Counsel often open their address with the words ‘May it please your Lordship’, though they doubt whether their client's merit justifies such conventional optimism. In submitting this slight tribute of admiration and gratitude to Norman Baynes, I have similar feelings, but I hope that the subject at least will find favour with one who, as lawyers are proud to remember, is one of themselves as well as a famous historian.
It may not be actually stated that the wicked uncle of the fairy tale was also a guardian, but probably he was; for uncles are the commonest guardians in all ages, and their perfidy is a typical example of human wickedness. Among those who suspected them most were, according to our tradition, the ancient lawgivers of Greece; for guardianship and the connected subject of second marriages occupy quite a noticeable place in the scanty records of both Solon and Charondas. Solon, according to Diogenes Laertius, laid down that a guardian must not marry the mother of his ward, and that the person who would inherit from the ward must not be his guardian.