Giles Jacob

[4] Giles Jacob's legal training included employment by Thomas Freke, and then as a secretary to Sir William Blathwayt.

[4] Jacob always had an interest in contemporary poetry and the literary life, and in 1714 he wrote a farce called Love in a Wood, or, The Country Squire.

The poem was low and bawdy, and the next year he wrote a serious work titled Tractatus de hermaphroditis about the legal status of intersex people,[4] published by Edmund Curll in 1718 (along with the first English-language publication of Ioannes Henricus Meibomius's A treatise of the use of flogging in venereal affairs).

It cannot be denied that he possessed very small abilities; but he was fully equal to a task where plodding industry, and not genius, must be deemed the essential qualification.In the Poetical Register, Jacob criticized the play Three Hours After Marriage (1717), which had been written by John Gay with anonymous assistance from John Arbuthnot and Alexander Pope.

In The Dunciad of 1728, Pope pounced:[4] Jacob, the scourge of grammar, mark with awe, Nor less revere him, blunderbuss of law.

Pope explained Jacob's offense as follows: "he very grossly and unprovoked abused in that book [the Poetical Register] the author’s friend, Mr.

It combined a dictionary of legal practice with an abridgment of statute law, and it reached its fifth edition by the time of Jacob's death.

Jacob's legal writings were of a practical and descriptive sort, often compared unfavorably to the analytic and theoretical treatises by authors like William Blackstone.