Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/218

 204 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S island of Bombay in one hemlsphere,^^ and in another Prince Rupert's land stretching no one knew how far into the frozen north were detached members of the manor of East Greenwich in the county of Kent.^^ Nearly twenty-five hundred copies of Blackstone's Commentaries were absorbed by the colonies on the Atlantic seaboard before they declared their independence. James Kent, aged fifteen, found a copy, and (to use his own words) was inspired with awe; ^^ John Marshall found a copy in his father's library ; ^^ and the common law went straight to the Pacific.^^ "Charter of 1669 printed among Charters granted to the East India Company (no date or publisher's name) : " to be holden of us, our heirs and successors as of the manor of East Greenwich in the county of Kent, in free and common soccage and not in capite nor by knight's service, yielding and paying therefor to us, our heirs and successors at the Custom House, London, the rent or sum of ten pounds of lawful money of England in gold on the thirtieth day of September yearly for ever." ^'Charter of 1670 incorporating the Hudson's Bay Company, printed by Beckles Wilson, The Great Company, vol. ii., pp. 318, 327: "yielding and paying yearly to us. . . two elks and two black beavers, whenso- ever and as often as we our heirs and successors shall happen to enter into the said countries, territories and regions hereby granted." " Thayer, The Teaching of English Law at Universities in Harvard Law Review, vol. ix., p. 170: '"I retired to a country village,' Chan- cellor 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 absorp- tion of nearly twenty-five hundred copies of the Commentaries in the thirteen colonies before the Declaration of Independence.' " "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,' and also that of ' Captain Thomas Marshall, Clerk of Dun- more County.' " "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 exigen- cies 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.