ative
genius, enlightened by reflection and study, would have given to the
world a pure and original system of jurisprudence. Whatever flattery
might suggest, the emperor of the East was afraid to establish his
private judgment as the standard of equity: in the possession of
legislative power, he borrowed the aid of time and opinion; and his
laborious compilations are guarded by the sages and legislature of past
times. Instead of a statue cast in a simple mould by the hand of an
artist, the works of Justinian represent a tessellated pavement of
antique and costly, but too often of incoherent, fragments. In the first
year of his reign, he directed the faithful Tribonian, and nine learned
associates, to revise the ordinances of his predecessors, as they were
contained, since the time of Adrian, in the Gregorian Hermogenian, and
Theodosian codes; to purge the errors and contradictions, to retrench
whatever was obsolete or superfluous, and to select the wise and
salutary laws best adapted to the practice of the tribunals and the use
of his subjects. The work was accomplished in fourteen months; and the
twelve books or _tables_, which the new decemvirs produced, might be
designed to imitate the labors of their Roman predecessors. The new
Code of Justinian was honored with his name, and confirmed by his royal
signature: authentic transcripts were multiplied by the pens of notaries
and scribes; they were transmitted to the magistrates of the European,
the Asiatic, and afterwards the African provinces; and the law of the
empire was proclaimed on solemn festivals at the doors of churches.
A more arduous operation was still behind--to extract the spirit of
jurisprudence from the decisions and conjectures, the questions and
disputes, of the Roman civilians. Seventeen lawyers, with Tribonian
at their head, were appointed by the emperor to exercise an absolute
jurisdiction over the works of their predecessors. If they had obeyed
his commands in ten years, Justinian would have been satisfied with
their diligence; and the rapid composition of the Digest or Pandects, in
three years, will deserve praise or censure, according to the merit of
the execution. From the library of Tribonian, they chose forty, the most
eminent civilians of former times: two thousand treatises were comprised
in an abridgment of fifty books; and it has been carefully recorded,
that three millions of lines or sentences, were reduced, in this
abstract, to the moder