are the masters of
civil prudence, and our superiority is the more conspicuous, if we deign
to cast our eyes on the rude and almost ridiculous jurisprudence of
Draco, of Solon, and of Lycurgus." The twelve tables were committed
to the memory of the young and the meditation of the old; they were
transcribed and illustrated with learned diligence; they had escaped the
flames of the Gauls, they subsisted in the age of Justinian, and their
subsequent loss has been imperfectly restored by the labors of modern
critics. But although these venerable monuments were considered as the
rule of right and the fountain of justice, they were overwhelmed by the
weight and variety of new laws, which, at the end of five centuries,
became a grievance more intolerable than the vices of the city. Three
thousand brass plates, the acts of the senate of the people, were
deposited in the Capitol: and some of the acts, as the Julian law
against extortion, surpassed the number of a hundred chapters. The
Decemvirs had neglected to import the sanction of Zaleucus, which so
long maintained the integrity of his republic. A Locrian, who proposed
any new law, stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord
round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly
strangled.

The Decemvirs had been named, and their tables were approved, by an
assembly of the _centuries_, in which riches preponderated against
numbers. To the first class of Romans, the proprietors of one hundred
thousand pounds of copper, ninety-eight votes were assigned, and
only ninety-five were left for the six inferior classes, distributed
according to their substance by the artful policy of Servius. But the
tribunes soon established a more specious and popular maxim, that every
citizen has an equal right to enact the laws which he is bound to
obey. Instead of the _centuries_, they convened the _tribes_; and the
patricians, after an impotent struggle, submitted to the decrees of an
assembly, in which their votes were confounded with those of the meanest
plebeians. Yet as long as the tribes successively passed over narrow
_bridges_ and gave their voices aloud, the conduct of each citizen
was exposed to the eyes and ears of his friends and countrymen. The
insolvent debtor consulted the wishes of his creditor; the client would
have blushed to oppose the views of his patron; the general was followed
by his veterans, and the aspect of a grave magistrate was a living
l