This is an entirely distinct book from the first series of the Law’s Lumber Room. The subjects are of more general interest, they are treated with greater fulness of detail, most are as much literary as legal; but I have thought it best to retain the old name. No other seemed so briefly and so truly descriptive of papers which tell what the law and its ways once were, and what they have ceased, one may reasonably suppose, for ever to be.

I make two remarks. There is a great deal of hanging in this book; that is only because those were hanging times. The law had no thought of mending the criminal; it ended him in the most summary fashion. The death of the chief actors was as inevitably the finish of the story as it is in a modern French novel.Again, in pondering those memories of the past, one realises how much, in other things than mechanical invention, our time is unlike all that went before. This is not the commonplace it seems, for not easily do we realise how far the change has gone.

Details such as make up this volume have this merit: they bring the antique world before us, and the net result seems to be this: we lead better lives, we are more just and charitable, perhaps less selfish than our forefathers, but how to deny that something is lost? for life is not so exciting, and our annals are anything but picturesque.

These papers were originally published in The New Review, The Yellow Book, and The Ludgate. I have made very considerable additions to most of them, and all have been carefully revised.