The Study of Legal Biography 347
Then we come to Littleton. We find that his period was particularly that of the discovery of America by Columbus. And then we come to Lord Coke's day. We find that it is just at the dawn of American colonization. Then we come down to Hale and we find that it is just at the close of American colonization, which is about co-eval with the settlement of Pennsylvania, which was the last of the thirteen colonies to be settled with the single exception of Georgia. Finally, we come to Blackstone as the master of them all in point of style and the most perfect in analysis.
I have often put to myself the question: What is the value of Blackstone's
the untaught hand, as it were, of a madman he should slay the innocent and set free the guilty, and lest he tumble down from on high, as from the throne of God. in attempting to fly before he has acquired wings.
"And when a person is obliged to judge and to be judged, let him take care for himself, lest by judging perversely and against the law, through entreaties or for a price, for the advantage of a paltry temporary gain, he presume to bring upon himself the sadness of eternal grief, and lest in the day of the fury of the Lord he feel the vengeance of him who has said, ‘Vengeance is mine, and I will repay,’ and when kings and princes of the earth shall weep and bewail, when they behold the Son of Man, through fear of his torments, when gold and silver will not avail to set them free. Who, indeed, would not fear that examination in which the Lord will be the accuser, the advocate, and the judge. and from his sentence there shall be no appeal possible. For the Father has given all judgment to the Son, who shuts and no one can open, who opens and no one can shut. Oh! strict judgment, in which men shall have to render account, not only for their acts but for every idle word that they have unrighteously spoken! Who then shall escape from his coming wrath? For the Son of Man shall send his angels, who shall separate from the kingdom of God all scandals, and those who work iniquity, and shall bind them into bundles to be burnt, and shall send them into a furnace of fire, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, groans and howlings, weepings and tortures, hissing and screaming, fear and trembling, pain and labour, burning heat and fetid smells, darkness and anxiety, bitterness and roughness, calamity and want, straitness and sadness, forgetfulness and confusion, twistings and prickings, sorrows and terrors, hunger and thirst, cold and heat, sulphur and blazing fire for ever and ever. Let each, then, beware of that judgment, when the Judge will be terribly strict, intolerably severe, immoderately offended, vehemently angered, and his sentence unchangeable, his prison without any return from it, his torments
Commentaries? What is their real place and value in legal literature? We can answer that question in one of two ways, by reading his work and by examining his raw material. I submit that we cannot begin to understand the value, or the extent, or the character of the work that he performed except by the latter method. We read the work - delightful reading. A month will amply suffice for the reading of it, but it is not the charm of his style that we are most impressed by. It is not the perspicacity and the precision, and the brevity, and the accuracy of his definitions, though the work is remarkable for that; but it is because the commentator, taking as raw material Anglo-Saxon customs, Norman accretions, ecclesiastical rules, Roman maxims, Plantagenet statutes and English digests— a turbid mass tumbling through the centuries, carrying down foul and conflicting matter — was able by the most astonishing degree of intellectual and legal alchemy to distil a limpid fluid which could be quaffed without disgust. If you were to pile up on the tables in this room the unabridged statutes, the old folios, the treatises, the digests, the entries, the abridgments, the reports, you would find that out of ten camels' loads he had by a marvelous power of intellectual compression brought the vast bulk into four small quartos. Now, the publication of his book—the first edition was in 1767, and think of the importance of that date to us in this country, just prior to our Declaration of Inde
without end, without interval, and without assuagement, his tormentors horrible, who never grow weary, who never pity when fear disturbs the accused, his conscience condemns him, his thoughts reproach him, and he may not flee away, whence the blessed Augustine, ‘Oh! how far too great are my sins; wherefore, when one has God as a rightful judge, and one's own conscience as a witness, on has nothing to fear but one's own cause.‘ " — Bracton De Legibus Angliæ, Liber 1. Chap. II. Twiss' translation.
