Excerpt from Romances and Minor Poems The contents of this Volume owe their exist ence to vacation hours enjoyed at intervals during the last twenty-five or thirty years. Their com position never interfered with the real business of a laborious life. But it would be unjust to the noble science of jurisprudence to believe that devotion to it (however continuous) is necessarily destructive of all imaginative vivacity, - all youth ful freshness of feeling. On the contrary, the very restraints which legal pursuits put on the imagination, encourage that faculty to re-assert its own rights in lighter and more recreative. 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.