tence of death might be "properly inflicted" by her husband, at once her judge, her jury, her accuser, and her executioner. "Woman," said the law, "can acquire or inherit only for the profit of her lord;” and so clearly was she regarded, in Roman jurisprudence, as a thing, that, in case of any defect in her legal title to the rank of married woman, she might be reclaimed, like other movables, on proof of use and possession during one entire year.

Such was the condition of the Roman matron, the mater familias of the poetical illusions of classical posterity. It was in vain that, from the earliest times, the Roman women had merited a better reward, by the services they had rendered to their country. They had, indeed, been amused with the institution of an annual festival, the matronalia, in commemoration of the reconcilement they had effected between the Romans and the Sabines, thereby saving the infant state from destruction. They were suffered, too, to erect an equestrian statue to the honour of the valorous Clelia, and to build a temple to "Female Fortune,” in recollection of the mediation of the mother and wife of Coriolanus. Their patriotism was acknowledged, when, to satisfy the rapacity of the Gauls, they spontaneously surrendered their jewels and money; and again, when in the most urgent difficulties of the Punic wars, they made a similar sacrifice to the exhausted exchequer of the state. Still no savage law against their lives and liberties was repealed; so that, after having acted under the pressure of circumstances, with the wisdom of the sage, and the devotedness of the patriot, they nevertheless remained, according to the ancient law, slaves and things.*

These laws, thus marked by violence and by ignorance, are to this very day not wholly uninfluential in determining the condition of the women of modern Europe; for, notwithstanding all that Tacitus has said of the independence and authority of the sex among the Germans, and all that has been boasted of the chivalric gallantry of their descendants, the spirit, if not the letter, of the Roman law

* "Women were condemned to the perpetual tutelage of parents, husbands, or guardians; a sex created to please and obey, was never sup posed to have obtained the age of reason and experience. Such, at least, was the stern and haughty spirit of the ancient law, which was insensibly mollified before the time of Justinian."-Gibbon, vol. viii. p. 70.

has prevailed; and the married woman is still indebted for pecuniary rights, to an evasion, as awkward and cumbrous, as it is paltry and degrading.

Nature, however, that great repealer of man's legal injustice, was not slow to throw into partial abeyance dispensations thus contradictory to her behests; and woman, stripped as she was of her natural rights, never exerted a more marked influence than at the time when young Rome secured for its virtues a respect, which was not afterwards paid to it in its proudest hour of universal dominion.

It was in the days of the Lucretias, the Virginias, and the Volumnias, when the fortunes of the republic were turned most readily by the intervention and the sanctity of the sex, that Rome was the most redoubtable; and if suicide, the immolation of a daughter, and the fortunate feebleness of Coriolanus, were circumstances in themselves of but equivocal character, they indicate, at worst, a barbarous, and not a corrupt state of society. But however the Christian moralist may regard these events, they es tablish, beyond the power of cavil, the moral importance of the sex to the state; and prove that their unblemished virtue made a part of the national honour, that an outrage upon it provoked revolutions subversive of despotism, which a more comprehensive and systematic violence in other quarters could not determine.

It was in the period of Rome's earliest legislation, that woman, the slave, the thing, was most effectually employed in all the subtile agency of mind. The Sibyl, with her nine books, imaged the genius and the pertinacity of the female organization; but the vestal priestess assumed a higher authority over the credulity of mankind, than man himself had ever exercised. The priest and the augur had no power comparable with hers, before whose supremacy the highest magistrates of the republic bowed their insignia. To her was committed the highest prerogative of mercy, a power above that of law; for when the law condemned, the bare presence of the vestal sufficed to pardon and to

save.

Even the dreadful penalty annexed to the violation of the vestal's vow, proves, by its inhuman severity, the confidence reposed in her virtue: for it was not in human nature, depraved and hardened as it may have been by

bigotry and superstition, to have enacted such a punishment, in the belief that it would be often inflicted. The vestal's evidence in trials was also received without the formality of an oath; and she was chosen as arbiter in legal disputes of much moment—a deference at once to her probity, and to the acuteness of her subtle intelligence.

Progressing civilisation, however, while it increased the influence of females, had a contrary effect on the few advantages which the laws of the more ancient times had assigned them. The Oppian law prohibited women from using carriages in the city, and from wearing purple robes, or any golden ornaments weighing more than half an ounce. The pretext was the exigency of the state, and the women appear to have submitted cheerfully to the sacrifice.

But after the victorious termination of the war, when the women sought a repeal of this law of circumstance, and a return to ancient usage, the conservatives of Rome took the alarm, and saw nothing less than danger to church and state, in an unprecedented irruption of female emancipators. Cato, the censor, stern, cold, and despotic, placed himself at the head of the husbandism and egoistical celibacy of Rome; (and on hearing, on the day appointed for the discussion, that every avenue of the forum was crowded with the ladies of the city, soliciting the senators and tribunes as they passed for "their most sweet voices") he went down to the house, to oppose redress, and to declare for the finality of a measure, which had his entire approbation.

He spoke on the wisdom of the Oppian law, as one who had never known what it was to have a wife, or rather, perhaps, as one who did know what it was to have one, that had proved too much for him. He censured the conduct of the women as a frightful and perilous innovation on the necessary and wholesome custom of female restriction. He describes the conduct of the Roman women, and the attempt to repeal the law, as a fatal overthrow of ancient order and decorum, as rebellion against their masterhusbands against law, government, and religion.

"He considered," he said, "their claiming rights, and assuming a voice in public affairs, to be an irrefragable proof that the men had lost their majesty, and abdicated their supreme authority-that absolute authority over the

weaker sex, which their ancestors had established by so many wise laws; for," (continued the severe and eloquent, and, haply, henpecked leader of the conservatives, addressing the Senate), "if each master of a family, emulating the example of his progenitors, had kept his wife in due submission at home, we should not now have so much to apprehend from the public disobedience of the congregated sex.

The Oppian law, however, was repealed; the arrangement supported by Cato, the censor, was determined not to be final; and when the triumph of the women, supported by all the numerous party of the day, was pronounced, there was, doubtless, grande hilarité on one side of the house, while on the other, dejection murmured the awful prophecy, that all virtue in woman would be henceforth but a name. Cornelia, Aurelia, and Attica, proved the falsehood of the prophecy.

The repeal of the Oppian law was followed by an attempt, on the part of the matrons, for other repeals; and they aspired to the common benefits of a free and opulent republic, in spite of the abusive epithet of Androgyne (the he woman), bestowed upon such women as had pleaded their own causes before the tribunal.†

The women of Rome at this reforming epoch went further still-they strove to command the use and secure their right to their private fortunes: to protect their estates against alienation, through the extravagance and vices of a prodigal husband, and to establish the freedom of the marriage contract; extending it even to the unpre

*The "gravity of Cato" in this instance is too solemnly ridiculous, not to give a specimen of it, with all the benefit of Livy's original. "Si in suâ quisque nostrum matrefamilias, Quirites, jus et majestatem viri retinere instituisset, minus cum universis feminis negotii haberemus. Nunc domi victa libertas nostra, impotentia muliebri, hic quoque in Foro obteritur et calcatur: et quia singulas sustinere non potuimus, universas horremus Quod nisi me verecundia singularum magis majestatis et pudoris, quam universarum tenuisset, ne compellate a Consule viderentur, dixissem. Qui hic mos est in publicum procurrendi et obsidendi vias, et viros alienos appelandi? Istud ipsum suos quæque domi rogare non potuistis? an blandiores in publico quam in privato, et alienis quam vestris estis?" &c.-Liv. Hist. 1. xxxiv.

† When the first Roman woman undertook her own defence before a tribunal, the Senate was so astounded by a spirit so unprecedented, that they solemnly implored the gods to reveal the nature of the omen.Plutarch.

cedented right of their being allowed to seek a divorce, upon proof of ill usage or other disagreements. Hitherto the domestic lord and judge might pronounce the death of his wife, and he might divorce her by expelling her his house and bed; but the slavery of the wretched female was hopeless and perpetual, unless he asserted, for his own convenience, the manly prerogative of a divorce. The warmest applause has been lavished on the virtue of the Romans, who had abstained from the exercise of this tempting privilege above five hundred years; but the fact may not have been unconnected with the unequal terms of a connexion, "in which the slave was unable to renounce her tyrant, when the tyrant was unwilling to relinquish his slave." Cato the censor was again indignant at the bold proceedings of the women, and shocked that the Roman matron should presume to consider herself as a voluntary companion of her lord and master, and should propose that the marriage contract might be dissolved by either parties alike, on their respective complaints, and proofs of incompatibility.

The women further complained of the rudeness of the primitive forms of Roman nuptials: they remonstrated against being purchased from their parents, and yet buying their prerogative of entering the bridegroom's house with three pieces of copper.' The being seated with

him on the same sheepskin, and eating with him the same salt-cake, were, it was true, simple symbols of the mystic union of marriage; but they were symbols of a union "rigorous and unequal,"† a new servitude, differing little from that in which they lived in their father's house, though decorated with the futile title of adoption.

But Cato resisted and vituperated in vain. The women

* At the close of the sixth century, a Roman citizen first ventured to recur to the law of divorce, and to put away his wife: this was Spurius Carvilius, who parted with his wife, not for her frailty, but her sterility. Spurius had the law on his side, but public opinion was against him: the marriage vow was, in the conviction of the citizens, irrevocable; and the legal, but immoral act of Spurius, drew upon him the contempt of his fellow-citizens of one sex, and the indignant resentment of the other.

"If (says the elder Cato), you surprised your wife in adultery, you may kill her without trial-but if she surprises you in the fact, the law will not permit her to touch you, not even with the tip of her finger." "Si adulterares, digito non auderet contingere: neque jus est."—Apud Aul. Gellium, L. x. Č. 23.