forms the subject of his work, he has left scarcely anything to be desired.

As a philosophical history, as a study of the general and progressive organization of facts, I cannot say so much for it. It does not appear to me that M. de Savigny has proposed this task to himself, or that he has even thought of it. Not only has he omitted all attempt to place the particular history upon which he occupied himself in relation with the general history of civilization and of human nature, but even within his own subject, he has troubled himself but little with any systematic concatenation of facts; he has not in the least considered them as causes and effects, in their relation of generation. They present themselves in his work, totally isolated, and having between them no other relation than that of dates, a relation which is no true link, and which gives to facts neither meaning nor value.

Nor do we meet, in any greater degree, with poetical truth; facts do not appear to M. de Savigny under their living physiognomy. It is true, upon such a subject, he had neither characters nor scenes to reproduce; his personages are texts, and his events publications or abrogations of laws. Still these texts and legislative reforms belonged to a society which had its manners and its life; they are associated with events more suited to strike the imagination-to invasions, foundations of states, &c. There is among these a certain dramaticaspect to seize; in this M. de Savigny has failed; his dissertations are not marked with the hue of the spectacle with which they are connected; he does not reproduce the external and individual traits of history any more than its internal and general laws.

And do not suppose that in this there is no other evil than. that of a deficiency, and that this absence of philosophical. and poetical truth is without influence upon the criticism of the material elements of history. More than once M. de Savigny, from not properly taking hold of the laws and physiognomy of facts, has been led into error regarding the facts themselves; he has not deceived himself as to texts and dates; he has not omitted or incorrectly reported such or such an event; he has committed a species of error for which the English have a word which is wanting in our tongue, misrepresentation, that is to say, he has spread a

false hue over facts, arising, not from any inaccuracy in particular details, but from want of verity in the aspect cf the whole, in the manner in which the mirror reflects the picture. In treating, for example, of the social state of the Germans before the invasion, M. de Savigny speaks in detail of the free men, of their situation and their share in the national institutions; his knowledge of historical documents is extensive and correct, and the facts alleged by him are true; but he has not rightly considered the mobility of situations among the barbarians, nor the secret contest between those two societies, the tribe and the warlike band, which coexisted among the Germans, nor the influence of the latter in altering the individual equality and independence which served as the foundation of the former, nor the vicissitudes and successive transformations to which the condition of the free men was subjected by this influence. Hence arises, in my opinion, a general mistake in the painting of this condition; he has made it too fine, too fixed, and too powerful; he has not, in the least, represented its weakness and approaching fall.

The same fault is seen, although in a less degree, in his history of the Roman law itself, from the fifth to the twelfth century; it is complete and correct, as far as the collection of facts goes; but the facts are all placed there, so to speak, upon the same level; one is not present at their successive modifications, one does not perceive the Roman law transform itself in proportion as the new society is developed. No moral concatenation connects these so learnedly and ingeniously re-established facts. Anatomical dissection, in a word, is the dominant character of the work; internal organization and external life, are alike wanting to it,

Reduced to its true nature, as a criticism of material facts, M. de Savigny's book is original and excellent; it ought to serve as the basis of all studies whose subject is this epoch, because it places beyond all doubt the perpetuity of Roman law from the fifth to the twelfth century, and thus fully resolves the problem which the author proposed to himself.

Now that it is resolved, one is surprised that this problem should ever have been raised, and that the permanence of the Roman law, after the fall of the Empire, should ever have

T. i. pp. 160-195.

been doubted. Not only do the barbaric laws everywhere make mention of the Roman laws, but there is scarcely a single document or act of this epoch which does not, directly or indirectly, attest their daily application. Perhaps the error which M. de Savigny has contested, has not been so general nor so absolute as he appears to suppose, and as it is commonly said to be. It was the Pandects which reappeared in the twelfth century; and when people have celebrated the resurrection of the Roman law at this period, it is above all of the legislation of Justinian that they have spoken. On regarding more closely, one will perceive, I think, that the perpetuity of other portions of the Roman law in the west, the Theodosian code, for example, and of all the colle tions of which it served for the basis, has not been so entirely departed from, as the work of M. de Savigny would give us to believe. But it matters little; more or less extended, the error upon this subject was real, and M. de Savigny, in dissipating it, has given a prodigious progress to knowledge.

I shall now place before you the principal results of his work, but I shall do so in an order contrary to that which we have followed in studying the German laws. We commenced with the most barbarous, in order to finish with those in which the Roman spirit had penetrated the deepest. We shall now, on the contrary, first study the countries where the Roman law preserved the greatest empire, in order to follow it in the various degrees of its diminution of strength.

It follows that the kingdom of the Visigoths is the first upon which we have to occupy ourselves. It was, you will recal to mind, from the year 466 to 484 that king Euric, who resided at Toulouse, for the first time caused the customs of the Goths to be written. In 506, his successor, Alaric II., caused the laws of his Roman subjects to be collected and published under a new form. We read, at the beginning of some of the manuscripts of this collection, the following preface:

"In this volume are contained the laws or decisions of equity, selected from the Theodosian code and other books, and explained as has been ordered, the lord king Alaric being in the twenty-second year of his reign, the illustrious count Goiaric presiding at this work. Copy of

the decree:-Letter of advice to Timothy, Viscount. With the aid of God, occupied with the interests of our people, we have corrected, after mature deliberation, all that seemed iniquitous in the laws, in such manner that, by the labour of the priests and other noblemen, all obscurity in the Roman and in our own ancient laws is dissipated, and a greater clearness is spread over it, to the end that nothing may remain ambiguous, and offer a subject for lengthened controversies for pleaders. All these laws, then, being explained and re-united in a single book by the choice of wise men, the assent of venerable bishops and of our provincial subjects, elected with this view, has confirmed the said collection, to which is appended a clear interpretation. Our Clemency, then, has ordered the subscribed book to be entrusted to count Goiaric, for the decision of affairs, to the end that hereafter all processes may be terminated according to its dispositions, and that it be not allowed to any person to put forward any law or rule of equity, unless contained in the present book, subscribed as we have ordered, by the hand of the honourable man Anianus. It is, therefore, expedient that thou take heed that, in thy jurisdiction, no other law or form be alleged or admitted; if perchance such a thing should happen, it shall be at the peril of thy head or at the expense of thy fortune. We order that this prescript be joined to the book that we send thee, to the end that the rule of our will and the fear of the penalty may restrain all our subjects.

"I, Anianus, honourable man, according to the order of the very glorious king Alaric, have subscribed and published this volume of Theodosian laws, decisions of equity, and other books, collected at Aire, the twenty-second year of his reign. We have collated them.

"Given the fourth day of the nones of February, the twenty-second year of the reign of king Alaric, at Toulouse.' This preface contains all we know concerning the history of the digestion of this code. I have a few explanations to add to it. Goiaric was the count of the palace, charged with the superintendence of its execution throughout the kingdom; Anianus, in quality of referendary, was to subscribe the various copies of it, and send them to the provincial counts; Timothy is one of these counts. The greater part of

the manuscripts being but copies made for private purposes, give neither the preface nor any letter. The collection of Alaric contains: 1st, the Theodosian code (sixteen books); 2nd, the books of civil law of the emperor Theodosius, Valentinian, Marcian, Majorian, and Severus; 3rd, the Institutes of Gaïus, the jurisconsult; 4th, five books of Paul, the jurisconsult, entitled Receptæ Sententiæ; 5th, the Gregorian code (thirteen titles); 6th, the Hermoginian code (2 titles); 7th, and lastly, a passage from the work of Papinian, entitled Liber Responsorum.

The Constitutions and Novels of the emperors are called Leges; the works of the jurisconsults, including the Gregorian and Hermoginian codes, which did not emanate from any official or public power, bear simply the name of Jus, This is the distinction between law and jurisprudence.

The whole collection was called Lex Romana, and not Breviarium; the latter name was unknown before the sixteenth century.1 Of the Breviarium Alaricianum, there is but one separate edition, published in 1528, at Basle, by Sichard. It has besides this been inserted, sometimes partially and sometimes entire, in the various editions of the Theodosian code.

It is divided into two essential parts: 1st, a text or abstract of the sources of the law which I have just enumerated; 2nd, an interpretation. The Institutes of Gaïus is the only work in which the interpretation and the text are fused in one.

The text is merely the reproduction of the original text, it is not always complete; all the imperial constitutions, for example, are not inserted in the Breviarium; but those which it did reproduce are not mutilated. There the ancient law appears in all its purity, independent of the changes which the fall of the Empire must have introduced into it. The Interpretation, on the contrary, digested in the time of Alaric by civil or ecclesiastical jurisconsults, whom he had charged with this work, takes cognizance of all these changes; explains, modifies, and sometimes positively alters the text,

1 I the preceding lecture it is said that Alaric caused the laws of his Roman subjects to be collected and published under the name of Breviarium. This is an oversight.