worked itself into Western
thought was neither the archaic system of the ancient city, nor the
pruned and curtailed jurisprudence of the Byzantine Emperors; still
less, of course, was it the mass of rules, nearly buried in a
parasitical overgrowth of modern speculative doctrine, which passes by
the name of Modern Civil Law. I speak only of that philosophy of
jurisprudence, wrought out by the great juridical thinkers of the
Antonine age, which may still be partially reproduced from the
Pandects of Justinian, a system to which few faults can be attributed
except it perhaps aimed at a higher degree of elegance, certainty, and
precision, than human affairs will permit to the limits within which
human laws seek to confine them.

It is a singular result of that ignorance of Roman law which
Englishmen readily confess, and of which they are sometimes not
ashamed to boast, that many English writers of note and credit have
been led by it to put forward the most untenable of paradoxes
concerning the condition of human intellect during the Roman Empire.
It has been constantly asserted, as unhesitatingly as if there were no
temerity in advancing the proposition, that from the close of the
Augustan era to the general awakening of interest on the points of the
Christian faith, the mental energies of the civilised world were
smitten with a paralysis. Now there are two subjects of thought--the
only two perhaps with the exception of physical science--which are
able to give employment to all the powers and capacities which the
mind possesses. One of them is Metaphysical inquiry, which knows no
limits so long as the mind is satisfied to work on itself; the other
is Law, which is as extensive as the concerns of mankind. It happens
that, during the very period indicated, the Greek-speaking provinces
were devoted to one, the Latin-speaking provinces to the other, of
these studies. I say nothing of the fruits of speculation in
Alexandria and the East, but I confidently affirm that Rome and the
West had an occupation in hand fully capable of compensating them for
the absence of every other mental exercise, and I add that the results
achieved, so far as we know them, were not unworthy of the continuous
and exclusive labour bestowed on producing them. Nobody except a
professional lawyer is perhaps in a position completely to understand
how much of the intellectual strength of individuals Law is capable of
absorbing, but a layman has no difficul