d the law before he leaves it; but until he has quitted his
seat, and the series of his decisions in the Law Reports has been
completed, we cannot discover how far he has elucidated or added to
the principles which his predecessors bequeathed to him. The influence
of the Praetor on Roman jurisprudence differed only in respect of the
period at which its amount was ascertained. As was before stated, he
was in office but for a year, and his decisions rendered during his
year, though of course irreversible as regarded the litigants, were of
no ulterior value. The most natural moment for declaring the changes
he proposed to effect occurred therefore at his entrance on the
praetorship, and hence, when commencing his duties, he did openly and
avowedly that which in the end his English representative does
insensibly and sometimes unconsciously. The checks on this apparent
liberty are precisely those imposed on an English judge. Theoretically
there seems to be hardly any limit to the powers of either of them,
but practically the Roman Praetor, no less than the English Chancellor,
was kept within the narrowest bounds by the prepossessions imbibed
from early training and by the strong restraints of professional
opinion, restraints of which the stringency can only be appreciated by
those who have personally experienced them. It may be added that the
lines within which movement is permitted, and beyond which there is to
be no travelling, were chalked with as much distinctness in the one
case as in the other. In England the judge follows the analogies of
reported decisions on insulated groups of facts. At Rome, as the
intervention of the Praetor was at first dictated by simple concern for
the safety of the state, it is likely that in the earliest times it
was proportioned to the difficulty which it attempted to get rid of.
Afterwards, when the taste for principle had been diffused by the
Responses, he no doubt used the Edict as the means of giving a wider
application to those fundamental principles, which he and the other
practising jurisconsults, his contemporaries, believed themselves
to have detected underlying the law. Latterly he acted wholly under
the influence of Greek philosophical theories, which at once tempted
him to advance and confined him to a particular course of progress.

The nature of the measures attributed to Salvius Julianus has been
much disputed. Whatever they were, their effects on the Edict are
sufficiently p