one another almost as quickly; editors were found in men like Burn, Christian, Coleridge, and Chitty, who felt that they were rendering a service to their profession in annotating Blackstone with minute and almost tender care; and laymen turned to him to find for the first time English law made readable. So great have been the growth and the changes of law during the last century that to keep the work up to date by means of footnotes is now an almost hopeless task. The attempt is not abandoned in America (see Cooley's edition, 1884), but Blackstone's text has not been reprinted in England since the edition of 1844. As an institutional treatise, however, it still stands alone. When annotation grew too cumbersome, less reverent editors came who laid hands on the text itself, and by mechanically inserting corrections and additions adapted it to modern use. In most cases, from a strange desire for uniformity, they have even removed from the lecture on the study of the law the form of oral address and all the references which it contains to the circumstances of its delivery, and have given it thus maimed as a formal introductory chapter; while Blackstone's worn-out theories on the origin and nature of law and government have been considered to need only abridgment and not revision. The best known of the adaptations, in point of arrangement and otherwise composed with a freer hand than the rest (the poor laws, for example, being no longer treated under the head of overseers of the poor), is Stephen's ‘New Commentaries on the Laws of England,’ first published in 1841. It reached a ninth edition in 1883, and is now the recognised text-book by which solicitors are introduced to law. It is still to Blackstone, in some form or other, that English law students turn who seek a general view of the subject. The ‘Commentaries’ has had a yet higher legal fame, having almost, but not quite, reached the distinction accorded to those treatises which, as Blackstone himself says, ‘are cited as authority … and do not entirely depend on the strength of their quotations from older authors.’ (But see Lord Redesdale's protest against the citing of the ‘Commentaries’ as an authority, 1 Sch. and Lef. 327.) His name is constantly heard in our courts, and to this day judges fortify their decisions by quoting his statement of the law. ‘If he has fallen into some minute mistakes in matter of detail,’ said Lord Campbell, in the famous case of the Queen v. Mills, ‘I believe that upon a great question like this, as to the constitution of marriage, there is no authority to be more relied upon’ (10 Cl. and Fin. 767). How wide his influence has been may be judged on the one side from the fact that throughout Digby's ‘History of the Law of Real Property’ his work is referred to ‘as at once the most available and the most trustworthy authority on the law of the eighteenth century,’ and on the other side from the publication in 1822 of Sir J. E. Eardley-Wilmot's Abridgment, ‘intended for the use of young persons, and comprised in a series of letters from a father to his daughter,’ and from the existence of a ‘Comic Blackstone.’ His reputation is not confined to England. (See translations in bibliography.) It was made, indeed, matter of reproach to French jurists that they incessantly cited Blackstone as a great authority, rating him even higher than did his own countrymen; and it is still to the ‘Commentaries’ that most continental writers refer on points of English law. Nowhere has his work been more widely read than in America. ‘I hear,’ said Burke, in 1775, ‘that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England.’ It has been edited and abridged in America nearly as often as in England; it suggested to Chancellor Kent the idea of writing his ‘Commentaries on American Law;’ and there, as here, it has shaped the course of legal education.
Yet while edition after edition was appearing the work had many hard things said about it. There were some who looked with apprehension on an attempt to make smooth the path of the student of law. President Jefferson is reported to have doubted the propriety of citing in America English authorities after the period of emigration, and still more after the declaration of independence, and to have said that the consequence of excluding them would be ‘to uncanonise Blackstone, whose book, although the most eloquent and best digested of our law catalogue, has been perverted more than all others to the degeneracy of legal science. A student finds there a smattering of everything, and his indolence easily persuades him that if he understands that book he is master of the whole body of the law’ (Tucker, Life of Jefferson, ii. 361. See a similar opinion in Ritso's Introduction to the Science of Law). Blackstone sustained more vigorous attacks at home. In 1769, when the publication of the first edition was completed, Dr. Priestley wrote what Blackstone called ‘a very angry pamphlet’ on some passages in the ‘Commentaries’ relating to dissenters. Blackstone replied in a conciliatory tone, admitting that the passages needed some revision in point of expression, but confessing to no material change of opinion; and Priestley wrote a second letter of explanation, in which,
