In considering the general details of the Visigothic Code, one of the striking and suggestive features which presents itself is the inculcation of exalted precepts of honor, probity, and justice, and, at the same time, the acceptance and adoption of a belief in the basest and most grovelling forms of superstition. Upon the same page where the duties to be observed between man and man are set forth with a perspicuity and a piety worthy of all praise, appear laws denunciatory of divination and sorcery. With all its imperfections, however, it presents us not only with noble and accurate conceptions of justice, but indirectly gives us, as well, a faithful and picturesque representation of the gradual, but constant, advancement of a people. Unlike other Codes which preceded and followed it, it is deficient in regularity of classification and division, and, in that respect, signally differs from the Institutes of Justinian, whose arrangement was almost literally followed by Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England. The irreconcilable character of many of its enactments; the identity of penalties for offences of a widely different gravity and nature; the enunciation of the most sublime principles of morality, side by side with mandates requiring the infliction of tortures whose inhumanity would almost appal a savage; the absence of ordeals and the wager of battle, so frequently appealed to in that and following ages, as proofs of guilt or innocence; are, in addition to those previously referred to, among the most prominent characteristics of this extraordinary compilation. The array of one caste against another, a practice which has never failed to destroy a government and degrade a people, is conspicuous everywhere. The court was regarded rather as a place of execution than the seat of the rendition of justice; the judge rather an avenger of injury, than the representative of the law and the guardian of social order. The words _ultio_ and _ulciscor_, constantly recurring in the Code, disclose only too plainly the vengeful sentiments of the legislator. In common with all barbarians, and likewise with the majority of civilized men, force, with its consequent inconvenience and suffering, was the only idea which appealed strongly to the Gothic mind, and the moral and deterrent influence of legislation was almost entirely lost sight of. In the arrangement of the Visigothic Code, the oldest laws, that is, those based upon the unwritten observances of ages, are without any evidence of the time of their adoption; such as are derived from Roman sources are designated _antiqua_, or ancient; the edicts of kings are promulgated under the royal title, a distinction indicative also of those which were exclusively enacted by the national councils.