Few authors ever had a clearer field. Long before his day, indeed, the immense growth of the law had been regarded as a heavy burden. Lawyers groaned, just as they groan now, over the increasing accumulation of statutes and reports. And yet Coke upon Littleton remained the beginner’s chief guide. Coke called his work the Institutes of the Laws of England; but, whatever its other merits, it lacks every quality which the title would suggest. It is unsystematic, undigested; it makes no pretence of leading its reader from principles to rules; and it spares him the details of no curious anomaly. It is like an overgrown treatise on the subjunctive mood. The need had long been felt for a better work; and the broad outlines had been sketched by Hale in his admirable Analysis of the Civil Part of the Law, which Blackstone followed in every essential feature. Some treatises too had appeared written with a purely educational purpose. Of these the most successful, long recommended as an elementary text-book for students, was the Institutes of Wood, a Buckinghamshire clergyman. It was a praiseworthy attempt to present the law in a methodical form, but it lacked literary merit, and had all the dulness of an epitome. It is memorable only as the book which the Commentaries displaced.
Blackstone saw his opportunity. Perhaps no one else in his time combined in the same degree the qualities which the work required; nor was there any one so capable of writing a law-book, which could be read with interest by educated laymen, and at the same time be accepted as almost authoritative by practising lawyers. Blackstone’s training enabled him to gain the ear of both; for he was not only a lawyer, but a man of letters. His love of literature developed early, and along with it a desire to win literary fame. He does not seem to have read widely, but the pleasure which in his school days he derived from Shakespeare and Milton, Pope and Addison, was dulled neither by advancing years nor by the absorbing demands of the law. “The notes which he gave me on Shakespeare,” said Malone, who used them in his edition, “show him to have been a man of excellent taste and accuracy, and a good critic.” He was something of a poet himself; but the “Lawyer’s Farewell to his Muse,” the “Lawyer’s Prayer,” and the “Elegy on the Death of the Prince of Wales,” though they have occasionally been unearthed as curiosities, have long been swept away with other rubbish of the kind. The following lines, which are his best, and in which we feel the very spirit of the Commentaries, will not tempt further even the most diligent seeker after neglected poets. Their historical audacity would amaze Professor Freeman.
‘Oh, let me pierce the secret shade
Where dwells the venerable maid!
There humbly mark, with rev’rent awe,
The guardian of Britannia’s Law,
Unfold with joy her sacred page
(Th’ united boast of many an age,
Where mix’d yet uniform appears
The wisdom of a thousand years) ...