which I do promise you is this, that your professional training, instead of impoverishing and narrowing your interests, will have widened and enriched them; that your professional ambition will be a noble and not a mean one; that you will have a vocation and not a drudgery; that your life will be not less but more human.

Instead of becoming more and more enslaved to routine, you will find in your profession an increasing and expanding circle of contact with scholarship, with history, with the natural sciences, with philosophy, and with the spirit if not with the matter even of the fine arts. Not that I wish you to foster illusions of any kind. It would be as idle to pretend that law is primarily or conspicuously a fine art as to pretend that any one of the fine arts can be mastered without an apprenticeship as long, as technical, as laborious, and at first sight as ungenial as that of the law itself. Still it is true that the highest kind of scientific excellence ever has a touch of artistic genius. least I know not what other or better name to find for that informing light of imaginative intellect which sets a Davy or a Faraday in a different rank from many deserving and eminent physicists, or in our own science a Mansfield or a Willes from many deserving and eminent lawyers. Therefore I am bold to say that the lawyer has not reached the height of his vocation who does not find therein (as the mathematician in even less promising matter) scope for a peculiar but genuine artistic function. We are not called upon to decide whether the discovery of the

At

Aphrodite of Melos or of the unique codex of Gaius were more precious to mankind, or to choose whether Blackstone's Commentaries would be too great a ransom for one symphony of Beethoven. These and such like toys are for debating societies. But this we claim for the true and accomplished lawyer, that is, for you if you will truly follow the quest. As a painter rests on the deep and luminous air of Turner, or the perfect detail of a drawing of Lionardo; as ears attuned to music are rapt with the full pulse and motion of the orchestra that a Richter or a Lamoureux commands, or charmed with the modulation of the solitary instrument in the hands of a Joachim; as a swordsman watches the flashing sweep of the sabre, or the nimbler and subtler play of opposing foils; such joy may you find in the lucid exposition of broad legal principles, or in the conduct of a finely reasoned argument on their application to a disputed point. And so shall you enter into the fellowship of the masters and sages of our craft, and be free of that ideal world which our greatest living painter has conceived and realised in his master-work. I speak not of things invisible or in the fashion of a dream; for Mr. Watts, in his fresco that looks down on the Hall of Lincoln's Inn, has both seen them and made them visible to others. In that world Moses and Manu sit enthroned side by side, guiding the dawning sense of judgment and righteousness in the two master races of the earth; Solon and Scaevola and Ulpian walk as familiar friends with Blackstone and Kent, with Holt and Marshall; and the bigotry of a Justinian and the

You

crimes of a Bonaparte are forgotten, because at their bidding the rough places of the ways of justice were made plain. There you shall see in very truth how the spark fostered in our own land by Glanvill and Bracton waxed into a clear flame under the care of Brian and Choke, Littleton and Fortescue,' was tended by Coke and Hale, and was made a light to shine round the world by Holt, and Mansfield, and the Scotts, and others whom living men remember. shall understand how great a heritage is the law of England, whereof we and our brethren across the ocean are partakers, and you shall deem treaties and covenants a feeble bond in comparison of it; and you shall know with certain assurance that, however arduous has been your pilgrimage, the achievement is a full answer. So venerable, so majestic, is this living temple of justice, this immemorial and yet freshly growing fabric of the Common Law, that the least of us is happy who hereafter may point to so much as one stone thereof and say, The work of my hands is there.

V

THE ENGLISH MANOR 1

In this exceedingly complex historical product there are two leading facts or groups of facts to be explained. We have the institution of the Manor, as known to lawyers, decrepit and in the way of being reduced to a shadowy name by the enfranchisement of copyholds, but still alive. A manor is an ancient imperium in imperio, as the family settlement of great estates may in some ways be deemed a modern one. It is a fortress island of Franco-Norman feudalism strangely blended with ancient local custom, holding out against that levelling flood of the Common Law which our forefathers, disguising a bold and farsighted centralising policy under an innocent phrase, named "the custom of the realm." Like the scheme of a family settlement, the customs of a manor are privileged to exclude and modify the ordinary law within a pretty wide range of variation. In both cases the varieties that actually occur are found to be consistent with a well-marked generic resemblance. The private law of the estate (to use a happy phrase

1 This essay contains the substance of several lectures given on different occasions.

of Sir H. Maine's) and the private law of the manor have each their own regular type. Aberrations are possible, but rare. Then we have or had, more or less associated with the manor, the system of commonfield cultivation which prevailed in many parts of the country within living memory, and of which many traces yet remain. The measures of agricultural improvement which made an end of the system in practice have at the same time put its extent and its details more fully on record, in the shape of evidence and reports, than had ever been done before. As regards this head, we have to depend almost entirely on historical and economical sources of knowledge. Lawyers have confined themselves to a technical theory of tenure into which the facts of usage could at need be dovetailed without manifestly spoiling the work. This was done piecemeal and with grudging; the facts might be known to a whole country-side, and natural in the farmer's eyes; but it was reason enough for the lawyer to treat them as abnormal that they strained his accepted theory. When we turn from Kemble's or Nasse's marshalling of the facts to Coke's commentary on the law of tenures according to Littleton's semi-sacred text, we find that Coke's brief and apparently capricious suggestions of odd legal possibilities become suddenly luminous. As matter of law, the Manor and the Common Fields have not any necessary connection. The historical problem (which is also capable of becoming in particular cases a legal problem of practical importance, and has become so in cases within our knowledge) is to