Note 71 — ENGLISH LAW AND THE RENAISSANCE.

Thayer, The Teaching of English Law at Universities in Harvard Law Review, vol. IX., p. 170: ‘“I retired to a country village,” Chancellor Kent tells us in speaking of the breaking up of Yale College by the war, where he was a student in 1779, “and, finding Blackstone’s Commentaries, I read the four volumes.… The work inspired me at the age of fifteen with awe, and I fondly determined to be a lawyer.” … “There is abundant evidence,” if we may rely upon the authority of Dr Hammond, whose language I quote, “of the immediate absorption of nearly twenty-five hundred copies of the Commentaries in the thirteen colonies before the Declaration of Independence.”’