whole range of the moral sciences. At one master-stroke he forged a new and lasting bond between law, history, and anthropology. Jurisprudence itself has become a study of the living growth of human society through all its stages, and it is no longer possible for law to be dealt with as a collection of rules imposed on societies as it were by accident, nor for the resemblances and differences of the laws of different societies to be regarded as casual.-POLLOCK, SIR FREDERICK, 1888-90, Sir Henry Maine and his Work, Oxford Lectures and Other Discourses, pp. 158, 159.

The slow irresistible pressure of Law is the strongest British influence now working in India, and Maine, from 1862 to his death, had more to do than any other single man, I will not say with making Indian law, but with determining what Indian law should be. That and the new spirit which he breathed into juridical studies in England, and to some extent in other countries of the West, are his chief titles to the remembrance of posterity. His published works are in the hands of all who care for the studies which he cultivated, and the remainder of this volume will be devoted to giving some idea of the nature and extent of his work during the years when he acted directly upon Indian legislation and government, at Calcutta and Simla.-DUFF, SIR MOUNTSTUART ELPHINSTONE GRANT, 1892, Sir Henry Maine, A Brief Memoir of His Life, p. 83.

Maine treated his great subject not only with similar learning and logic, but with the advantages of a lucid style and much fine literary power,-making a very abstruse subject, handled in a new and unusual method, a book as agreeable to read as it was valuable and important in historical science. If it is too much to say that he "created a new method for the study of legal ideas and the institutions. founded upon them," it is yet certain that no one of his time had used that method so powerfully.-OLIPHANT, MARGARET O. W.. 1892, The Victorian Age of English Literature, p. 551.

Few writers of our time could claim the phrase "mitis sapientia" as Maine could, though it is possible that he was a little too much given to theories.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1896; A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, p. 358.

It ["Ancient Law"] has two great mer

its. It is written in a most lucid, pleasant style, and it is decidedly original in substance. Maine's design is far less ambitious than Buckle's; but for that very reason his performance is more adequate. The most conspicuous distinction between the two is that the later writer shows in far greater measure than his predecessor the modern sense of the importance of origins. It was this that gave his work importance. To a great extent the task of recent historians has been to trace institutions to their source, and explain their later development by means of the germs out of which they have grown. In this respect Maine was a pioneer, and his later work was just a fuller exposition of the principles at the root of "Ancient Law." His "Village Communities" and his "Early History of Institutions" are both inspired by the same idea. In his "Popular Government" he may be said to break new ground; but it is easy to see the influence on that book of the author's prolonged study of early forms of society. These later books are not perhaps intrinsically inferior to "Ancient Law," but they are less suggestive, just because so much of the work had been already done by it.WALKER, HUGH, 1897, The Age of Tennyson, p. 135.

I heard Maine deliver in the hall of my college at Oxford the lectures which were published in his book entitled "Village Communities in the East and West;" and his pregnant suggestions have constantly guided my work in India, and throughout my life have chiefly inspired my studies, whenever I have been able to find time for any studies at all. For his far-reaching, penetrating, and illuminating genius I have a profound admiration. . . . I pass from Maine the Law Member of Council to Maine the writer of books. He never constructed a complete science of jurisprudence, still less a complete science of sociology. works have been described as groups of essays rather than systematic treatises; but they appear to me to possess a certain unity. He never published a revised edition of "Ancient Law," but that book contains the germinal ideas out of which all else he wrote was unfolded. . . . I remember being told at Oxford, in the year 1870 or thereabouts, that Maine was anxious to write his "Village Communities" before he forgot what he had to say. It was delightful to hear of something so entirely human

His

in one I regarded as so great. The first chapter of that book is, I think, from an Indian point of view, one of the most important that he ever wrote. The

achievement known to the learned world is Maine's account of the early history of property, the process of feudalisation, and the decay of feudal property in France and England. This includes his description of the Irish tribe, and his discussions of village communities in the East and West. The subject, in fact, is nothing less than his view of the general history of property in land. In one section of this extensive field of research a whole literature has sprung up chiefly, though not exclusively, from seed of his sowing. Phear, Seebohm, Gomme, and Baden-Powell, amongst others have all written on the village community, and all acknowledge their obligations to Maine. One effect in India of Maine's teaching here is that we can never again confound Indian and English ideas of landed property.-TUPPER, CHARLES LEWIS, 1898, India and Sir Henry Maine, Journal of the Society of Arts, vol. 46, pp. 390, 391, 394, 395, 397.

Sir Henry Maine was a lawyer with a style, and belongs, by method and genius, among men of letters. The literary world looks askance upon a lawyer, and is slow to believe that the grim and formal matter of his studies can by any alchemy of style be transmuted into literature. Calfskin seems to it the most unlikely of all bindings to contain anything engaging to read. Lawyers, in their turn, are apt to associate the word "literature" almost exclusively with works of the imagination, and to think "style" a thing wholly misleading and unscientific.

He moves in a large region, where it is refreshing to be of his company, where wide prospects open with every comment, and you seem, as he talks, to be upon a tour of

the world. . . . Maine disliked what is called "fine" writing, as every man of taste must; and he was no coiner of striking phrases. . . . The work which has since held the attention of the world. . . . His now celebrated volume on "Ancient Law," his first book, and unquestionably his greatest. It was the condensed and perfected substance of his lectures at the Inn of Court. It was in one sense not an original work: it was not founded on original research. Its author had broken no new ground and made no discoveries. He had simply taken the best historians of Roman law, great German scholars chiefly-had united and vivified, extended and illustrated, their conclusions in his own comprehensive way; had drawn, with that singularly firm hand of his, the long lines that connected antique states of mind with unquestioned but otherwise inexplicable modern principles of law; had made obscure things luminous, and released a great body of cloistered learning into the world, where common students read and plod and seek to understand. . . . The book ["Popu lar Government"] abounds in good things. Its examination of the abstract doctrines which underlie democracy is in his best manner, every sentence of it tells. style is pointed, too, and animated beyond his wont, hurried here and there into a quick pace by force of feeling, by ardour against an adversary. He finds, besides, with his unerring instinct for the heart of a question, just where the whole theory and practice of democracy show the elements that will make it last or fail. . . . Maine's style in "Popular Government" is, as I have said, much more spirited than his style elsewhere, and smacks sometimes with a very racy flavor.-WILSON, WOODROW, 1898, A Lawyer with a Style, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 82, pp. 363, 364, 367, 372.

The

virtues. DUFF, LADY A. J. GRANT, 1889, Laurence Oliphant, Contemporary Review, vol. 55, p. 179.

Oliphant's life seems a lost one, save as a beacon to warn others.-LEISCHING, LOUIS, 1891, Personal Reminiscences of Laurence Oliphant.

If we are to consider his life a failure, so also must we consider the lives of all men and women who faithfully follow the light they have, unless that light should chance to guide them where they can lounge in easy chairs and sleep on beds of down.LEWIN, WALTER, 1891, Laurence Oliphant, The Academy, vol. 40, p. 30.

Though of British parentage, Laurence Oliphant was born in Africa, spent more than two-thirds of his life out of England, and never remained more than a year or two at a time in the land of his fathers. Travel was his education, travel was his livelihood, travel was his heaven, and to be kept from travel was his hell. . . . From thirty years on to nearly three-score, he remained the same rolling stone. He appears to have been incapable of a generous enthusiasm for the great literary men of his age. His reading was always limited, and he had no correspondence with writers of note. We see, indeed, in his case the strange phenomenon of a prolific and much vaunted writer without any taste or appreciation for poetry or belles lettres. It was this lack of taste that made it possible for Oliphant to pin his faith to such an impostor as the author of "The Great Republic: A Poem of the Sun," Thomas Lake Harris, whom he styled "the greatest poet of the age, as yet, alas! unknown to fame. It was this same lack that enabled him to accept as poetry some doggerel rhymes he had himself produced, during his separation from his wife, under the alleged influence of a spiritual "counterpart" in Heaven. Nor was his taste in other departments of art superior to his taste in literature, as is proved by his excessive admiration for Russian architecture. ANDERSON, EDWARD PLAYFAIR, 1891, Laurence Oliphant, The Dial, vol. 12, pp. 138, 140.

His observations were sharp and severe, but his political doctrines were of unswerving rectitude, and his judgments on men and things were both caustic and infallible. . . . He was a man who could not submit to discipline in the ordinary business of life.

He lost his temper if he received any orders, and he resigned at the first remark that interfered with his arrangements.BLOWITZ, HENRI GEORGES ADOLPHE OPPERDE, 1891, Another Chapter of My Memoirs, Harper's Magazine, vol. 82, pp. 292, 299.

His career as a whole, though brilliant in parts, was a melancholy waste of grand opportunities and a misuse of splendid talents. . . . At all stages of his career, Oliphant was a profoundly religious man; but his religion was not that of the majority; the system which he adopted for his own use did not wholly satisfy him, and he suffered from an abnormal development of one side of his nature. Even when under the baneful domination of Mr. Harris, he engaged in enterprises requiring a cool head and in adventures requiring a brave heart. He was a peculiar compound of mysticism as beautiful but as barren as moonshine, and of practical good sense; indeed, his business capacity was higher than his talent for philosophising. His most useful books are those telling of his explorations in the Holy Land; the most sensible of his actions were those which related to restoring its former prosperity and populousness to Palestine.-RAE, W. FRASER, 1891, A Modern Mystic, Temple Bar, vol. 93, pp. 413, 427.

Brilliant, versatile, and accomplished we all knew Oliphant to be, and yet there was some deep defect in his composition which prevented him from reaching the distinction to which his natural abilities, had they been accompanied with steadfastness of purpose, would undoubtedly have carried him. Whatever he undertook to do he did well, but when he had done it he had a tendency to fly off from that particular field of effort, and to take up something new. He was the very man, one might have supposed, to succeed in the diplomatic service; but somehow or other he allowed all his chances to slip through his fingers. He had not the requisite concentration of mind or sustained industry to bring him to the front at the bar, to which he once thought of devoting himself, and even the pursuit of literature he followed in an uncertain, irregular, spasmodic fashion.JENNINGS, L. J., 1891, Laurence Oliphant, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 64, p. 176.

The charm of Oliphant's alert and versatile intellect and sympathetic character

was recognised by a wide circle of friends. It was felt not least by those who most regretted the strange religious developments which led to the waste of his powers and his enslavement to such a prophet as Harris. He was beloved for his boyish simplicity and the warmth of heart which appeared through all his illusions. Suggestions of insanity were, of course, made, but apparently without definite reasons. Remarkable talents without thorough training have thrown many minds off their balance, and Oliphant's case is only exceptional for the singular combination of two apparently inconsistent careers. Till his last years, at any rate, his religious mysticism did not disqualify him for being also a shrewd financier, a charming man of the world, and a brilliant writer.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1895, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XLII, P. 137.

GENERAL

"Piccadilly" has just enough of sketchy carelessness and improbability to pass for originality, and to lead many people into thinking that the author could do much greater things if he liked. How far "Altiora Peto" has complicated or dispelled this notion it is impossible to say, though it is said to have been favourably received. We are, therefore, the more bound to confess at once that we have found it entirely dull and uninteresting, both in detail and as a whole. . . . After searching diligently and anxiously we really cannot find a single thing to praise in this book, unless it be the grammar and spelling, and the big print and thick paper; but all that is a poor compliment. Of course, one feels that Mr. Oliphant is a practised writer, and a man of ability and culture, and that there is nothing to reprobate or make game of in his work. All the same, it is as clear as his print that he has no more idea of what a novel should be than a mummy, and that he never can and never will write a novel worth yawning over.-PURCELL, E., 1883, Altiora Peto, The Academy, vol. 24, p. 240.

He has taken little or no pains; he has insufficient knowledge of many subjects of which he treats; the book ["Haifa"] is scrappy, careless, and unconnected, being a mere series of hasty letters scribbled off for the columns of a New York newspaper, and reprinted without arrangement, condensation, or due revision; and yet, in spite of all these defects, it possesses the

delightful and indescribable flavour of genius. TAYLOR, ISAAC, 1887, Haifa, The Academy, vol. 31, p. 319.

By an obvious law of its evolutionary progress physical science has of late years passed into the region of the infinitesimally

minute. . . . It is a field in which Mr. Oliphant's imagination runs riot to an excess which I at least have never seen surpassed.

He explores the world of spirits with

a self assurance which no materialist investigating the laws of matter could possibly rival.-OWEN, JOHN, 1888, Scientific Religion, The Academy, vol. 34, p. 81.

In 1888 he published "Scientific Religion," perhaps the least read of his works, though it was the one which he valued himself the most. It contains the history of the opinions he finally reached. The style is difficult and somewhat repellent, and the ideas extremely hard of comprehension to ordinary readers, while it is difficult to

understand the union of belief in the verbal inspiration of the canon, with profound distrust of the Churches which fixed that canon. Still there are passages of great beauty, and in many points the differences between his ideas and those of the Christian Churches are rather matters of phraseology than of dogma.-DUFF, LADY A. J. GRANT, 1889, Laurence Oliphant, Contemporary Review, vol. 55, p. 187.

But the generation, not only of his contemporaries but of their children, must be exhausted indeed before the name of Laurence Oliphant will cease to conjure up memories of all that was most brilliant in intellect, most tender in heart, most trenchant in attack, most eager to succour in life. There has been no such bold satirist, no such cynic philosopher, no such devoted enthusiast, no adventurer so daring and gay, no religious teacher so absolute and visionary, in this Victorian age, now beginning to round towards its end, and which holds in its long and brilliant roll no more attractive and interesting name.— OLIPHANT, MARGARET O. W., 1891, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant and of Alice Oliphant his Wife, vol. II, p. 374.

Oliphant's failures, however, as a son, as a student, as a husband, as a lawyer, as a diplomatist, as a parliamentarian, as a religionist, as a business man, and as a colonizer. did not prevent him from being an agreeable talker and a clever writer of