Blackstone, SIR WILLIAM, commentator on English law, was the posthumous son of a silker-mercer in London, and was born there 10th July 1723. In 1738 he obtained a scholarship from the Charterhouse to Pembroke College, Oxford; in 1741 entered the Inner Temple; in 1744 was elected a fellow of All Souls'; and in 1746 was called to the bar, but failed to attract either notice or practice. In 1749 he succeeded an uncle as recorder of Wallingford, in Berkshire; and in 1753 he delivered a course of lectures at Oxford on the law of England. Three years later, a Mr Viner having left £12,000 to endow a chair of English Law at Oxford, Blackstone was in 1758 appointed first Vinerian professor. Next year he returned to Westminster; and as the doctrines which he had taught as a lecturer had commended him to the Tory government of that day, he was made a king's counsel in 1761, in the same year becoming member for Hindon, in Wiltshire, and shortly after principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford. Other honours followed fast, and in 1763 he was made solicitor-general to the queen. In 1765-69 he published the four volumes of his lectures, which form his celebrated Commentaries on the Laws of England, and which brought him in £14,000. His practice, too, continuing to increase, he resigned in 1766 his Oxford appointments. Four years later he declined the solicitor-generalship, and, having been knighted, was made a justice of the Court of Common Pleas. He died 14th February 1780, and was buried at Wallingford.
Blackstone's fame rests wholly on his Commentaries. His seventeen other literary works, which included some youthful poetry, were inconsiderable, and his merits as pleader or judge were not of themselves such as to have made his reputation outlive him. As a commentator, he had many excellences. His style is in general clear and gracefully ornate, his illustrations are pleasing and felicitous. While he confined himself to exposition—to the accurate statement in scholarlike English of what had heretofore lain buried in the cumbrous language of lawyers like Littleton—Blackstone was unsurpassed, and rendered an important service to the country. But he was ambitious of combining with this exposition the higher task of explaining the reasons of law, as well as its merits and defects. For this survey of law from the legislator's point of view, he had not the requisite qualifications; his knowledge of English history was superficial, his study of the philosophy of law had been imperfect. With the works, indeed, of Montesquieu and Beccaria he was acquainted; but the mode in which he quotes them shows that he had imbibed nothing of their spirit. The method followed in the Commentaries was as unscientific as could be imagined, and had not even the merit of originality. It was taken with little alteration and no improvement from Sir Matthew Hale's Analysis of the English Law. Possibly the haste with which the Commentaries must have been composed, being originally in the form of lectures, may have led to some of their imperfections. Since Blackstone's death the Commentaries have been very frequently reprinted, having reached a 23d edition in 1854, not to speak of various American editions and abridgments, such as Wait's (1875) and Ewell's (1883).