lebrated as the most ancient legislators; and each
of them claims his peculiar part in the threefold division of
jurisprudence. 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 were compiled by the
diligence of antiquarians, and above twenty texts still speak the
rudeness of the Pelasgic idiom of the Latins.

I shall not repeat the well-known story of the Decemvirs, who sullied by
their actions the honor of inscribing on brass, or wood, or ivory, the
Twelve Tables of the Roman laws. They were dictated by the rigid and
jealous spirit of an aristocracy, which had yielded with reluctance to
the just demands of the people. But the substance of the Twelve Tables
was adapted to the state of the city; and the Romans had emerged
from Barbarism, since they were capable of studying and embracing the
institutions of their more enlightened neighbors. A wise Ephesian was
driven by envy from his native country: before he could reach the shores
of Latium, he had observed the various forms of human nature and civil
society: he imparted his knowledge to the legislators of Rome, and a
statue was erected in the forum to the perpetual memory of Hermodorus.
The names and divisions of the copper money, the sole coin of the
infant state, were of Dorian origin: the harvests of Campania and Sicily
relieved the wants of a people whose agriculture was oft