The Twelve

“ UNPLACED FRAGMENTS There are extant about a dozen fragments of whose place in the Twelve Tables we are ignorant. In nearly every instance these fragments consist of only one word or phrase, which later Latin antiquarians have preserved to illustrate an ancient spelling or to explain an archaic usage or to point a definition.
The longest fragment only is worth reproduction for the present purpose: To appeal from any judgement (inuicium) and sentence (poena) is allowed. ”

“ The value of the Twelve Tables consists not in any approach to symmetrical classification or even to terse clarity of expression, but in the publication of the method of procedure to be adopted, especially in civil cases, in the knowledge furnished to every Roman of high or low degree as to what were both his legal rights and his legal duties, in the political victory won by the plebeians, who compelled the codification and the promulgation of what had been largely customary law interpreted and administered by the patricians primarily in their own interests. ”

“ Well, that night we had our show; but there warn’t only about twelve people there—just enough to pay expenses. And they laughed all the time, and that made the duke mad; and everybody left, anyway, before the show was over, but one boy which was asleep. So the duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn’t come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted was low comedy—and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he reckoned. He said he could size their style. ”

“ This statute is quoted by Cicero (De Legibus, III. 4. 11) , who inserts censores (censors) as the subject of the last verb locassint (have placed) . But the last clause must have been "modernized" either by Cicero or in his source, because the promulgation of the Twelve Tables in 449 B.C. antedated the creation of the censorship, which can not be traced higher than 443 B.C., if we can believe Livy's account of its institution (op. cit., IV. 8. 2-7) . Before that time the consuls superintended the lists of citizens.
[59] The first provision doubtlessly descends from a primitive tribal tabu. ”

“ It is strictly the first and the only Roman code, [1] collecting the earliest known laws of the Roman people and forming the foundation of the whole fabric of Roman Law. Its importance lies in the fact that by its promulgation was substituted for an unwritten usage, of which the knowledge had been confined to some citizens of the community, a public and written body of laws, which were easily accessible to and strictly binding on all citizens of Rome.
Till the close of the republican period (509 B.C.-27 B.C.) the Twelve Tables were regarded as a great legal charter. ”

“ The first one came probably at twelve, if we may trust our statistics; the second stronger, at fourteen, and then the third—perhaps a good many don't feel the first one or second—the third perhaps at sixteen. The one which comes over him at sixteen will affect heart and intellect and will, and everything, and he will stay converted probably. ”

“ A gentle south-west breeze was blowing, just filling the sails of more than a thousand ships in the offing, which moved languidly along the sparkling sea. It was an atmosphere better befitting a tranquil holiday than the scene of carnage which seemed approaching. ”

“ If we could affix to each century as characteristic a presentment as those portraits do of the steel-clad hero of Towton, or the be-wigged, be-buckled courtier of George the Second, our object would be gained. We should see a whole history in a glance at a century’s face. If it were peculiarly marked by nature or accident, so much the more easy would it be to recognise the likeness. If the century was a warlike, quarrelsome century, and had scars across its brow ”

“ Nor would I boast a proud nativity On the luxuriant plains of Italy, With glowing, sunny landscapes, rich and fair, Tall city spires, and grand cathedrals there; Where the salubrious climate's genial heat Gives to the pulse a soft and ardent beat; Where nature, with accelerated force, With less of time, completes her wonted course. ”

“ We were at the spoiled age of twenty, at the threshold of life’s work, when one arms one’s self against love, and indulges in yearnings for universal things which only later, alike with him who has lived too much and him who has not lived at all, accept their limitations and disenchantments;—we were twenty, and we found in you that melancholy which at twenty it is so sweet to breathe. ”

“ The new century has come upon us with a rush of energy that no century has shown before. Let us stand aside for a moment that we may see what kind of a century it is to be, what is the work it has to do, and what manner of men it will demand to do it.
In most regards one century is like another. Just as men are men, so times are times. In the Twentieth Century there will be the same joys, the same sorrows, the same marrying and giving in marriage, the same round of work and play, of wisdom and duty, of folly and distress which other centuries have seen. ”

“ When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men ”

“ Mark the pageant of the Centuries.
The Eleventh Century enters from the right through the inner scene across which is now drawn a veil, so that the figures behind are seen, but not too distinctly, yet so that they shall be clearly discerned. Passing out of the inner scene to the right, they enter again on the left and cross the outer stage. There is stately music, varying to the passing of each, and ending in a march of triumph at the close. The Eleventh Century beckons, and there follows to her beckoning her meinie, to wit:
William the Conqueror. ”

“ The respect for the Sixties was an article of faith, a dogma of dogmas in the Nineties. If the now younger generation write articles and books about the Nineties—those amazing documents in which I scarcely recognise an age I thought I knew by heart—we were still more zealous in writing books about the Sixties. ”

“ Now, their pretense of wanting to see the fourteen—and the other two whom they had been less lucky with—was that commonest and mildest form of lying which is sufficiently described as a deflection from the truth. Is it justifiable? Most certainly. It is beautiful, it is noble; for its object is, not to reap profit, but to convey a pleasure to the sixteen. ”

“ Each epoch has its own mysterious stamp. The centuries have a seal that they affix to chefs-d'œuvre, and which it is necessary to know how to decipher and recognize. The seal of the sixteenth century is not the seal of the eighteenth. The Renaissance was a subtle time,—a time of reflection. ”

“ The Retreat of the Ten Thousand, which used to worry us in our youth, was not half so formidable an affair as the Advance of the Ten Thousand, schoolboys though they be, who just now overrun the land. ”

“ The white daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stood up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy. ”

“ And the world, as it rolled through Twenty-eight,
Must roll through Twenty-nine.
Some king will come, in Heaven’s good time,
To the tomb his father came to;
Some thief will wade through blood and crime
To a crown he has no claim to;
Some suffering land will rend in twain
The manacles that bound her,
And gather the links of the broken chain
To fasten them proudly round her:
The grand and great will love and hate,
And combat, and combine;
And much where we were in Twenty-eight
We shall be in Twenty-nine. ”

“ With song, wit and wassail, and true hearts anigh.
⁠Centuria, Centuria, vivat Centuria!
Then love as they loved when thine eldest was young,
⁠Centuria!
O the comrades that gossipped and painted and sung,
O the smoke-cloud that lingers their places among!
⁠Centuria, Centuria, vivat Centuria!
And sing as they'll sing in thy fair years untold,
⁠Centuria,
Strong hearts that shall follow, as tender and bold;
We may fade, we shall pass, but thou growest not old ”

“ People, you remember, played with the fantasy of beginning a brand-new century as if it were a new toy. Nobody who was living could remember the birth of the last century. It was a new emotion for everyone. ”

“ But a time has come when it is necessary to review our past life, and to prepare for that which is to come."
"Ah, sire, you pain me. You are not yet in the prime of your years, and you speak as though old age were upon you. In a score of years from now it may be time for folk to say that age has made a change in your life."
The king winced. ”

“ I am justifying the century and not its fringe. Perhaps a hundred women of quality were lost; but for every one, the rogues set down ten, like the gazettes after a battle when they count up the losses of the beaten side. ”

“ The twelfth century, in spite of Stephen's reign, is hopeful; the thirteenth is glorious, rich and fairly peaceful. In the fourteenth begins a decline, of which it is difficult to explain all the causes; both men and classes have begun to snarl at each other. In the fifteenth, the period now before us, they are going to bite each other; the century seems to be a failure all round. ”

“ A fat little bookseller in the City, a rakehell wit of noble blood, and a rugged Scotch surgeon from the navy—those are the three strange immortals who now challenge a comparison—the three men who dominate the fiction of their century, and to whom we owe it that the life and the types of that century are familiar to us, their fifth generation. ”

“ Each century has its special ideal, the ideal of the nineteenth is a young man. The seventeenth century is only woman—see the tapestries, the delightful goddesses who have discarded their hoops and heels to appear in still more delightful nakedness, the noble woods, the tall castles, with the hunters looking round; no servile archaeology chills the fancy, it is but a delightful whim; and this treatment of antiquity is the highest proof of the genius of the seventeenth century. ”

“ For, lo! yet another century is upon you, before which even the marvels of the Nineteenth are to grow pale. As of old, light breaks from the east, but now also, for you, from the farther East. It circles the world in both directions, like the flag it is newly gilding now with its tropic beams. The dawn of the Twentieth Century bursts upon you without needing to cross the Sierras, and bathes at once in its golden splendors, with simultaneous effulgence, the Narrows of Sandy Hook and the peerless portals of the Golden Gate. ”

“ The twentieth century differs from the twelfth not merely in its language, its dress, its implements and armour, but in its whole experience of life. It is not merely in the suits and trappings that one age contrasts with another; and for this reason the historical novel is justified, as something more than picturesque scene-painting, for it treats of other ages’ experiments in living, and depicts human nature35 breaking in upon a different set of experiences, a different range of problems. ”

“ Thus I shall seem cruel to you when I say that you had better be shut up for the next five years, even in a convent, silently growing toward a noble life in the world afterward, than to be caught and carried on by its follies now, before you have learned how to live.
Are you young? Then you should be more beautiful at twenty-five, at thirty, at thirty-five, than you are now. Not with the budding bloom of first youth, that is as evanescent as it is exquisite. ”

“ Life has flowed like water down this winding stair, and, waterlike, has left these smooth-worn grooves behind it. From the long-gowned, pedantic scholars of Plantagenet days down to the young bloods of a later age, how full and strong had been that tide of young English life. ”

“ But the Nineties are not more wonderful and stimulating to the young men of to-day who look back to them so admiringly, than the Sixties were to us whom they kept up into the small hours of many a Friday morning, inexhaustible as a subject of our talk, and Sandys, standing for the Sixties and all we found in them so admirable, could command any sacrifice. ”

“ My darlings, this morning we will glance at some of the relics of what was once called the 'Christian Era,' subsequently designated by historians as 'The Age of Blood and Malevolence,' but which is, nevertheless, always of importance in the world's library from its having been the first link in the long unbroken chain of eras of civilization. If time will permit we will take from the twenty-first century to the fifteenth. ”

“ There is eternal feud between those two camps of misunderstanding, age and youth. This play, written by a young man, shows the feud from the point of view of youth. The play of King Lear shows it from the point of view of age. This play of youth is as lovely and as feverish as love itself. Youth is bright and beautiful, like the animals. Age is too tired to care for brightness, too cold to care for beauty. ”

“ Five centuries effect a great change on manners. A man may nowadays, and without the slightest suspicion of the fact, brush clothes with half the English peerage on a sunny afternoon in Pall Mall. Then it was quite different. The fourteenth century loved magnificence and show. Great lords kept princely state in the country; and when they came abroad, what a retinue, what waving of plumes, and shaking of banners, and glittering of rich dresses! Religion was picturesque, with dignitaries, and cathedrals, and fuming incense, and the Host carried through the streets. ”

“ I wonder if these people ever grow old,—that is, old as we do, sitting in the chimney-corner, and dreaming no more of fêtes than of playing at blind-man's-buff. I have certainly seen here, as elsewhere, men, and women too, grey-headed, and wrinkled enough to be as solemn as the most venerable judge upon the bench; but I never saw any that did not seem ready to hop, skip, jump, waltz, and make love. ”