So long as his admirers could see no defects in his work, and his critics were blind to its merits, judgments of Blackstone kept moving along parallel lines, and never met. Standing at this distance of time, when the _Commentaries_ have long lost the glitter of novelty, when we have not Bentham’s cause for anger, and when nobody retains a belief in the infallibility of Austin, it should be possible to treat Blackstone more fairly than either his friends or his enemies have done. There are signs that a juster estimate is now being formed, and the clearest of these is the testimony of one who must know by his own experience what were the difficulties which Blackstone surmounted. Sir James Stephen admits that he was neither a profound nor an accurate thinker, that he is often led to speak of English law in terms of absurd praise, and that his arrangement of the subject is imperfect. But “the fact still remains,” he says, “that Blackstone first rescued the law of England from chaos. He did, and did exceedingly well, for the end of the eighteenth century, what Coke tried to do, and did exceedingly ill, about 150 years before; that is to say, he gave an account of the law as a whole, capable of being studied, not only without disgust, but with interest and profit.... A better work of the kind has not yet been written, and, with all its defects, the literary skill, with which a problem of extraordinary difficulty has been dealt with is astonishing.” Few authors ever had a clearer field. Long before his day, indeed, the immense growth of the law had been regarded as a heavy burden. Lawyers groaned, just as they groan now, over the increasing accumulation of statutes and reports. And yet Coke upon Littleton remained the beginner’s chief guide. Coke called his work the _Institutes of the Laws of England_; but, whatever its other merits, it lacks every quality which the title would suggest. It is unsystematic, undigested; it makes no pretence of leading its reader from principles to rules; and it spares him the details of no curious anomaly. It is like an overgrown treatise on the subjunctive mood. The need had long been felt for a better work; and the broad outlines had been sketched by Hale in his admirable _Analysis of the Civil Part of the Law_, which Blackstone followed in every essential feature. Some treatises too had appeared written with a purely educational purpose. Of these the most successful, long recommended as an elementary text-book for students, was the _Institutes_ of Wood, a Buckinghamshire clergyman. It was a praiseworthy attempt to present the law in a methodical form, but it lacked literary merit, and had all the dulness of an epitome. It is memorable only as the book which the _Commentaries_ displaced.