The first book I was advised to read, as a historical introduction to and compendium of law, was Blackstone's Commentaries. This author had acquired too much celebrity for any man of liberal education to be ignorant of his fame. I therefore began and continued to read him with all the prepossession that an author himself could wish in his favour. The panegyric he makes on English laws, and the Constitution of Britain, gave me delight and animation. The reproof he bestows, on gentlemen who are ignorant of this branch of learning, and on the perplexities introduced into our statute-law by such 'ill-judging and unlearned legislators,' and his praise of the capacity they would acquire for administering justice, to which sacred function they are so often called, were this ignorance removed, gave dignity to the study I was about to pursue. Then the account given of Servius Sulpicius! who, according to my learned author, 'left behind him about a hundred and four-score volumes of his own compiling!' How wonderfully did it move my admiration! I previously knew that in most countries, which are denominated civilized, law was voluminous: but I had never till then imagined that one man could himself compile a hundred and fourscore volumes! And, as it seems, could compile them at his leisure too: for his chief business was that of oratory! Beside which it lives on record that, being a firm patriot, he was a wise and indefatigable senator! But it appears that Sulpicius could devour law with greater ease than Milo, or perhaps even than Cacus himself, could oxen. Neither was it recorded that this prodigy of legal learning began young. And should I then despair of equalling him? No, no: get me into one of my trances and, had he compiled as many thousands of volumes, I should scarcely have suspected that I could not compile as fast as he. As I read on, how did I deplore the quarrel between Vicarius and his opponents: or, in other words, between the pandects and the common law of England: with the ignorance that had nearly been the result! How rejoice in the institution of those renowned hot-beds of law, the Inns of Court: by the aid of which, had not the rage for enacting laws kept pace with the rage for studying them, there were hopes that the whole kingdom would in time have been so learned in the science that every man might indeed have become his own lawyer.