nsults comes to a close. The
remaining history of the Roman law is the history of the imperial
constitutions, and, at the last, of attempts to codify what had now
become the unwieldy body of Roman jurisprudence. We have the latest
and most celebrated experiment of this kind in the _Corpus Juris_ of
Justinian.

It would be wearisome to enter on a detailed comparison or contrast of
English and Roman Equity, but it may be worth while to mention two
features which they have in common. The first may be stated as
follows. Each of them tended, and all such systems tend, to exactly
the same state in which the old common law was when Equity first
interfered with it. A time always comes at which the moral principles
originally adopted have been carried out to all their legitimate
consequences, and then the system founded on them becomes as rigid, as
unexpansive, and as liable to fall behind moral progress as the
sternest code of rules avowedly legal. Such an epoch was reached at
Rome in the reign of Alexander Severus; after which, though the whole
Roman world was undergoing a moral revolution, the Equity of Rome
ceased to expand. The same point of legal history was attained in
England under the chancellorship of Lord Eldon, the first of our
equity judges who, instead of enlarging the jurisprudence of his court
by indirect legislation, devoted himself through life to explaining
and harmonising it. If the philosophy of legal history were better
understood in England, Lord Eldon's services would be less exaggerated
on the one hand and better appreciated on the other than they appear
to be among contemporary lawyers. Other misapprehensions too, which
bear some practical fruit, would perhaps be avoided. It is easily seen
by English lawyers that English Equity is a system founded on moral
rules; but it is forgotten that these rules are the morality of past
centuries--not of the present--that they have received nearly as much
application as they are capable of, and that though of course they do
not differ largely from the ethical creed of our own day, they are not
necessarily on a level with it. The imperfect theories of the subject
which are commonly adopted have generated errors of opposite sorts.
Many writers of treatises on Equity, struck with the completeness of
the system in its present state, commit themselves expressly or
implicitly to the paradoxical assertion that the founders of the
chancery jurisprudence contemplated its pr