About this time the Professorship of Civil Law became vacant, and the Solicitor-General, Mr. Murray, afterwards Lord Mansfield, "with a just appreciation of Dr. Blackstone's abilities," strongly recommended him. The Duke of Newcastle, it is said, promised him the place, but not being satisfied, after a short interview, with the candidate's devotion to His Grace's politics, it was given to another. Truly a happy circumstance, for it directed his attention from the Civil to the Common Law. He fell back upon his original plan, and for three years read with marked and immediate success the lectures he had been long preparing. Although his lectures remained in manuscript for a period of twelve years he published, in 1756, "An Analysis of the Laws of England," exhibiting the order and principal divisions of his subject and clearly methodizing its intricacies. In 1758 the Vinerian Professorship of the Common Law in Oxford was established, made possible by the ample benefaction to the University in the sum of £12,000, of Mr. Viner, the author of an elaborate Abridgment of Law and Equity in twenty-four volumes. And thus, as Blackstone tells us in his Preface, there was produced "a regular and public establishment of what the author had privately undertaken *** and the compiler of the ensuing commentaries. had the honour to be elected the first Vinerian Professor." The far-famed lecture on "The Study of Law," which serves as an introduction to the published commentaries, was read at Oxford on October 25, 1758. The next year our author appeared in the triple rôles of lawyer, antiquary and historian, publishing a new and beautiful edition of "The Great Charter and Charter of the Forest," which drew him into. an interesting controversy with Dr. Lyttleton, late Dean of Exeter, and then Bishop of Carlisle, as to the authenticity of a curious ancient roll containing both the Great Charter, and that of the Forest, which the Bishop asserted to be an original and which Blackstone contended was but a copy. This was followed by a letter to the Honourable

Daines Barrington, the Editor of the Statutes and one of the old Benchers of the Middle Temple, alluded to by Charles Lamb in his charming essay of that title. The letter described and discussed the peculiarities of an antique seal with some observations on its original, and the two successive controversies which the disuse of it occasioned. In 1761 he became a member of Parliament and sat for Hindon. He now found himself in the possession of a considerable practice, and obtained a Patent of Precedence as King's Counsel, the original of which I shall exhibit to you.

Finding himself burdened with professional work, he appointed a deputy to read his lectures, which led to some controversy, which he silenced by a statement of his rights under the Viner establishment. He then published a treatise on the Law of Descents in Fee Simple, and collected and republished five of his pieces, under the title of Law Tracts, in two volumes, octavo. In 1763 he was appointed Solicitor General to the Queen. This was followed by an offer of the Chief Justiceship of the Common Pleas in Ireland, which he declined. About this time he married Sarah, eldest daughter of James Clitheroe, Esq., of Boston House, Middlesex, by whom he had nine children, seven of whom survived him. Soon after his marriage he was appointed by the Earl of Westmoreland, then Chancellor of the University, principal of New Inn Hall. The next year he resigned this appointment, and also his Vinerian professorship. Finding that imperfect and unauthorized copies of his lectures were in circulation among piratical booksellers, he determined to rewrite them, and the renowned Commentaries, in four. volumes, quarto, appeared in 1765-66-68-69, with the following dedication: "To the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty the Following View of the Laws and Constitution of England, the Improvement and Protection of which have distinguished the Reign of Her Majesty's Royal Consort, is with all Gratitude and Humility most respect fully inscribed

by her Dutiful and Most Obedient Servant, William Blackstone."

A well-trained classical scholar with a knack at verse, an architect, a bookkeeper, a student of Shakespeare, a lecturer upon the common law, a doctor of the civil law, an author of tracts requiring close investigations of ancient records, a concise, accurate but brilliant writer, with fine powers of analysis, he brought to this great task an unusual combination of qualities and imparted to legal literature a style and method never before attained and never since equalled.

I might here close this slight biographical sketch, having brought it to the point of the Commentaries to be examined, but for the sake of completeness will add a few particulars. In 1770 the celebrated Mr. Dunning retiring, Blackstone was offered the Solicitor-Generalship, which he declined. In less than a month, on the death of Mr. Justice Clive. he was made a Judge of the Common Pleas, and actually kissed hands on February 9th, but at the request of Mr. Justice Yates, who wished to escape collisions with Lord Mansfield, he consented to take that Judge's place in the King's Bench, and again kissed the King's hands for that Court on the 16th of the same month, when he received the honor of knighthood. His original commission of that date will be one of my exhibits. Four months later, on the death of Yates, he removed into the Common Pleas and held the place until his own death, on February 14, 1780, at the age of fifty-seven. I shall not dwell upon his labors as a judge, nor upon his devotion with John Howard to the improvement of prison discipline, nor upon his work as a reporter. These must be left for an expansion of this paper.

Let us turn to the Genesis of the Commentaries. Many interesting and instructive suggestions are to be derived from a close examination of the Tracts Chiefly Relating to the Antiquities and Laws of England, before mentioned as appearing in two volumes, octavo. I prefer, however, the

third edition, printed at Oxford in 1771, as containing additional matter, particularly An Analysis of the Laws of England, which was a key to his lectures, and The Preface to the Sixth Edition of the Analysis, in which he states the origin of his Lectures, and his method of arrangement. The volume, which is a quarto, contains six papers: 1, An Analysis of the Laws of England; 2, An Essay on Collateral Consanguinity; 3, Considerations on Copyholders; 4, Observations on the Oxford Press; 5, Introduction to the Great Charter; 6, Magna Carta, Carta de Foresta, etc. Before attending to the Analysis, which, although the first in the volume, was the last to be written, let us consider the other papers.

In the five papers last above named, all of which-let it be noted—were written and first published before the Commentaries were undertaken or even the Analysis prepared, there is abundant evidence, both in the text and in the foot notes of the character and extent of Blackstone's studies of the older authorities, the constant handling of which would make him familiar with their doctrines and impress him with the need of a clear, systematic treatise upon the body of the law. Thus, taken in the order of antiquity of authorship, there are distributed among these five papers three references to the Grand Coustumier of Normandy, four references to Glanvil, twenty references to Bracton, six to Britton, nine to Fleta, three to the Mirror of Justices, three to Lambard's Archaionomia, six to Wilkins' Laws of the Anglo-Saxons, six to the Year Books, five to Littleton, twenty-one to Coke, two to Croke, two to Hale, three to Gilbert on Tenures, two to Wright on Tenures, seven to the Registrum Brevium, five to the old Natura Brevium, eleven to Fitzherbert's Abridgment, four to Brooke's Abridgment, thirteen to Rymer's Foedera and, what is more significant, as indicating that he actually handled the original court rolls or records, which were not in print, but in manuscript on vellum and only to be found, in the then confused and

scattered state of the records before Lord Langdale's day, by toilsome searching without an index, there are five references to the Charter rolls, five to the Statute rolls, ten to the Close rolls, one to the Fine rolls, fourteen to the Patent rolls, eight to the Red Book of the Exchequer, and also two references to Madox's History of the Exchequer and one to the Dialogue de Scacchario, first printed by Madox, and six to Selden, the antiquarian.

No one familiar with these records and books in the shape and editions as existing in Blackstone's day-especially if he be alive to the vast amount of incidental information to be derived from the touching, seeing and tasting of old books and papers-can doubt, when he examines into the manner in which they were handled by Blackstone in his "Tracts," that our author was not only possessed of persevering industry, discriminating judgment, skill in the arrangement of matter, neatness and precision of statement, but above all, that he was animated by the glow of the historical student. Superimposed as these researches were upon his studies of Coke-Littleton, Plowden and Hale's History of the Common Law, he was persuaded, I had almost said incited, to the preparation of his Lectures.

We are now ready to appreciate what he says in the Preface to his Analysis. In substance it is this: he had observed with concern the total neglect of the study of the laws in the usual education of English gentlemen, and in particular that no attention to such studies had been provided by the Universities. To remedy so just a complaint he was induced, in 1753, to institute and to continue a course of lectures at Oxford, and to render the attempt extensively useful he marked out a plan of the laws of England, "so comprehensive, as that every title might be reduced under some one or other of its general heads, which the student might afterwards pursue to any degree of minuteness; and at the same time so contracted that the gentleman might, with tolerable application, contemplate