Observe how parts with parts unite
In one harmonious rule of right;
See countless wheels distinctly tend
By various laws to one great end;
While mighty Alfred’s piercing soul
Pervades and animates the whole.’
The Pope who was lost in Blackstone we can as easily spare as the Ovid who was lost in Murray. Yet it was from that love of literature to which his poetical compositions bear witness, perhaps in some degree also from the enforced measure and restraint of verse, that he acquired a style, which though it has not the freshness and variety of Addison’s, its most direct model, has the same singular clearness and almost the same ease and flow. By education, not by accident, did he come to deserve Bentham’s one compliment that he it was who first, of all institutional writers, taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the scholar and the gentleman.
Beyond keeping up a certain interest in architecture, on which in early youth he is said to have composed a treatise, Blackstone seldom allowed himself to be diverted from a persevering and varied study of law. He divided his time between Westminster and Oxford, and long remained undecided whether he should finally settle in the law-courts or among his books. While, with hardly any practice of his own, he was training himself with unusual diligence, as his reports of cases testify, in the practical part of his profession, he had it clearly before him that law is not to be mastered by any one who neglects its history. “In my apprehension,” he said, when he was a student, “the learning out of use is as necessary as that of every day’s practice;” and he carried out this belief by making the Commentaries as much a history as an exposition. Even more plainly than in his great work we can see in his edition of Magna Charta and the Charter of the Forest how unflagging were his zeal and patience, and how minute his investigations. His knowledge of general history may have been superficial, as Hallam said it was; he may have had old-fashioned notions about Alfred the Great, even though he does warn his readers against the tendency to ascribe all imaginable things to that king; yet the Commentaries contain what, on the whole, is still the best history written in English of English law.
The plan of the book had long been in his mind; he was indirectly led to carry it out through an attempt of the Duke of Newcastle to corrupt him. Lord Mansfield (then Mr. Murray) recommended him to the chair of civil law at Oxford, which was vacant in 1756, but he lost the appointment, according to report, because he was not hearty enough in promising the duke support “whenever anything in the political hemisphere is agitated in the university.” Murray, hearing of his disappointment, advised him to lecture on his own account upon English law. He took the advice; the novelty of the lectures and their ability made them successful; and when the Vinerian chair of common law was founded in 1758 he was appointed the first professor. Making hardly any change in form, arrangement, or mode of treatment, as appears from his notes which are still extant written in the neatest of hands, he expanded the lectures into the Commentaries. But while he never deviated from his original plan, his store of knowledge grew steadily throughout the fourteen years which elapsed between his first private lectures and the appearance of his work. When the question of ex officio informations was debated in the House of Lords in 1812, Lord Ellenborough spoke of him as follows:—“Blackstone, when he compiled his lectures, was comparatively an ignorant man; he was merely a fellow of All Souls’ College, moderately skilled in the law! His true and solid knowledge was acquired afterwards. He grew learned as he proceeded with his work. It might be said of him, at the time he was composing his book, that it was not so much his learning that made the book, as it was the book that made him learned.” The Commentaries were not, however, the work of a merely book-learned man; besides his attendance in the courts as a spectator, Blackstone had enjoyed several years of good practice before the first volume appeared; but Ellenborough’s opinion is substantially sound. It is indeed one of the striking facts about Blackstone that while as years went on his mind gained little in breadth, and his fundamental ideas underwent no change, he was able, by simple hard work and with abilities not by any means the highest, to make himself at length one of the really learned lawyers of his time. Several names might be mentioned which on special lines of law stand far above his; but there was no one who rivalled him in that extent of general knowledge which an institutional writer must possess. The Commentaries have won the peculiar distinction of being quoted and of carrying weight in every political discussion which raises questions of constitutional importance, and also of being cited in our courts (though under protest from some rigid judges) as only a little lower than that small group among our law-books which have an inherent, and not merely a reflected, authority. We should do Blackstone grievous wrong if from his popularity we assumed that his knowledge was superficial.
Thus, both as lawyer and as man of letters, he was peculiarly fitted for his work. Written with less literary skill, the Commentaries would long ago have been forgotten; if his learning had been more minute he would never have written them at all. A work which, partly through favoring circumstances, but mainly through its merits, has effected a real revolution in legal studies, is not to be dismissed by saying that its philosophy is weak, and that it is hostile to reform.