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Excerpt from Introduction and Notes to Sir Henry Maine's "Ancient Law"
Germanic legal antiquities had been investi gated to a considerable extent; but the Con tinental scholars who had done this were still hardly aware of the wealth or importance of the material awaiting scientific treatment in England. On the other hand, those who made their results known to English readers, John Mitchell Kemble the foremost, were not learned in the modern law of England, and had not the means of con necting its later or even its mediaeval history with the earliest monuments of English institutions. Thus no one had made any serious attempt to sift the mass of information collected by English professional writers and antiquaries of the six teenth and seventeenth centuries, whose indus trious labour assuredly deserves all praise, and whose judgment has in some cases been restored to credit which it had not deserved to lose. We need hardly say that Maine, not being a technical antiquary, did not attempt any such thing him self. Indeed, the work he actually did was needful to disclose the right lines of antiquarian research, and rescue it from the state of mere dilettante curiosity.
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