They were agreed that our representative system was practically perfect; that religious dissent is subversive of civil government; and that the people were bound by their original contract to a scheme of government fundamentally and inviolably fixed on king, lords, and commons. Burke was among the first to read and admire the _Commentaries_; and had Blackstone lived ten years longer he would have read the _Reflections on the Revolution in France_, and applauded every word. We might describe him, in fact, as a Burke with the genius left out. [11] This is Fox’s comment on the passage:—“How vain, then, how idle, how presumptuous is the opinion that laws can do everything! and how weak and pernicious the maxim founded upon it, that measures, not men, are to be attended to!” Over Blackstone’s mind the antiquity of the constitution exercised a potent spell. The retrospective imagination, as it has been called, made him regard with reverence institutions that reach back to a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. The parliament and the monarchy, the sheriff, the corner, and trial by jury, seemed to be less the work of man’s hands than to partake of the dignity and immutability of the laws of nature; and the sense of trivial anomalies was lots in the veneration which he felt for a system of laws embodying in unbroken continuity the wisdom of a thousand years. It is not an unworthy emotion. There are few, let us hope, who have never been stirred by reflecting on the growth of that English liberty, which finds splendid voice in the prose of Milton, and whose presence, with “its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, and titles,” glows in every line of Burke. On its practical side the emotion may be healthy or may be baneful. We call him the crudest of politicians who never reflects that our laws have grown with the people, that they contain the experience of a nation, and are not the paper schemes of clever theorists, and that they are surrounded by traditions which no convulsion ever swept away and which give them half their strength. It is this that a greater lawyer than Blackstone meant when he said that time is the wisest thing in the inferior world. But to timid natures antiquity becomes the proof, and not merely the evidences of excellence; so that the mind is led to make a severance between the past and the present, and while respecting the constitution as a thing of gradual growth to forget that the growth continues. Blackstone’s whole nature was affected by this illusion of distance. It distorted alike his historical beliefs and his practical judgments. It made him maintain, as Bolingbroke did, that our liberties are but the restoration of the ancient constitution of which our Saxon forefathers were deprived by the policy and force of the Normans. To Montesquieu’s opinion that as Rome, Sparta, and Carthage lost their liberties, so