Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/730

 716 V. BENCH AND BAR learning, he sketched the whole field of the law. The literary charm of his easily flowing periods made his Commentaries general reading among even laymen. Criticism had not dem- onstrated any of Blackstone's errors or fallacies. English- men, reading the lectures, swelled with pride to hear that " of a constitution, so wisely contrived, so strongly raised, and so highly finished, it is hard to speak with that praise, which is so justly and severely its due." After a description of its solid foundations, its extensive plan, the harmony of its parts, the elegant proportion of the whole, Blackstone with impressive eloquence exhorted his countrymen : " To sustain, to repair, to beautify this noble pile, is a duty which Englishmen owe to themselves, who enjoy it, to their ances- tors, who transmitted it, to their posterity, who will claim at their hands this the best birthright and the noblest in- heritance of mankind." But even as Blackstone was writing these sonorous peri- ods, two great reformers were at work. One of them, Lord Mansfield, was working by the slow and careful method of judicial legislation. The other, Jeremy Bentham, was stor- ing up that great supply of reforming material, which was to supply Brougham and Romilly in the next generation. Mansfield's work is not found in the statutes; it is recorded in the law reports. Bentham derided the judge-made law, and maintained that all the law should be written on the statute books. Mansfield followed the traditional practice of the English lawyer; Bentham turned to the continental codifiers. Mansfield extended and transformed old princi- ples, building up whole branches of the law by the expan- sion of accepted rules. Bentham's idea of a change was to wipe out all existing law, by a set of codes whose words should be the sole rule of decision. William Murray, the first Earl of Mansfield, was born in 1705. The fates conspired to make him the greatest of lawyers. His family was almost the oldest in Scotland. Compared with these de Moravias or Murrays, the Bourbons, the Hapsburgs, and the Hohenzollerns are things of yester- day ; even the house of Savoy is not older. A younger branch of the Murray family had the title of Viscount Stor-