form of the oaths of the judges, 1 Hening’s Stat. 169, 187; of the Governor, ib. 504; in the act for a provisional government, ib. 372; in the preamble to the laws of 1661-2; the uniform current of opinions and decisions; and in the general recognition of all our statutes framed on that basis.  But the state of the English law at the date of our emigration, constituted the system adopted here.  We may doubt, therefore, the propriety of quoting in our courts English authorities subsequent to that adoption; still more, the admission of authorities posterior to the Declaration of Independence, or rather to the accession of that King, whose reign, ab initio, was that very tissue of wrongs which rendered the Declaration at length necessary.  The reason for it had inception at least as far back as the commencement of his reign.  This relation to the beginning of his reign, would add the advantage of getting us rid of all Mansfield’s innovations, or civilizations of the common law.  For however I admit the superiority of the civil, over the common law code, as a system of perfect justice, yet an incorporation of the two would be like Nebuchadnezzar’s image of metals and clay, a thing without cohesion of parts.  The only natural improvement of the common law, is through its homogeneous ally, the chancery, in which new principles are to be examined, concocted, and digested.  But when, by repeated decisions and modifications, they are rendered pure and certain, they should be transferred by statute to the courts of common law, and placed within the pale of juries.  The exclusion from the courts of the malign influence of all authorities after the Georgium sidus became ascendant, would uncanonize Blackstone, whose book, although the most elegant and best digested of our law catalogue, has been perverted more than all others to the degeneracy of legal science.  A student finds there a smattering of every thing, and his indolence easily persuades him, that if he understands that book, he is master of the whole body of the law.  The distinction between these and those who have drawn their stores from the deep and rich mines of Coke’s Littleton, seems well understood even by the unlettered common people, who apply the appellation of Blackstone-lawyers to these ephemeral insects of the law.

Whether we should undertake to reduce the common law, our own, and so much of the English statutes as we have adopted, to a text, is a question of transcendant difficulty.  It was discussed at the first meeting of the committee of the revised code, in 1776, and decided in the negative, by the opinions of Wythe, Mason, and myself, against Pendleton and Thomas Lee.  Pendleton proposed to take Blackstone for that text, only purging him of what was inapplicable, or unsuitable to us.  In that case, the meaning of every word of Blackstone would have become a source of litigation, until it had been settled by repeated legal decisions.  And to come at that meaning, we should have had produced,