he Roman law of Contract and Delict. The law
bound the parties together, and the _chain_ could only be undone by
the process called _solutio_, an expression still figurative, to which
our word "payment" is only occasionally and incidentally equivalent.
The consistency with which the figurative image was allowed to present
itself, explains an otherwise puzzling peculiarity of Roman legal
phraseology, the fact that "Obligation" signified rights as well as
duties, the right, for example, to have a debt paid as well as the
duty of paying it. The Romans kept in fact the entire picture of the
"legal chain" before their eyes, and regarded one end of it no more
and no less than the other.

In the developed Roman law, the Convention, as soon as it was
completed, was, in almost all cases, at once crowned with the
Obligation, and so became a Contract; and this was the result to which
contract-law was surely tending. But for the purpose of this inquiry,
we must attend particularly to the intermediate stage--that in which
something more than a perfect agreement was required to attract the
Obligation. This epoch is synchronous with the period at which the
famous Roman classification of Contracts into four sorts--the Verbal,
the Literal, the Real, and the Consensual--had come into use, and
during which these four orders of Contracts constituted the only
descriptions of engagement which the law would enforce. The meaning of
the fourfold distribution is readily understood as soon as we
apprehend the theory which severed the Obligation from the Convention.
Each class of contracts was in fact named from certain formalities
which were required over and above the mere agreement of the
contracting parties. In the Verbal Contract, as soon as the Convention
was effected, a form of words had to be gone through before the
vinculum juris was attached to it. In the Literal Contract, an entry
in a ledger or table-book had the effect of clothing the Convention
with the Obligation, and the same result followed, in the case of the
Real Contract, from the delivery of the Res or Thing which was the
subject of the preliminary engagement. The contracting parties came,
in short, to an understanding in each case; but, if they went no
further, they were not _obliged_ to one another, and could not compel
performance or ask redress for a breach of faith. But let them comply
with certain prescribed formalities, and the Contract was immediately
complete, taking