versies on points of legal doctrine are, indeed, the inevitable result of mental activity applied without restraint to legal questions and relations. To stifle thought and to suppress freedom are the only effectual means of avoiding such controversies. But, in a community where freedom is suppressed and thought is stifled, what rights can be secure? What is the worth of law without either intelligence or liberty?

It was no easy matter for a prince who had legislated so long and so much, to stay his hand and rest content with the work already accomplished. The appetite for legislation, like other appetites, is apt to grow with what it feeds on. The compilers of the Corpus Juris must have felt that in the new law-system, however much improved, there were still incongruities and inequalities which called for further improvement; that there were necessities, either not provided for at all, or not in the best manner, by any rules contained in it. From many sources must have come a real or apparent demand for further law-making. Thus we find that Justinian, after the completion of his great legislative work, issued a large number of new constitutions, especially in the years from 535 to 545, in the last of which he lost his able and active minister Tribonian. Many of these constitutions made little alteration in the existing law; but there were some which introduced extensive and important changes. Justinian did not think it necessary to work over the

whole Corpus Juris so as to bring it into harmony with the rules and doctrines thus established. He may have dreaded the expenditure of time and toil necessary for the recasting of a law-book so voluminous: he may have shrunk from calling on his subjects to throw away the heavy and costly tomes which he had compelled them to procure in order to replace them by others equally heavy and costly: he may have felt that the revocation of a law-system so laboriously constructed and so solemnly promulgated only a few years before, would lead people to regard the entire law as something uncertain, fluctuating, and transient. At all events, he contented himself with bringing these later ordinances, as fast as they were issued, into a separate collection, where they stood in chronological order, without any attempt to give them a logical arrangement. This collection bore the name novellae constitutiones (recent enactments): in all editions of the Corpus Juris, it stands as the concluding part, and by English writers is generally called the Novels, a name identical in spelling, though any thing but identical in what it designates, with that which we use for the compositions of Bulwer, Dickens, or Trollope. In these Novels, the language generally used was the Greek; some, however, were issued in Latin, and not a few in Greek and Latin at the same time. In the last case, it is curious to note that Justinian himself declares that the Latin form must be taken as the au

thentic and authoritative original, and the Greek as only its translation; the Latin was still regarded, by the force of old tradition, as the proper official language of the empire. The actual use of Greek as the prevailing language of the Novels distinguishes this from the preceding portions of the Corpus Juris. In the Codex the large majority of the constitutions are in Latin, and Latin is the language of thirty-eight out of the thirty-nine writers embraced in the Digest.

In regard to this whole body of law, the construction and outward appearance of which have thus been described and especially in regard to the Digest, its largest and most characteristic part-one may say, in general, that it was too good for the age in which it appeared. It was produced in a period of great and progressive decline, by men whom a study of older and better models had raised above the general level of their time. Apparently they hoped that, by bringing these same models into a form and position in which they could be generally known and studied, it would be possible to arrest the downward tendencies in the profession and practice of the law. In the reign of Justinian, at least in its earlier part, men were hoping for a good time coming. It seemed as if the clouds which had settled down on the Roman world were beginning to break away; as if the storm of barbarian invasion and conquest had spent its force, and the empire of the Cæsars was to recover its ancient power

and glory. The legislation of Justinian shows the influence of such anticipations. The old law, freed from the obsolete elements which encumbered and concealed it, was to have the ascendency which it exercised in the prosperous times of the earlier empire. These hopes, we know, were doomed to disappointment. The anticipated good time of restoration and revival never came. The downward tendencies of society were too strong to be arrested. The great law-book of Justinian seems to have gained no very wide currency among those for whom it was intended. It was, to a great extent, superseded in practice by paraphrases and abridgments, of the whole or of particular parts. An inquirer two or three centuries later, looking at the fate of this Justinian legislation, might have said that it was a splendid and elaborate failure. In the reign of Leo the Isaurian (717-741), the books of the Corpus Juris were hardly used at all in their original form; and even the paraphrases and abridgments founded on it were so ill adapted to the existing state of the law, that this emperor thought it necessary to issue a compendious code of his own. This was the state of things in the Eastern Empire. In Western Europe the Corpus Juris had never found currency, except in Italy; and here, in some parts and cities of the peninsula, it still enjoyed an obscure and precarious influence. How it emerged from this condition to one of world-wide note and commanding authority, will appear in the next lecture.

LECTURE II.

THE ROMAN LAW SINCE JUSTINIAN.

THE Germanic tribes which became masters of Gaul, Spain, and Italy,* in the fifth century, kept their Germanic law-customs for themselves, but suffered the conquered populations to remain under the old Roman law. Hence a system of personal, rather than territorial law. Persons were sometimes allowed to choose their own law by a professio. The multiplicity of systems was increased by the growth of an ecclesiastical law, founded on the Roman, but with features peculiar to itself, for ecclesiastical persons and relations.

In Britain, on the contrary, the Saxons and Angles, driving out the native inhabitants, became sole occupants of the conquered districts, and thus had no Roman law existing with and acting upon their own.

Some of the Germanic chiefs (Alaric the Visigoth, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, Sigismund the Burgundian) issued, for the use of their native subjects, summaries of the Roman law, drawn from the Theodosian code and other earlier sources. These appeared shortly before the Corpus Juris of Justinian, and were vastly inferior to it in extent and value.

It was formerly believed that the knowledge of the Corpus Juris in Western Europe began with the discovery of a copy (the Florentine MS. of the Digest, said to have been found by the Emperor Lothar II. at the taking of Amalfi in 1136. But Savigny has shown that the Corpus Juris, introduced into Italy during the reign of Justinian, never ceased to be known and used in parts of that country. But about 1100 (opening era of the Crusades) we find a greatly revived and extended study of the Roman law, carried on especially at Bologna, by a series of acute and profound law-teachers, called glossators, from the marginal glosses or comments which they wrote on their copies of the Corpus Juris. A voluminous collection of these glosses, made by Accursius, one of the last glossators (died 1260), is printed in old editions of the Corpus Juris.

As the effect of these studies, the Corpus Juris came to be received as law, as the main (though not exclusive) source of private law, first in