Dr. Samuel Hopkins speaks of Blackstone as ‘a man of learning,’ and doubtfully adds: ‘He seems to have been of the puritan persuasion, and to have left his country for his nonconformity.’ He tells us also that ‘he used to come to Providence and preach, and to encourage his hearers gave them the first apples they ever saw’—his orchard having been as celebrated as his library. Lechford, who wrote in 1641, thus mentions him: ‘One Mr. Blackstone, a minister sent from Boston, having lived there nine or ten Years, because he would not join the church; he lives with Mr. [Roger] Williams, but is far from his opinions.’
[Massachusetts Historical Collections, iv. 202, x. 710; Johnson’s Wonder-working Providence, where is to be found a notice of one who sympathised with Blackstone: ‘Mr. Samuel Maverick, living on Noddle’s Island in Boston Harbour . . . an enemy to the reformation in hand, being strong for the lordly prelatical power;’ Holmes’s Annals, i. 377; Savage’s Winthrop, i. 44; Everett’s Address, Second Century, 29; Sprague’s Annals of the American Pulpit, v. 1–3.]
BLACKSTONE, Sir WILLIAM (1723–1780), legal writer and judge, was born in Cheapside, London, on 10 July 1723. He was the posthumous son of Charles Blackstone, who is described as ‘a silkman, and citizen and bowyer of London,’ and who came of a Wiltshire family. His mother, a daughter of Lovelace Bigg of Chilton Foliot in Wiltshire, died before he was twelve years of age, leaving him to the care of his brother, a London surgeon. Through being thus early left an orphan, he was saved, it has been reasonably suggested, from passing through life as a prosperous tradesman. He had already gone to Charterhouse School, and after his mother’s death was, on the nomination of Sir Robert Walpole, admitted on the foundation. When he left for Oxford in 1738, he was head of the school; and perhaps from the fact that he gained a gold medal for some verses on Milton, we may gather that his mind had already received its strong literary bent. At Pembroke College, which he entered at the age of fifteen, his studies were chiefly in classical learning. Among his contemporaries was Shenstone the poet; and doubtless at this time were written most of the ‘originals and translations’ which he is said to have afterwards collected in an unpublished volume. From the pieces which can still be traced to him, and which are full of the strained and stilted mannerisms of the period, we can judge that nothing has been lost to English literature by Blackstone’s seeking in poetry only a relaxation. In 1741 he entered himself at the Middle Temple, solemnly marking the change in his life by a poem entitled ‘The Lawyer’s Farewell to his Muse,’ wherein English law is figured, in the spirit of his ‘Commentaries,’ as a complex yet harmonious whole. The poem has been often reprinted, e.g. in Dodsley, vol. iii., Southey’s ‘Specimens of English Poetry,’ Irving Browne’s ‘Law and Lawyers in Literature.’ Of his legal studies we know nothing except from a letter written by him in 1745 (see Law Stud. Mag. ii. 279), in which he describes himself as following the plan sketched out by C. J. Reeve (see Coll. Jurid. i. 79), and as having already finished one book of Littleton without experiencing much difficulty. ‘In my apprehension,’ he says, again anticipating the ‘Commentaries,’ ‘the learning out of use is as necessary to a beginner as that of every day’s practice.’ The vow of exclusive attachment to law was not rigorously kept. Before completing his twentieth year he had written a treatise on the ‘Elements of Architecture,’ which has never been published, but which was highly spoken of by those to whom it was shown. He became a careful student of Shakespeare; Malone tells us that ‘the notes which he gave me on Shakespeare show him to have been a man of excellent taste and accuracy, and a good critick’ (Prior, Life of Malone, 431. The notes are initialed ‘—E’ in Malone’s supplement). Even verse was not abandoned, though he had to write in secret. His friends particularly admired a poem written by him in 1751 on the death of Frederick, prince of Wales; but it has now little interest except to collectors of literary parallels, who will compare with ‘the cock’s shrill clarion’ of Gray’s ‘Elegy’ (published in the same year)
The bird of day
’Gan morn’s approach with clarion shrill declare.
It appeared under the name of Blackstone’s brother-in-law, Clitherow, and is reprinted in ‘Gent Mag.’ li. 335. This interest in literature never left him. Thus in his last years, when he sat on the bench, we find him carefully discussing, as if it were an important legal case, the quarrel between Pope and Addison, and criticising by the light of Pope’s letters the account of the quarrel given in Ruffhead’s ‘Life.’
He had already been elected a fellow of All Souls (1744) and had taken the degree of B.C.L. (1745), when, after the usual period of probation, then five years, he was called to the bar in 1746. For a long time he made little way, ‘not being,’ it is said, ‘happy in a graceful delivery or a flow of elocution (both of which he much wanted),
