Complete Works, Volume 1: The Book on Games of Chance

...cries of the wretched litigants, whom the hectic fever of the courts fixes, withered and drained, to the thresholds of the palace. To be willing to help them is natural for you due to the generosity of your character. He gives twice who gives quickly. Because you love to render justice quickly, it is to render it twice; especially for us from the more remote provinces, who are dragged to your tribunals, panting across three hundred and sixty Roman miles, or eighteen legal days' journeys. To impose an end or a limit to these miseries, and to extinguish the whole viperous brood of lawsuits, or to send it back to its authors, will be pious and just. The learned know from what region of the world this plague has invaded us; and from what time the skill of the forum, once easy and simple among us, degenerated into a fox-like and wolf-like art; and how our own jurisprudence, chaste, holy, and venerable—though often handled by impure hands—barely escaped becoming, from a French matron, an Avignon harlot. Many great men before you have attempted to wash away these stains and restore the Goddess to her former majesty. But I know not by what fate the iniquity of the times has always resisted them; which was more indomitable than is the malice of men, which today, in a tranquil Kingdom, is all that remains for you to subdue. You will crush this little by little, the strongest hammer of the wicked