This to some extent clears the ground: but not altogether. Setting aside minor legal and philosophic treatises which Alfonso may have supervised, it remains to speak of more important matters. A great achievement is the code called, from the number of its divisions, the _Siete Partidas_ (Seven Parts). This name does not appear to have been attached to the code till a hundred years after its compilation; but it may be worth observing that the notion is implied in the name of the _Septenario_, and that Alfonso, regarding the number seven as something of mysterious potency, exhausts himself in citing precedents—the seven days of the week, seven metals, seven arts, seven years that Jacob served, seven lean years in Egypt, the seven-branched candlestick, seven sacraments, and so on. The trait is characteristic of the time. It would be a grave mistake to suppose that the _Siete Partidas_ in any way resembles a modern book of statutes, couched in the technical jargon of the law. Its primary object was the unification of the various clashing systems of law which Alfonso encountered within his unsettled kingdom; and this he accomplished with such success that all subsequent Spanish legislation derives from the _Siete Partidas_, which are still to some extent in force in the republican states of Florida and Louisiana. But the design soon outgrows mere practical purpose, and expands into dissertations upon general principles and the pettier details of conduct. Sancho Panza, as Governor of Barataria, could not have bettered the counsels of the _Siete Partidas_, whose very titles force a smile: "What things men should blush to confess, and what _not_," "Why no monk should study law or physics," "Why the King should abstain from low talk," "Why the King should eat and drink moderately," "Why the King's children should be taught to be cleanly," "How to draw a will so that the witnesses shall not know its tenor," with other less prudish discussions. The reading of this code is not merely instructive and curious; apart from its dry humouristic savour, the _Siete Partidas_ rises to a noble eloquence when the subject is the common weal, the office of the ruler, his relations to his people, and the interdependence of Church and State. No man, by his single effort, could draw a code of such intricacy and breadth, and it is established that Jacobo Ruiz and Fernán Martínez laboured on it; but Alfonso's is the supreme intelligence which appoints and governs, and his is the revising hand which leaves the text in its perfect verbal form.