itherto considered reputable--which was founded on a modification of
the lower form of civil marriage. Without explaining the technical
mechanism of the institution now generally popular, I may describe it
as amounting in law to little more than a temporary deposit of the
woman by her family. The rights of the family remained unimpaired, and
the lady continued in the tutelage of guardians whom her parents had
appointed and whose privileges of control overrode, in many material
respects, the inferior authority of her husband. The consequence was
that the situation of the Roman female, whether married or unmarried,
became one of great personal and proprietary independence, for the
tendency of the later law, as I have already hinted, was to reduce
the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of marriage in
fashion conferred on the husband no compensating superiority. But
Christianity tended somewhat from the very first to narrow this
remarkable liberty. Led at first by justifiable disrelish for the
loose practices of the decaying heathen world, but afterwards hurried
on by a passion of asceticism, the professors of the new faith looked
with disfavour on a marital tie which was in fact the laxest the
Western world has seen. The latest Roman law, so far as it is touched
by the constitutions of the Christian Emperors, bears some marks of a
reaction against the liberal doctrines of the great Antonine
jurisconsults. And the prevalent state of religious sentiment may
explain why it is that modern jurisprudence, forged in the furnace of
barbarian conquest, and formed by the fusion of Roman jurisprudence
with patriarchal usage, has absorbed, among its rudiments, much more
than usual of those rules concerning the position of women which
belong peculiarly to an imperfect civilisation. During the troubled
era which begins modern history, and while the laws of the Germanic
and Sclavonic immigrants remained superposed like a separate layer
above the Roman jurisprudence of their provincial subjects, the women
of the dominant races are seen everywhere under various forms of
archaic guardianship, and the husband who takes a wife from any family
except his own pays a money-price to her relations for the tutelage
which they surrender to him. When we move onwards, and the code of the
middle ages has been formed by the amalgamation of the two systems,
the law relating to women carries the stamp of its double origin. The
principle of