was prescribed for the breach of the law, it of course became a dead letter. The Emperor Augustus afterwards re-enacted the Cincian law, and prescribed penalties for its breach. But towards the end of his reign, the advocates were again authorized to receive fees or presents from their clients. The Emperor Tiberius also permitted them to receive such forced gratuities. This led to the abuse referred to by Tacitus, and induced the Senate to insist upon the enforcement of the re-enactment of the Cincian law, or rather a law limiting the amount of the fees of advocates.[33] Nero revoked the law of Claudian, which was subsequently re-enacted by the Emperor Trajan, with the additional restriction that the advocate should not be permitted to receive his fee or gratuity, until the cause was decided. The younger Pliny mentions a law, which authorized the advocate, after the pleadings in the cause had been made and the judgment had been given, to receive the fee, which might be voluntarily offered by the client, either in money or a promise to pay. Erskine, in his Institutes of the Law of Scotland, understands the law in the Digest _De Extraordinariis Cognitionibus_ as authorizing a suit for the fee of a physician or advocate without a previous agreement for a specific sum.[34] The consequences may be best told in the impressive language of the historian of the Decline and Fall of the Empire: "The noble art, which had once been preserved as the sacred inheritance of the patricians, was fallen into the hands of freedmen and plebeians, who, with cunning rather than with skill, exercised a sordid and pernicious trade. Some of them procured admittance into families for the purpose of fomenting differences, of encouraging suits, and of preparing a harvest of gain for themselves or their brethren. Others, recluse in their chambers, maintained the dignity of legal professors, by furnishing a rich client with subtleties to confound the plainest truth, and with arguments to color the most unjustifiable pretensions. The splendid and popular class was composed of the advocates, who filled the Forum with the sound of their turgid and loquacious rhetoric. Careless of fame and of justice, they are described for the most part, as ignorant and rapacious guides, who conducted their clients through a maze of expense, of delay, and of disappointment; from whence, after a tedious series of years, they were at length dismissed when their patience and fortune were almost exhausted."[35] Is not this probably the history of the decline of the profession in all countries from an honorable office to a money-making trade?