nheritance possessed by women, must have contributed to keep
alive the feeling; and it is the general belief that the system of
creating Fidei-Commissa, or bequests in trust, was devised to evade
the disabilities imposed by those statutes. But the feeling itself, in
its remarkable intensity, seems to point back to some deeper
antagonism between law and opinion; nor is it at all wonderful that
the improvements of jurisprudence by the Praetor should not have
extinguished it. Everybody conversant with the philosophy of opinion
is aware that a sentiment by no means dies out, of necessity, with the
passing away of the circumstances which produced it. It may long
survive them; nay, it may afterwards attain to a pitch and climax of
intensity which it never attained during their actual continuance.

The view of a Will which regards it as conferring the power of
diverting property from the Family, or of distributing it in such
uneven proportions as the fancy or good sense of the Testator may
dictate, is not older than that later portion of the Middle Ages in
which Feudalism had completely consolidated itself. When modern
jurisprudence first shows itself in the rough, Wills are rarely
allowed to dispose with absolute freedom of a dead man's assets.
Wherever at this period the descent of property was regulated by
Will--and over the greater part of Europe moveable or personal
property was the subject of Testamentary disposition--the exercise of
the Testamentary power was seldom allowed to interfere with the right
of the widow to a definite share, and of the children to certain fixed
proportions, of the devolving inheritance. The shares of the children,
as their amount shows, were determined by the authority of Roman law.
The provision for the widow was attributable to the exertions of the
Church, which never relaxed its solicitude for the interest of wives
surviving their husbands--winning, perhaps, one of the most arduous of
its triumphs when, after exacting for two or three centuries an
express promise from the husband at marriage to endow his wife, it at
length succeeded in engrafting the principle of Dower on the Customary
Law of all Western Europe. Curiously enough, the dower of lands proved
a more stable institution than the analogous and more ancient
reservation of certain shares of the personal property to the widow
and children. A few local customs in France maintained the right down
to the Revolution, and there are traces