d by rapid steps to the highest improvement both in solidity and
elegance; insomuch that the study of our jurisprudence presented to
liberal and well-educated minds, even in the best authors, hardly
anything but barbarous terms, ill explained, a coarse, but not a plain
expression, an indigested method, and a species of reasoning the very
refuse of the schools, which deduced the spirit of the law, not from
original justice or legal conformity, but from causes foreign to it and
altogether whimsical. Young men were sent away with an incurable, and,
if we regard the manner of handling rather than the substance, a very
well-founded disgust. The famous antiquary, Spelman, though no man was
better formed for the most laborious pursuits, in the beginning deserted
the study of the law in despair, though he returned to it again when a
more confirmed age and a strong desire of knowledge enabled him to
wrestle with every difficulty.

The opinions which have drawn the law into such narrowness, as they are
weakly founded, so they are very easily refuted. With regard to that
species of eternity which they attribute to the English law, to say
nothing of the manifest contradictions in which those involve themselves
who praise it for the frequent improvements it has received, and at the
same time value it for having remained without any change in all the
revolutions of government, it is obvious, on the very first view of the
Saxon laws, that we have entirely altered the whole frame of our
jurisprudence since the Conquest. Hardly can we find in these old
collections a single title which is law at this day; and one may venture
to assert, without much hazard, that, if there were at present a nation
governed by the Saxon laws, we should find it difficult to point out
another so entirely different from everything we now see established in
England.

This is a truth which requires less sagacity than candor to discover.
The spirit of party, which has misled us in so many other particulars,
has tended greatly to perplex us in this matter. For as the advocates
for prerogative would, by a very absurd consequence drawn from the
Norman Conquest, have made all our national rights and liberties to have
arisen from the grants, and therefore to be revocable at the will of the
sovereign, so, on the other hand, those who maintained the cause of
liberty did not support it upon more solid principles. They would hear
of no beginning to any of our privileges,