Sir william blackstone biography channel

On October 25, 1758 as William Blackstone approached the podium in the Oxford lecture hall he knew he was a failure.

Sir william blackstone biography channel

The thirty year old lawyer, nearsighted, already portly, chronically ill, now ready to read his notes in his grating voice, had spent the last seven years before the Bar in London with, a sympathetic biographer wrote, "little notice or practice."

Now addressing the students assembled before him to hear the first of his lectures on English law, Blackstone began with an apology.

Speaking in the third person Blackstone worried aloud that if his plan was "crude or injudicious, or the execution of it lame or superficial" he would set back the study of law.

"And this he must more especially dred, when he feels by experience how unequal his abilities are to complete, in the manner he could wish, so extensive and arduous a task; since he freely confesses, that his former more private attempts have fallen very short of his o