commission appointed in the year 1531 to make out a new text from
the best manuscripts which could be found. This revision of the assizes
of Jerusalem was translated into Italian, and was still in use in 1571,
making the period during which it was in force almost five centuries.

Having thus traced the external history of this system, we now turn to
its material contents.

No one any longer regards the forming of a system of law as an
independent, arbitrary, or accidental thing. Every such must be a
product and copy of the entire intellectual life of the age, and this
piece of legislation is indeed a true mirror of the Christian world in
Europe at the time; and the outline only rises more sharply, boldly, and
clearly to view, because there is presented to us at the same time so
rare a phenomenon in the march of civilization as the building up of a
state organization, for which there is no foundation in the land where
it is to be established.

The manner in which the spiritual elements fermented and boiled at that
time in the Occident--how the most shocking rudeness and barbarism
throve side by side with the most exalted religious enthusiasm--the
lowest forms of materialism by the side of spiritual
fanaticism--superstition, ignorance, and vile falsehood, side by side
with energy, valor, and generosity--all this is drawn with sharpest
features in the assizes.

The history shows us these men in their frantic cruelty, butchering the
inhabitants of conquered Jerusalem, men, women, and children without
distinction, delighting in their torment, and then, smeared with their
blood, moving in procession to the holy places, singing their Christian
songs of praise, all dissolved in tears of deepest emotion. They had
left Europe in swarms, many so ignorant as not to know whether the holy
land which they sought lay on this earth or in those regions which they
had heard called heaven--so frenzied in their fanaticism as to forget
that they might still have bodily wants, and hence throwing away their
effects, and yet so low in their ideas as only to enjoy physical things.
Such are very much the men for which these laws seem to have been made.
Upon one leaf we read: 'That man is without sentiments of honor, though
he be of highest rank, who, being called to stand as counsel by the
lowest vassal, before a tribunal of justice, declines to do so; for they
are all alike the true followers of Christ;' and by the side of this
that most un