COMMENTARIES ON THE Laws of England. IN FOUR BOOKS. BY SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONIANT.. ONE OF THE JUSTICES OF HIS MAJESTY'S COURT OF COMMON PLEAS. THE SIXTEENTH EDITION, WITH THE LAST CORRECTIONS OF THE AUTHOR; AND WITH NOTES BY JOHN TAYLOR COLERIDGE, Esq. OF THE MIDDLE TEMPLE, BARRISTER AT LAW. LONDON: PRINTED BY A. STRAHAN, LAW-PRINTER TO THE KING'S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY ; AND J. BUTTERWORTH AND SON, FLEET-STREET. 1825. ΤΟ THE RIGHT HONOURABLE ROBERT LORD GIFFORD, BARON OF ST. LEONARD'S, MASTER OF THE ROLLS, AND ONE OF HIS MAJESTY'S MY LORD, IN requesting permission to inscribe this edition of Blackstone's Commentaries to Your Lordship, I was actuated by motives of high and unfeigned respect for qualities and attainments upon which I will not here enlarge. I believed too, that your attachment to our common profession would make you look with a favourable eye on any well-meant attempt to render it service, and that you would not unwillingly connect your name with a work which, more than any other, has tended to liberalise the practice of the law, and to disseminate a knowledge of its principles generally through the English nation. I did not of course hope that faults in execution, of which I was myself conscious, would escape Your Lordship; but I knew that the most able are commonly the |