The Castilian version of the Visigothic Code, notwithstanding its coarseness, its ambiguities, and its errors, is still most useful for the purposes of the philologist and the historian. It displays the beginning and the development of the noble and elegant Spanish idiom, from its origin, full of barbarisms, down to its perfection of to-day; from the crude and awkward expressions of the chronicle and the missal, to the perspicuous and polished diction of Calderon, Mendoza, and Cervantes. We detect in its labored and awkward sentences the corrupt Latin of the times when classic purity was lost, and the Romance languages had not yet been formed; an epoch of transition, abounding in abbreviated words and crabbed expressions, curious etymology, phrases constructed with little regard to the rules of syntax, incorrect quotations from Scripture, provincial peculiarities of construction and nomenclature, archaic terms, whose meanings are now forgotten, words of purely Arabic derivation, the names of animals and objects, then, for the first time, introduced into Castilian,--much of it confusing, yet all instructive in revealing the customs and prejudices of a people, and depicting the various gradations accompanying the formation and growth of a language. Such are our obligations, legal, historical, ethical, philological, and economic, to the Visigothic Code. Its harsh, inelegant style, its repetitions and absurdities, its incoherence, its superstitions, and its savage treatment of heretics, may well be forgotten in the services it has rendered to mankind. All modern systems of government are infinitely indebted to it, for it forms to-day the basis of the jurisprudence of a large portion of the civilized nations of the earth. A great number of the principles it inculcates would reflect credit upon any legal treatise, human or divine. Its translation into Castilian aided, more than any one literary work, to invest with beauty, grace, and symmetry, what is now one of the most magnificent and sonorous languages spoken by the tongue of man. It has delineated, with a fidelity not to be found in tradition or chronicle, the state of a society, remarkable in its characteristics, still devoted to barbarian customs, yet evincing sentiments and impulses usually only to be encountered under conditions of the most advanced moral and intellectual development.