Blackstone saw his opportunity. Perhaps no one else in his time combined in the same degree the qualities which the work required; nor was there any one so capable of writing a law-book, which could be read with interest by educated laymen, and at the same time be accepted as almost authoritative by practising lawyers. Blackstone’s training enabled him to gain the ear of both; for he was not only a lawyer, but a man of letters. His love of literature developed early, and along with it a desire to win literary fame. He does not seem to have read widely, but the pleasure which in his school days he derived from Shakespeare and Milton, Pope and Addison, was dulled neither by advancing years nor by the absorbing demands of the law. “The notes which he gave me on Shakespeare,” said Malone, who used them in his edition, “show him to have been a man of excellent taste and accuracy, and a good critic.” He was something of a poet himself; but the “Lawyer’s Farewell to his Muse,” the “Lawyer’s Prayer,” and the “Elegy on the Death of the Prince of Wales,” though they have occasionally been unearthed as curiosities, have long been swept away with other rubbish of the kind. The following lines, which are his best, and in which we feel the very spirit of the _Commentaries_, will not tempt further even the most diligent seeker after neglected poets. Their historical audacity would amaze Professor Freeman. ‘Oh, let me pierce the secret shade Where dwells the venerable maid! There humbly mark, with rev’rent awe, The guardian of Britannia’s Law, Unfold with joy her sacred page (Th’ united boast of many an age, Where mix’d yet uniform appears The wisdom of a thousand years)... Observe how parts with parts unite In one harmonious rule of right; See countless wheels distinctly tend By various laws to one great end; While mighty Alfred’s piercing soul Pervades and animates the whole.’ The Pope who was lost in Blackstone we can as easily spare as the Ovid who was lost in Murray. Yet it was from that love of literature to which his poetical compositions bear witness, perhaps in some degree also from the enforced measure and restraint of verse, that he acquired a style, which though it has not the freshness and variety of Addison’s, its most direct model, has the same singular clearness and almost the same ease and flow. By education, not by accident, did he come to deserve Bentham’s one compliment that he it was who first, of all institutional writers, taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the scholar and the gentleman.