Beautiful Set of Blackstone's Commentaries
Commentaries on the Laws of England.
Oxford: Printed at the Clarendon Press, 1765-1766-1768-1769.
Price: $26,000.00
About the item
First Edition. With final blank in vol. I; folding Table of Consanguinity and Table of Descents in vol. II. 4 vols. 4to. Contemporary sprinkled calf, gilt arms of the Duke of Newcastle on sides, neatly rebacked to style preserving original red and black labels, marbled endpapers. Modern open-backed slipcase. Rothschild 407; PMM 212; Grolier English 52.
Item #375551
Beautiful set of this classic, one of the cornerstones of our legal system, and still regarded as the best general history of English law. In these lectures which he gave as the first Vinerian Professor of Law at Oxford, Blackstone taught (as even his critic Bentham noted) “jurisprudence to speak the language of the scholar and gentleman.”
“Blackstone’s great work on the laws of England is the extreme example of justification of an existing state of affairs by virtue of its history … Until the Commentaries, the ordinary Englishman had viewed the law as a vast, unintelligible and unfriendly machine... Blackstone’s great achievement was to popularize the law and the traditions which had influenced its formation... He takes a delight in describing and defending as the essence of the constitution the often anomalous complexities which had grown into the laws of England over the centuries. But he achieves the astonishing feat of communicating this delight, and this is due to a style which is itself always lucid and graceful” (PMM).
