REFERRED.TO IN MR. GIBBONS MEMOIRS

Tus excellent work, which Mr. Blackstone read as Vinerian Professor, may be considered as a rational System of the English Jurisprudence, digested into a natural method, and cleared of the pedantry, the obscurity, and the superflujties which rendered it the unknown horror of all men of taste.

Unfortunately for this useful science, the foreign clergy, who poured in shoals into England after the Norman conquest, had little relish for the old common law of this country; they had formed the design of erecting upon its ruins the new system of civil and canon law which had just begun to revive in the court of Rome and the Italian Universities. The artful designs of these ecclesiastics were however constantly disappointed by the steady opposition of the nobility and laity, who supported the municipal law of England against these innovations; till at last, despairing of success, the clergy affected to despise what they were unable to destroy, and withdrew almost entirely from the secular ‘tribunals. The Court of Chancery, of which they retained the direc ‘ tion, adopted many of the forms of the civil law, and as they were the sole masters of the two universities, they easily proscribed a science which they abhorred, and reduced the students of the common law to the necessity of erecting peculiar schools in London, and within the neighbourhood of the courts of justice. Although two hundred years have now elapsed since the Reformation, yet the reverence for esta blished customs will easily account for so material a defect in our acsdemical character not having been sooner corrected. a J have