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 advanced 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.