Beschreibung:

BLACKSTONE, Sir William (1723-1780). Commentaries on the Laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765-1766-1768-1769. 4 volumes, 4 (275 x 210mm). 2 engraved tables, one folding. (Occasional light browning or spotting.) Contemporary English speckled calf, covers with double-fillet borders, spines in six compartments with raised bands, red morocco lettering-piece in the second, green morocco label tooled with volume number in the third, the other compartments with repeat pattern of various flower and foliage sprays, (small chips to foot of spines of vols.I,II and IV, small splits to joints of vols.I, III and IV.) AN ATTRACTIVE COPY OF THE FIRST EDITION. "Blackstone's great work on the laws of England is the extreme example of justification of an existing state of affairs by virtue of its history... Until the Commentaries , the ordinary Englishman had viewed the law as a vast, unintelligible and unfriendly machine... Blackstone's great achievement was to popularize the law and the traditions which had influenced its formation... He takes a delight in describing and defending as the essence of the constitution the often anomalous complexities which had grown into the laws of England over the centuries. But he achieves the astonishing feat of communicating this delight, and this is due to a style which is itself always lucid and graceful" ( PMM ). The text in vol.I ends on Mmm1 and there is no conjugate blank Mmm2: this is not called for by Rothschild. This copy does not include the Supplement to the First Edition; containing the most material corrections and additions in the second . The tools on the spines show some slight variation, demonstrating that the set was bound as the volumes were published, bound for the same owner. PMM 212; Rothschild 407. (4)