Blackstone has now been dead more than a century, but neither lawyers nor laymen have yet made up their minds whether he was an intellectual giant, or only a second-rate man of letters, with a little learning and a pretty style, who acquired popularity because he flattered the English constitution. His friends have pitched high their eulogy. Sir William Jones, speaking to the freeholders of Middlesex, who had little reason to love Blackstone, called him the pride of England, and in a grave legal treatise referred to the _Commentaries_ as the most correct and beautiful outline that ever was exhibited of any human science. Hargrave, fresh from annotating Coke upon Littleton, described him as an almost second Hale, and that as it were in the very presence of Hale, in a volume of tracts half filled with Hale’s legal lore. “To me,” said Mr. Justice Coleridge, the nephew of the poet, and one of Blackstone’s many editors, “the _Commentaries_ appear in the light of a national property, which all should be anxious to improve to the uttermost, and which no one of proper feeling will meddle with inconsiderately.” And a distinguished German jurist, exaggerating only a little, has said that Englishmen regard the _Commentaries_ as “_ein juristisches Evangelium_.” The history of the work is in itself remarkable. If we except the Institutes of Justinian, and the _De Jure Belli ac Pacis_ of Grotius, perhaps no law book has been oftener printed. Not to speak of the many adaptations, more or less close, or of the many abridgments of the _Commentaries_ (one of these was “intended for the use of young persons, and comprised in a series of letters from a father to his daughter,”) they have, in their original form, gone through more than twenty complete editions in England since the publication of the first volume in 1765. Nor has the homage of parody—in the shape of a “Comic Blackstone”—been wanting to place them among the classics. In America they have attained at least an equal fame. In the speech on Conciliation, delivered in 1775, Burke said that he had heard from an eminent bookseller that nearly as many copies had been sold there as here. Two years later, one of the five members appointed to frame the laws of Virginia seriously proposed that, with suitable modifications, the _Commentaries_ should be taken as their text. There is reason to believe that they are now held in higher esteem in America than among ourselves. The American editions, already nearly as numerous as the English, still continue to multiply,[9] while forty years have passed since we have had an English Blackstone with an unmutilated text. His own countrymen are now content to know him through the medium of condensed and often lifeless versions, though it is not so far back since, for those who aspired to the amount of legal knowledge which a gentleman should possess, Blackstone was the very voice of the law. If on many sides Blackstone received the meed