Excerpt from Sir Henry Maine: A Brief Memoir of His Life It has been thought desirable that a sketch of Sir Henry Maine, somewhat fuller than the notices which appeared after his death, should be prefixed to this volume. His was a life which contained but few incidents. He was never connected with great affairs, save in India and at the India Office, and the great affairs with which he was connected were not of a kind to attract the attention of even well-informed readers who are not specially interested either in the country to which he gave so much of his thoughts, or in legal history and jurisprudence. His only adequate monument is to be found in his works. A life of him of the regulation size could no doubt be compiled according to the regulation fashion; that is, by stringing together great numbers of his letters to various official personages at home or in India when he was serving at Calcutta or Simla; but they would not be of any general interest, and he was far from being much given to writing letters, either for the pleasure of doing so or for the purpose of keeping up relations with private friends. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.