[71] Thayer, _The Teaching of English Law at Universities_ in _Harvard Law Review_, vol. IX., p. 170: ‘“I retired to a country village,” Chancellor Kent tells us in speaking of the breaking up of Yale College by the war, where he was a student in 1779, “and, finding Blackstone’s Commentaries, I read the four volumes.… The work inspired me at the age of fifteen with awe, and I fondly determined to be a lawyer.” … “There is abundant evidence,” if we may rely upon the authority of Dr Hammond, whose language I quote, “of the immediate absorption of nearly twenty-five hundred copies of the Commentaries in the thirteen colonies before the Declaration of Independence.”’ [Sidenote: _Marshall and Blackstone._] [72] Thayer, _John Marshall_, 1901, p. 6: ‘When Marshall was about eighteen years old he began to study Blackstone.… He seems to have found a copy of Blackstone in his father’s house.… Just now the first American edition was out (Philadelphia, 1771-2), in which the list of subscribers, headed by the name of “John Adams, barrister at law, Boston,” had also that of “Captain Thomas Marshall, Clerk of Dunmore County.”’ [Sidenote: _Roman law in America._] [73] It may be interesting to notice that in 1856, and perhaps even in 1871, Sir H. Maine believed that the Code of Louisiana (‘of all republications of Roman law the one which appears to us the clearest, the fullest, the most philosophical and the best adapted to the exigencies of modern society’) had a grand destiny before it in the United States. ‘Now it is this code, and not the Common Law of England which the newest American States are taking for the substratum of their laws.… The Roman law is, therefore, fast becoming the lingua franca of universal jurisprudence.’ (Maine, _Roman Law and Legal Education_, 1856, reprinted in _Village Communities_, ed. 3, pp. 360-1.) Nowadays this hope or fear of a Reception of Roman law in the United States seems, so I am given to understand, quite unfounded. See e.g. J. F. Dillon, _Laws and Jurisprudence of England and America_, 1894, p. 155: ‘the common law [in distinction from the Roman or civil law] is the basis of the laws of every State and Territory of the Union, with comparatively unimportant and gradually waning exceptions.’ [Sidenote: _Ihering and the litigious Englishman._]