ty in comprehending why it was
that an unusual share of the collective intellect of Rome was
engrossed by jurisprudence. "The proficiency[6] of a given community
in jurisprudence depends in the long run on the same conditions as its
progress in any other line of inquiry; and the chief of these are the
proportion of the national intellect devoted to it, and the length of
time during which it is so devoted. Now, a combination of all the
causes, direct and indirect, which contribute to the advancing and
perfecting of a science continued to operate on the jurisprudence of
Rome through the entire space between the Twelve Tables and the
severance of the two Empires,--and that not irregularly or at
intervals, but in steadily increasing force and constantly augmenting
number. We should reflect that the earliest intellectual exercise to
which a young nation devotes itself is the study of its laws. As soon
as the mind makes its first conscious efforts towards generalisation,
the concerns of every-day life are the first to press for inclusion
within general rules and comprehensive formulas. The popularity of the
pursuit on which all the energies of the young commonwealth are bent
is at the outset unbounded; but it ceases in time. The monopoly of
mind by law is broken down. The crowd at the morning audience of the
great Roman jurisconsult lessens. The students are counted by hundreds
instead of thousands in the English Inns of Court. Art, Literature,
Science, and Politics, claim their share of the national intellect;
and the practice of jurisprudence is confined within the circle of a
profession, never indeed limited or insignificant, but attracted as
much by the rewards as by the intrinsic recommendations of their
science. This succession of changes exhibited itself even more
strikingly at Rome than in England. To the close of the Republic the
law was the sole field for all ability except the special talent of a
capacity for generalship. But a new stage of intellectual progress
began with the Augustan age, as it did with our own Elizabethan era.
We all know what were its achievements in poetry and prose; but there
are some indications, it should be remarked, that, besides its
efflorescence in ornamental literature, it was on the eve of throwing
out new aptitudes for conquest in physical science. Here, however, is
the point at which the history of mind in the Roman State ceases to
be parallel to the routes which mental progress had