[151] Memoirs, pp. 52-61. Alas! it is the natural influence of Slavery to make men hard. Gorgon-like, it turns to stone. Among the judicial magistrates of the time, Lord Mansfield was not alone. His companion in contemporary fame, Blackstone, shared the petrifaction. The first edition of his incomparable Commentaries openly declared, that a slave, on coming to England, became at once a freeman; but, in a subsequent edition, after the question had been practically presented by Granville Sharp, the text was pusillanimously altered to an abandonment of this great constitutional principle; and our intrepid philanthropist hung his head with shame and anxiety, while the counsel for the Slave-Hunters triumphantly invoked this tergiversation as new authority against Freedom.[152] [152] Memoirs, pp. 91, 92, note. The text of the first edition (1765), as quoted by Sharp's biographer, Hoare, was as follows: "And this spirit of liberty is so deeply implanted in our Constitution, and rooted even in our very soil, that a Slave, or a Negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws, and, with regard to all national rights, becomes _eo instanti_ a freeman." As altered, the latter part was found to read thus: " ... a negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws, and so far becomes a freeman; though the master's right to his service may _possibly_ still continue." Hoare remarks, that he finds this reading in the fifth edition, 1773. It appears also in an edition printed at Philadelphia so early as 1771. And thus the text was finally left by the author, and so remains. In the third edition, printed at Oxford in 1768, for "_possibly_" in the last clause we have the word "probably." Of this prior reading Hoare makes no mention.