sed two days and as many nights
without tasting any food. He allowed himself little time for sleep, and
was always up before the morning light. His restless application to
business and to study, as well as the extent of his learning, have been
attested even by his enemies. He was, or professed to be, a poet and
philosopher, a lawyer and theologian, a musician and an architect; but
the brightest ornament of his reign is the compilation of Roman law
which has immortalized his name. He died on November 14, 565, at the age
of eighty-three, and in the thirty-eighth year of his reign.

A few words must be said about the legislative reforms carried through
by Justinian. He was not only a collector and a codifier of the laws; he
also introduced in many directions the most fundamental changes into the
substantive law itself. The following were the most important changes.
(1) He ameliorated the condition of slaves--depriving their masters of
the power of putting them to death. He declared that any one who put a
slave to death by his own hand should be guilty of homicide. (2) He
greatly revolutionized the law of intestate succession by giving to
cognati (relatives on the mother's side) an equal share with agnati
(relatives on the father's side) of the same degree. These two changes
in the law were probably in a large measure induced by the circumstances
of his birth. (3) He made considerable changes in the law of divorce,
and as to the property of spouses. (4) He reformed civil procedure in
the way of making it uniform, and introducing a system of small-debt
courts.

ST. AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY[9]

By RT. REV. HENRY CODMAN POTTER, BISHOP OF NEW YORK

(DIED, 604)

[Footnote 9: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

[Illustration: St. Augustine. [TN]]

A complete biography of St. Augustine of Canterbury it is impossible to
write: almost all that is known of him is his work as a missionary to
the English, and almost the only source of our knowledge of that
missionary work is the "Ecclesiastical History" of Baeda. But the mission
of St. Augustine was one of the great crises, not only of the history of
the Christian Church, but of the history of human civilization. The
difference between a number of Celtic churches, with bishops largely
subordinate to the abbots of monasteries, included (as it seems) in none
of the great Catholic patriarchates, cut off from all communication with
the great centres of human thought