We regret to announce the death of Principal Rainy last
Saturday at Melbourne, and of Professor F. W. Maitland, of Cambridge, on Friday week at Grand Canary, to which be had gone for his health. We have dealt elsewhere with the career of the former. In Professor Maitland England has lost perhaps her foremost legalist in the Continental sense, a man whose achievement may well be set beside that of Savigny or Gierke. No one has ever done more for the history of English law and the elucidation of our early institutions than Professor Maitland did in his edition of the Year Books of Edward IV., and his other works for the Selden Society, as well as in the "History of English Law" which he compiled along With Sir Frederick Pollodk. He was equally great in comparative jurisprudence, and his encyclopaedic learning, in which no German savant excelled him, was joined with an exceptional charm of style. His works were in the truest sense luciferous, and more than any English writer he has humanised and illuminated law, and given it its true place in the history of progress. His Life of his friend Sir Leslie Stephen, which we reviewed last week, showed him also as a brilliant man of letters. He will be deeply regretted by many pupils and readers to whom his works were a gateway into a new world of thought.
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