There is certainly no profound nor much original thought in Blackstone’s four volumes. Nobody was ever made better able to comprehend a difficulty in English law by means of the notions on laws in general to be found in that famous chapter, which, as Sir Henry Maine puts it, may almost be said to have made Bentham and Austin into jurists by virtue of sheer repulsion. They lead to nothing, and explain nothing. They are rather the obeisances made by a polite professor to his subject, or a lawyer’s invocation of his muse, than the necessary foundations of a system. Blackstone repeats the venerable doctrine that human laws depend on the law of nature and the law of revelation, and that no laws are valid which conflict with these; but he never dares to apply it to any rule of English law. And when he comes to speak of parliament and monarchy, he has forgotten that odd proof of the perfection of the British constitution, with its divine combination of power, wisdom, and goodness, of which Bentham made such easy fun. He does not so much as pretend to be original. He is so dependent on others that he adopts not only their opinions but even their language, and by no means always does he let us know that he is quoting. He does not refer to Locke when he is stating, practically in Locke’s words, the theory of the right of society to inflict punishment; he never mentions the name of Burlamaqui, who was his guide, most faithfully followed, in the analysis of laws in general; and he fails to acknowledge half his obligations to Montesquieu.[10] Indeed, the free use he makes of Montesquieu’s famous chapter on the English constitution would be appalling, did we not remember that he was only following a professional custom of appropriation, which legal authors have not yet wholly abandoned. There is, in fact, scarcely a single sentence of that chapter which has not, somewhere or other, found its way into the _Commentaries_; and, as often as not, the Commentator leaves us to infer that the reflections are his own. [10] Blackstone does not seem to have read either Burlamaqui or Montesquieu in French. He invariably uses the words of Nugent’s translations, which had then been recently published.