In its respectable antiquity; in the sublime morality inculcated by its precepts; in the obligations incurred by every nation which has drawn upon its accumulated stores of wisdom; in its freedom from the dishonorable expedients of legal chicanery; in the simplicity of its procedure; in the certainty and celerity required by the practice of the tribunals where its authority was acknowledged; in the inflexible impartiality with which it invested the decisions of those tribunals; in its well-founded title to public confidence; the Visigothic Code is without parallel in the annals of jurisprudence. But great as are its claims upon the gratitude and reverence of the jurist and the legislator, they are scarcely comparable to the indebtedness imposed upon the historian. The meagre information to be gleaned from the works of native chroniclers is, in great measure, thoroughly unreliable. The literature of the age, scanty in itself, consists mainly of the recital of ecclesiastical fables, the martyrdom of legendary saints, the discovery of spurious relics, the averting of calamities by invocation and miracle, and trivial incidents in the lives of holy men and women, whose preternatural gifts the indulgent credulity of their biographers has handed down to the contempt and ridicule of posterity. The pages destined for such records were too precious to be defiled by the accounts of wars and insurrections and the interesting descriptions of mediæval society. The diligence of the compilers of the Forum Judicum has, however, largely supplied the deficiencies of the monkish annalists. In their various civil and prohibitory enactments, they have unconsciously delineated the follies, the vices, the superstitions, and the crimes of the age. The penalties imposed for the violation of statutes denote infallibly the barbarian origin of those who formulated them. The law of retaliation--tolerated only among the lowest races of men--occurs repeatedly among the provisions of the Visigothic Code. The deterrent effect of criminal legislation was almost always subordinated to considerations of vengeance. The magistrate was regarded as the vindicator of wrong, rather than the calm representative of judicial dignity and the impartial interpreter of the laws. Scalping, maiming, blinding, scourging, branding, emasculation, were punishments prescribed without discrimination, for offences varying widely in the nature and degree of misconduct and criminality. The period of transition which separated the barbaric rudeness of Adolphus and the effeminate luxury of Roderick is traceable, step by step, in the progressive legislation of centuries. The rise and consolidation of ecclesiastical power; the limitation of the royal prerogative; the decline of the insolent pretensions of the nobility; the elevation of the peasant from the position of a beast of burden to a self-respecting being, who, however steeped in ignorance he might be, was always sure of an impartial hearing before