were distasteful from their sympathy with free institutions.  Different opinions have been expressed by the jurisconsults as to the merits of the Justinian collection.  By some it is regarded as a vast mass of legal lumber; by others, as a beautiful monument of human labor.  After the lapse of so many centuries it is certain that a large portion of it is of no practical utility, since it is not applicable to modern wants.  But again, no one doubts that it has exercised a great and good influence on moral and political science, and introduced many enlightened views concerning the administration of justice as well as the nature of civil government, and thus has modified the codes of the Teutonic nations that sprang up on the ruins of the old Roman world.  It was used in the Greek empire until the fall of Constantinople.  It never entirely lost authority in Italy, although it remained buried for centuries, till the discovery of the Florentine copy of the Pandects at the siege of Amalfi in 1135.  Peter Valence, in the eleventh century, made use of it in a law-book which he published.

With the rise of the Italian cities, the study of Roman law revived, and Bologna became the seat from which it spread over Europe.  In the sixteenth century the science of theoretical law passed from Italy to France, under the auspices of Francis I., when Cujas, or Cujacius, became the great ornament of the school of Bourges and the greatest commentator on Roman law until Dumoulin appeared.  Grotius, in Holland, excited the same interest in civil law that Dumoulin did in France, followed by eminent professors in Leyden and the German universities.  It was reserved for Pothier, in the middle of the eighteenth century, to reduce the Roman law to systematic order,—­one of the most gigantic tasks that ever taxed the industry of man.  The recent discoveries, especially that made by Niebuhr of the long-lost work of Gaius, have given a great impulse to the study of Roman law in Germany; and to this impulse no one has contributed so greatly as Savigny of Berlin.

The great importance of the subject demands a more minute notice of the principles of the Roman law than the limits of this work properly allow.  I shall therefore endeavor to abridge what has been written by eminent authorities, taking as a basis the late work of Lord Mackenzie and the learned and interesting essay of Professor Maine.

The Institutes of Justinian began with the law of persons, recognizing the distinction of ranks.  All persons are capable of enjoying civil rights, but not all in the same degree.  Greater privileges are allowed to men than to women, to freemen than to slaves, to fathers than to children.