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If they had obeyed his commands in ten years, Justinian would have been satisfied with their diligence; and the rapid composition of the Digest or Pandects in three years will deserve praise or censure, according to the merit of the execution.
Cunningham, the celebrated critic of Bentley, had given prelections in Leyden, and no reader of the Heart of Midlothian will forget the laments of the inimitable Bartoline Saddletree over his not being sent to Leyden or Utrecht to study the Institutes and the Pandects.
Even the Pandects themselves have escaped with difficulty and danger from the common shipwreck, and criticism has pronounced that all the editions and manuscripts of the West are derived from one original.
It was used in the Greek empire until the fall of Constantinople. It never entirely lost authority in Italy, although it remained buried for centuries, till the discovery of the Florentine copy of the Pandects at the siege of Amalfi in 1135. Peter Valence, in the eleventh century, made use of it in a law-book which he published.
It was only so far as philosophy modified laws, that the influence of Greece was of much account. Nor did Roman jurisprudence culminate in its serene majesty till the time of the emperors. It was not perfectly developed, until Justinian consolidated it in the Code, the Pandects, and the Institutes.
A rumour had been spread that the author of the Pandects had reduced the "Institutes of Caius" to ashes, that posterity might not discover the source of his own great work. Gibbon ventured to contradict the scandal, and to point to the monks as the probable devastators.
More than a third of the whole Pandects is from Ulpian, and next to him the principal writers are Paulus, Papinian, Salvius Julianus, Pomponius, Q. Cervidius Scaevola, and Gaius. Though the variety of subjects is immense, the Digest has no claims to scientific arrangement. It is a vast cyclopedia of heterogeneous law badly arranged; everything is there, but everything is not in its proper place."
For I am sure that you, and all those through whose hands this process has passed, have by your devices added what you could to it pro et contra in such sort that, although their difference perhaps was clear and easy enough to determine at first, you have obscured it and made it more intricate by the frivolous, sottish, unreasonable, and foolish reasons and opinions of Accursius, Baldus, Bartolus, de Castro, de Imola, Hippolytus, Panormo, Bertachin, Alexander, Curtius, and those other old mastiffs, who never understood the least law of the Pandects, they being but mere blockheads and great tithe calves, ignorant of all that which was needful for the understanding of the laws; for, as it is most certain, they had not the knowledge either of the Greek or Latin tongue, but only of the Gothic and barbarian.
Every other kind of possession, which might be named imperfect proprietorship, was called in bonis habere. It was not till after the time of Cicero that the general name of dominium was given to all proprietorship. Justinian has not condescended to give usury a place in his Institutes; but the necessary rules and restrictions are inserted in the Pandects and the Code.
Under his reign, and by his care, the civil jurisprudence was digested in the immortal works of the Code, the Pandects, and the Institutes: the public reason of the Romans has been silently or studiously transfused into the domestic institutions of Europe,, and the laws of Justinian still command the respect or obedience of independent nations.
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