In the world's history, lawgivers are among the greatest and most godlike characters. They are reformers of nations. They are builders of human society. They are fit companions of the master poets who fill it with their melody. Man will never forget Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe,--nor those other names of creative force, Minos, Solon, Lycurgus, Numa, Justinian, St. Louis, Napoleon the legislator. Each is too closely linked with human progress not to be always remembered. In their train follow the company of jurists, whose labors have the value without the form of legislation, and whose recorded opinions, uttered from the chair of a professor, the bench of a judge, or, it may be, from the seclusion of private life, continue to rule the nations. Here are Papinian, Tribonian, Paulus, Gaius, ancient, time-honored masters of the Roman Law,--Cujas, its most illustrious expounder in modern times, of whom D'Aguesseau said, "Cujas has spoken the language of the law better than any modern, and perhaps as well as any ancient," and whose renown during life, in the golden age of jurisprudence, was such that in the public schools of Germany, when his name was mentioned, all took off their hats,--Dumoulin, kinsman of our English Queen Elizabeth, and most illustrious expounder of municipal law, one of whose books was said to have accomplished what thirty thousand soldiers of his monarch failed to do,--Hugo Grotius, filled with all knowledge and loving all truth, author of that marvellous work, at times divine, at other times, alas! too much of this earth, the "Laws of War and Peace,"--John Selden, who against Grotius vindicated for his country the dominion of the sea, supped with Ben Jonson at the Mermaid, and became, according to contemporary judgment, the great dictator of learning to the English nation,--D'Aguesseau, who brought scholarship to jurisprudence throughout a long life elevated by justice and refined by all that character and study could bestow, awakening admiration even at the outset, so that a retiring magistrate declared that he should be glad to end as the young man began,--Pothier, whose professor's chair was kissed in reverence by pilgrims from afar, while from his recluse life he sent forth those treatises which enter so largely into the invaluable codes of France,--Coke, the indefatigable, pedantic, but truly learned author and judge, Mansfield, the Chrysostom of the bench, and Blackstone, the elegant commentator, who are among the few exemplars within the boast of the English Common Law,--and, descending to our own day, Pardessus, of France, to whom commercial and maritime law is under a larger debt, perhaps, than to any single mind,--Thibaut, of Germany, earnest and successful advocate of a just scheme for the reduction of the unwritten law to the certainty of a written text,--Savigny, also of Germany, renowned illustrator of the Roman Law, who is yet spared to his favorite science,--and in our own