as one of his friends said, ‘there is rather too much submission for the honour of having been noticed’ (Rutt, Memoirs of Priestley, i. 73). The same part of the work was subjected to a more careful examination in certain letters on the Toleration Act, addressed to Blackstone by Dr. Furneaux, who not only condemned its illiberal spirit, but found grave fault with it as an incomplete statement of the law. These criticisms were so far successful that in subsequent editions the obnoxious passages were considerably modified; the doubt, for example, being no longer expressed whether, as compared with those of the papists, ‘the spirit, the doctrines, and the practice of the sectaries are better calculated to make men good subjects.’ A few years later (1776) came Bentham's famous ‘Fragment on Government,’ directed against the digression on the legislative power of government which occurs (pp. 47–50) in Blackstone's chapter on the nature of laws in general, where he states his quaint proof of the perfection of the British constitution. Bentham did not notice, nor did Blackstone acknowledge, that much of this chapter comes from Burlamaqui, the very words being sometimes reproduced. Even the digression, which to Bentham seemed to be made without any reason, occurs in Burlamaqui with the same context (Droit de la Nature, part i. ch. 8. Evidently Blackstone had before him Nugent's translation published in 1748). In the preface to the tract Bentham summed up his opinion of the ‘Commentaries’ as a whole, and while frankly recognising Blackstone's merits, ‘who, first of all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the scholar and the gentleman,’ urged that the work is thoroughly vitiated by its tone of intolerance and of blind admiration. We have only Bentham's own account of the way in which Blackstone received the criticism; when asked if he would answer it, he said, ‘No, not even if it had been better written.’ (For Bentham's opinion of Blackstone see also the very strongly worded remarks extracted from his commonplace book in Bowring's Bentham, x. 141.) The judgment of Austin was not less severe. To him Blackstone's arrangement is a slavish and blundering copy of Hale's; in the whole work (‘the far too celebrated Commentaries’ he calls it) there is not a single particle of original or discriminating thought; its flattery of English institutions is ‘a paltry but effectual artifice’ which has made it popular; and its style, for which other critics have only one voice of admiration, is ‘a style which is fitted to tickle the ear, though it never or rarely satisfies a severe and masculine taste’ (i. 71). There should be mentioned one other critic, long ago forgotten, Sedgwick, the editor of Gilbert's ‘Law of Evidence,’ who, with strong dissent, yet in a spirit of great fairness and with minute care, discusses Blackstone's first volume, chapter by chapter (Remarks Critical and Miscellaneous on the Commentaries of Sir W. Blackstone, 1800; 2nd ed. 1808). A weak reply to Sedgwick was made by W. H. Rowe in a ‘Vindication of Blackstone's Commentaries’ (1806).
The criticisms of Bentham and of Austin had weight enough to bring Blackstone into undue discredit. To read the ‘Commentaries’ ceased to be considered an essential part of the liberal education of gentlemen and scholars, and it grew the fashion to speak lightly of the work. There seems now to be the beginning of a more just appreciation. Most of the specific charges against Blackstone were indeed well founded. His was not a mind of much analytical power, nor in any high sense was he an original thinker. His philosophy of law was but a confused mingling of the theories of Puffendorf, Locke, and Montesquieu; and its importance now consists only in its having created, by repulsion, the later English school of jurisprudence. Of the spirit of intellectual independence he had very little. Partly by nature, partly through his political sympathies, partly also, it must be remembered, from a truly worthy admiration of a great system of law and government, he was conservative almost to rigidity. In a characteristic passage he declared that the legal restraints to which Englishmen were subject in his day were ‘so gentle and moderate … that no man of sense or probity would wish to see them slackened’ (i. 144); and, with not less boldness, speaking of the time of Charles II, and drawing a distinction between the theoretical perfection of law and its practical working, he said that ‘by the law, as it then stood, … the people had as large a portion of real liberty as is consistent with a state of society’ (iv. 439; see Amos's The English Constitution in the Reign of Charles II, which is a detailed examination of this opinion; it is discussed also in Fox's History, in Rose's Observations, and in Heywood's Vindication; and see also how Blackstone himself explains his habit of defending legal anomalies, i. 172). The extent of his learning, moreover, has been often exaggerated. He never knew the civil law otherwise than superficially, and frequently states it inaccurately; and even in English law his work is not more remarkable for original research than for the singular skill which it shows in making a happy use of the labours of previous text-writers.
