wealthy pleader obtains a more
certain advantage than he could hope from the accidental corruption of
his judge. The experience of an abuse, from which our own age and
country are not perfectly exempt, may sometimes provoke a generous
indignation, and extort the hasty wish of exchanging our elaborate
jurisprudence for the simple and summary decrees of a Turkish cadi. Our
calmer reflection will suggest that such forms and delays are necessary
to guard the person and property of the citizen; that the discretion of
the judge is the first engine of tyranny, and that the laws of a free
people should foresee and determine every question that may probably
arise in the exercise of power and the transactions of industry. But the
government of Justinian united the evils of liberty and servitude; and
the Romans were oppressed at the same time by the multiplicity of their
laws and the arbitrary will of their master.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] Among the works which have been recovered, by the persevering and
successful endeavors of M. Mai and his followers to trace the
imperfectly erased characters of the ancient writers on these
palimpsests, Gibbon at this period of his labors would have hailed with
delight the recovery of the _Institutes_ of Gaius, and the fragments of
the Theodosian _Code_, published by M. Peyron of Turin.

[27] Pisa was taken by the Florentines in the year 1406; and in 1411 the
_Pandects_ were transported to the capital. These events are authentic
and famous.

[28] They were new bound in purple, deposited in a rich casket, and
shown to curious travellers by the monks and magistrates bareheaded and
with lighted tapers.

[29] Gibbon, dividing the _Institutes_ into four parts, considers the
appendix of the criminal law in the last title as a fourth part.

[30] This parental power was strictly confined to the Roman citizen. The
foreigner, or he who had only _jus Latii_, did not possess it. If a
Roman citizen unknowingly married a Latin or a foreign wife, he did not
possess this power over his son, because the son, following the legal
condition of the mother, was not a Roman citizen. A man, however,
alleging sufficient cause for his ignorance, might raise both mother and
child to the rights of citizenship.

[31] The edict of Constantine first conferred this right; for Augustus
had prohibited the taking as a concubine a woman who might be taken as a
wife; and if marriage took place afterward, this marriage made no chan