red by the supreme
magistrate; and he alone proposed the laws, which were debated in the
senate, and finally ratified or rejected by a majority of votes in
the thirty curiae or parishes of the city. Romulus, Numa, and Servius
Tullius, are celebrated as the most ancient legislators; and each
of them claims his peculiar part in the threefold division of
jurisprudence. [7] The laws of marriage, the education of children,
and the authority of parents, which may seem to draw their origin from
nature itself, are ascribed to the untutored wisdom of Romulus. The law
of nations and of religious worship, which Numa introduced, was derived
from his nocturnal converse with the nymph Egeria. The civil law is
attributed to the experience of Servius: he balanced the rights and
fortunes of the seven classes of citizens; and guarded, by fifty new
regulations, the observance of contracts and the punishment of crimes.
The state, which he had inclined towards a democracy, was changed by the
last Tarquin into a lawless despotism; and when the kingly office was
abolished, the patricians engrossed the benefits of freedom. The royal
laws became odious or obsolete; the mysterious deposit was silently
preserved by the priests and nobles; and at the end of sixty years, the
citizens of Rome still complained that they were ruled by the arbitrary
sentence of the magistrates. Yet the positive institutions of the kings
had blended themselves with the public and private manners of the city,
some fragments of that venerable jurisprudence [8] were compiled by the
diligence of antiquarians, [9] and above twenty texts still speak the
rudeness of the Pelasgic idiom of the Latins. [10]

[Footnote 6: The constitutional history of the kings of Rome may be
studied in the first book of Livy, and more copiously in Dionysius
Halicarnassensis, (l. li. p. 80--96, 119--130, l. iv. p. 198--220,) who
sometimes betrays the character of a rhetorician and a Greek. * Note: M.
Warnkonig refers to the work of Beaufort, on the Uncertainty of the
Five First Ages of the Roman History, with which Gibbon was probably
acquainted, to Niebuhr, and to the less known volume of Wachsmuth,
"Aeltere Geschichte des Rom. Staats." To these I would add A. W.
Schlegel's Review of Niebuhr, and my friend Dr. Arnold's recently
published volume, of which the chapter on the Law of the XII. Tables
appears to me one of the most valuable, if not the most valuable,
chapter.--M.]

[Footnote 7: This t