If such was the fate
of the most beautiful compositions of genius, what stability could be
expected for the dull and barren works of an obsolete science? The books
of jurisprudence were interesting to few, and entertaining to none:
their value was connected with present use, and they sunk forever as
soon as that use was superseded by the innovations of fashion, superior
merit, or public authority. In the age of peace and learning, between
Cicero and the last of the Antonines, many losses had been already
sustained, and some luminaries of the school, or forum, were known only
to the curious by tradition and report. Three hundred and sixty years
of disorder and decay accelerated the progress of oblivion; and it may
fairly be presumed, that of the writings, which Justinian is accused
of neglecting, many were no longer to be found in the libraries of the
East. [85] The copies of Papinian, or Ulpian, which the reformer had
proscribed, were deemed unworthy of future notice: the Twelve Tables and
praetorian edicts insensibly vanished, and the monuments of ancient Rome
were neglected or destroyed by the envy and ignorance of the Greeks.
Even the Pandects themselves have escaped with difficulty and danger
from the common shipwreck, and criticism has pronounced that all the
editions and manuscripts of the West are derived from one original. [86]
It was transcribed at Constantinople in the beginning of the seventh
century, [87] was successively transported by the accidents of war
and commerce to Amalphi, [88] Pisa, [89] and Florence, [90] and is now
deposited as a sacred relic [91] in the ancient palace of the republic.
[92]

[Footnote 83: When Faust, or Faustus, sold at Paris his first printed
Bibles as manuscripts, the price of a parchment copy was reduced from
four or five hundred to sixty, fifty, and forty crowns. The public
was at first pleased with the cheapness, and at length provoked by the
discovery of the fraud, (Mattaire, Annal. Typograph. tom. i. p. 12;
first edit.)]

[Footnote 8311: Among the works which have been recovered, by the
persevering and successful endeavors of M. Mai and his followers to
trace the imperfectly erased characters of the ancient writers on these
Palimpsests, Gibbon at this period of his labors would have hailed with
delight the recovery of the Institutes of Gaius, and the fragments of
the Theodosian Code, published by M Keyron of Turin.--M.]

[Footnote 84: This execrable practice prevailed f