ceeded that of ordinary politicians of his
time, Sir Edward Coke wrote his commentaries in English, but when he
published them, he felt it right to soothe the alarm of lawyers by
assuring them that his departure from ancient usage could have no
disastrous consequences. "I cannot conjecture," he apologetically
observes in his preface, "that the general communicating these laws in
the English tongue can work any inconvenience."

Some of the primary text-books of legal lore had been rendered into
English, and some most valuable treatises had been written and published
in the mother tongue of the country; but in the seventeenth century no
Inns-of-Court man could acquire an adequate acquaintance with the usages
and rules of our courts and the decisions of past judges, until he was
able to study the Year-Books and read Littleton in the original. To
acquire this singular language--a _dead_ tongue that cannot be said to
have ever lived--was the first object of the law-student. He worked at
it in his chamber, and with faltering and uncertain accents essayed to
speak it at the periodic mootings in which he was required to take part
before he could be called to the bar, and also after he had become an
utter-barrister. In his 'Autobiography,' Sir Simonds D'Ewes makes
mention in several places of his Law-French exercises (_temp._ James
I.), and in one place of his personal story he observes, "I had twice
mooted in Law-French before I was called to the bar, and several times
after I was made an utter-barrister, in our open hall. Thrice also
before I was of the bar, I argued the reader's cases at the Inns of
Chancery publicly, and six times afterwards. And then also, being an
utter-barrister, I had twice argued our Middle-Temple reader's case at
the cupboard, and sat nine times in our hall at the bench, and argued
such cases in English as had before been argued by young gentlemen or
utter-barristers in Law-French bareheaded."

Amongst the excellent changes by which the more enlightened of the
Commonwealth lawyers sought to lessen the public clamor of law-reform
was the resolution that all legal records should be kept, and all writs
composed, in the language of the country. Hitherto the law records had
been kept in a Latin that was quite as barbarous as the French used by
the reporters; and the determination to abolish a custom which served
only to obscure the operations of justice and to confound the illiterate
was hailed by the more