erce, by social intercourse, and
that great opener of the mind, ingenuous science?

These certainly were great encouragements to the study of historical
jurisprudence, particularly of our own. Nor was there a want of
materials or help for such an undertaking. Yet we have had few attempts
in that province. Lord Chief Justice Hale's History of the Common Law
is, I think, the only one, good or bad, which we have. But with all the
deference justly due to so great a name, we may venture to assert that
this performance, though not without merit, is wholly unworthy of the
high reputation of its author. The sources of our English law are not
well, nor indeed fairly, laid open; the ancient judicial proceedings are
touched in a very slight and transient manner; and the great changes and
remarkable revolutions in the law, together with their causes, down to
his time, are scarcely mentioned.

Of this defect I think there were two principal causes. The first, a
persuasion, hardly to be eradicated from the minds of our lawyers, that
the English law has continued very much in the same state from an
antiquity to which they will allow hardly any sort of bounds. The second
is, that it was formed and grew up among ourselves; that it is in every
respect peculiar to this island; and that, if the Roman or any foreign
laws attempted to intrude into its composition, it has always had vigor
enough to shake them off, and return to the purity of its primitive
constitution.

These opinions are flattering to national vanity and professional
narrowness; and though they involved those that supported them in the
most glaring contradictions, and some absurdities even too ridiculous to
mention, we have always been, and in a great measure still are,
extremely tenacious of them. If these principles are admitted, the
history of the law must in a great measure be deemed, superfluous. For
to what purpose is a history of a law of which it is impossible to trace
the beginning, and which during its continuance has admitted no
essential changes? Or why should we search foreign laws or histories for
explanation or ornament of that which is wholly our own, and by which we
are effectually distinguished from all other countries? Thus the law has
been confined, and drawn up into a narrow and inglorious study, and that
which should be the leading science in every well-ordered commonwealth
remained in all the barbarism of the rudest times, whilst every other
advance