Excerpt from The Law Glossary, 1856: Being a Selection of the Greek, Latin, Saxon, French, Norman, and Italian Sentences, Phrases, and Maxims Found in the Leading English and American Reports and Elementary Works; With Historical and Explanatory Notes Whether or not it is to be regretted that almost all our Law publications abound with Sentences, Quotations, and Maxims chiefly extracted from the dead languages, it is not the author's purpose to inquire. He has been led to examine the propriety of presenting this compilation, from observing that the student, although well educated, frequently becomes disgusted with his labors, by finding innumerable uncouth and many abbreviated passages from the barbarous Latin and Norman-French of the Middle Ages, so constantly interspersed through our valuable Law Treatises and books of Reports. The author, in this undertaking, has endeavored, to the best of his ability, to meet the difficulty alluded to; and although, in so great a number as nearly five thousand translations, he may not have come up, in many instances, to the critical interpretation of the original, yet he hopes, from the labor he has for years bestowed on this work, and the assistance he has received, that not many errors have been made, affecting the sense or spirit of the passages. Many of our judicial decisions have reference to analogous cases adjudged in the English courts, and innumerable Sentences, Quotations and Maxims from the ancient Law volumes are necessarily used and interspersed through all our reports, treatises, and books of practice, - thus rendering very obscure some of the most important passages with which the student should be intimately acquainted. The Law Maxims have been, as it were, handed down to us like heirlooms, through a succession of ages, many of them as fundamental and unalterable principles of the Common Law, as the Lex non scripta of our ancestors, founded on the traditional consent of many successive ages. Lord Coke remarks "that the Maxims of the Common Law are as eternal as nature's rights, control acts of parliament, and adjudge them void, when made against common right and reason;" but it is well known that their very essence is enveloped in foreign languages, sometimes difficult to translate in the spirit of the original. Where it has been possible, the author has given a literal translation; but in very many instances he has been obliged to deviate in this respect, in order to make the sense intelligible, and has frequently, after the primary or literal translation, introduced some words by way of further explanation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books.

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