until now, most of these lesser structural members of the framework have lain scattered about upon the ground, here and there, ready for use, and yet not fully serviceable because not easily accessible and not assembled in their relations to each other and to the whole. It is the purpose of these volumes to assemble and make accessible these valuable parts of the structure of our legal history.
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