nor having any powerful friends or connections to recommend him.’ Perhaps his lack of friends is exaggerated, for only three years after his call he succeeded one of his uncles as recorder of Wallingford. Still his practice must have been small. He attended the courts assiduously, but in the notes which he took of important cases his own name occurs only twice in the period from 1746 to 1760. He was busy, however, at Oxford. He assisted in bringing to completion the Codrington Library, and as bursar of his college and steward of its manors, he had an opportunity of exercising his almost excessive love of order and regularity, ‘applying his legal mind,’ says Professor Burrows, ‘to the examination of all the documents bearing on the college property, re-arranging its archives, and leaving … a characteristic record of the labour he had bestowed on its accounts in a special manuscript book for the benefit of his successors’ (Worthies of All Souls, p. 400; Chalmers, i. 179). With the same earnestness he entered into the question of founder's kin, which then agitated the college. Claims had been made by remote collateral descendants to the privileges which Archbishop Chichele declared in favour of his kin. The college held that some bounds should be put to the meaning of kindred, but their decisions in particular cases were uniformly overruled by the visitors. Blackstone defended the college in a tract on ‘Collateral Consanguinity’ (1750, reprinted in ‘Law Tracts’), arguing that if there were no collateral limit all men would be founder's kin, and concluding in favour of the limit of the canon law, namely the seventh degree. It was probably due in great part to the assistance which he thus gave that in his lifetime a regulation was made limiting the number of privileged fellows. He found fresh work in an attempt to reform the administration of the Clarendon Press. On being appointed a delegate in 1755 he saw the Press ‘languishing in a lazy obscurity,’ and set himself to discover the cause. He studied the charters, statutes, and registers relating to it, and ‘had repeated conferences,’ he says, ‘with the most eminent masters, in London and other places, with regard to the mechanical part of printing.’ His recommendations, many of which were carried into effect, he set out in a letter to Dr. Randolph, the vice-chancellor, which still retains some interest from its details as to the cost of printing. Blackstone himself gave an example of admirable printing in his edition of ‘Magna Charta,’ published by the Clarendon Press in 1758, under the direction of Dr. Prince (Thomson, Magna Charta).
He had meanwhile been led to the chief work of his life. Murray, the solicitor-general (afterwards Lord Mansfield), had recommended him to the Duke of Newcastle for the professorship of civil law at Oxford, which fell vacant in 1752; but owing, it is said, to his want of readiness to promise that he would give the duke his political support at the university, he was passed over (see an account of his interview with the duke in Holliday's Life of Mansfield, i. 88). The disappointment was great, but Murray, who seems even then to have understood where Blackstone's strength lay, advised him to go to Oxford and read lectures on English law. As it turned out, he could not have had better advice. Not only were his lectures received with great favour, but they suggested to Mr. Viner the idea of founding a chair of English law (Holliday, p. 89). Mr. Viner, who had himself done useful work in compiling his ‘Abridgment of Law and Equity,’ bequeathed a sum of 12,000l. for the purpose; and so clear were his directions that in 1758, only two years after his death, his scheme was carried to completion, and Blackstone, as the first professor, began his lectures (see an account of Viner's benefaction in Blackstone's Commentaries, i. 28n). Among his hearers at one time was Bentham, who claims to have even then detected the fallacies that were to appear in the ‘Commentaries,’ and who describes him as ‘a formal, precise, and affected lecturer—just what you would expect from the character of his writings; cold, reserved, and wary—exhibiting a frigid pride’ (Bowring, Bentham, x. 45). The subject was a novel one in an English university; and Blackstone's lectures, which showed the skill of the man of letters quite as much as the learning of the lawyer, attracted considerable attention, and quickly led to a bettering of his own prospects. He took up law once more, and for several years lived a twofold life: in London, practising at Westminster, and sitting in parliament as member for the rotten borough of Hindon in Wiltshire (1761); and at Oxford, holding not only his professorship, but also the principalship of New Inn Hall, to which he was appointed in 1761. From this time onward his name occurs frequently in his own reports of cases; and, seeing that in 1761 he was offered and that he declined the chief justiceship of the Common Pleas in Ireland, and that two years later he was made solicitor-general to the queen, he must have rapidly risen to a high place in his profession. Through his published works, too, he was becoming known as a careful student of legal history. He had been counsel in the
