Читать книгу Judgments in Vacation онлайн

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There is this further to be said about judgments written in vacation. No one is bound to listen to them, no shorthand writer has to strain his ear to take them down, no editor of the Law Reports has to disobey his conscience to include them in the authorised version of the law; and, best of all, no Court of Appeal can either reverse them or lessen their authority by approving them. Indeed, it is only in one attribute that judgments in vacation seem to me scarcely as satisfactory as judgments delivered in term time. With the latter costs follow the event.

Many of these papers have appeared in print before. The oldest of them, Dorothy Osborne, appeared in the English Illustrated Magazine as long ago as April 1886, and I have reprinted it in the belief that many of Dorothy’s servants may like to read the little essay that led to my receiving from Mrs. Longe her copies of the original letters and her notes upon them, whereby the full edition was at length published. The quotations in it were taken from Courtenay’s extracts in his “Life of Temple.” In reprinting the article here I have only amended actual errors and misprints. In the paper on “An Elizabethan Recorder” the spelling has been modernized. In reproducing the article on “The Insolvent Poor” which was published originally in the Fortnightly Review in May 1898, it has not been thought necessary to modernize all the instances and figures that were then used. Unhappily the situation of the Insolvent Poor is no better to-day than it was in 1898, and the argument of that day remains unaffected by any reform. “Kissing the Book” was published before the recent alteration in the law, but even now the custom is not extinct, and the folk-lore of it may still be entertaining. I have to thank Messrs. Macmillan for leave to reprint the paper on “Dorothy Osborne,” and my thanks are also due to the proprietors of the Fortnightly Review, The Cornhill, The Manchester Guardian, The Contemporary Review, The Pall Mall Magazine, and The Rapid Review, for their leave to reprint other papers.