of excessive praise, his critics, it must be allowed, did not spare him. They have not been many, but they have spoken so emphatically, and, within certain limits, so unanswerably, that they have aroused suspicion whether, after all, Blackstone may not have been a charlatan. He was naturally regarded with distrust by lawyers of the rigid school, who felt that legal learning was gone if such primers as the _Commentaries_ were to displace the venerable Coke. The book was not many years old before the phrase “Blackstone lawyers” came to be used as synonymous with smatterers in law. But such criticism had a professional ring, and perhaps in the end did the assailed author more good than harm. [9] A second edition of Professor Cooley’s _Blackstone_ was published in Chicago last year. If nowadays the name of Blackstone is held in diminished respect, the fact is mainly due to the contempt poured upon him by Bentham and Austin. They mercilessly exposed his shallow and confused philosophy. Bentham, reviewing one by one his opinions on government, maintained that they were not so much false as wholly meaningless; and Austin declared that neither in the general conception, nor in the detail of his book, is there a single particle of original and discriminating thought. It is tainted throughout, said the one, with hostility to reform; it was popular, said the other, because it “truckled to the sinister interests and mischievous prejudices of power.” Austin found nothing to praise even in its style, which, though fitted to tickle the ear, seemed to him effeminate, rhetorical, and prattling, and not in keeping with the dignity of the subject.