the Yellow Mask, it was the face of his dead
wife?"

"Yes! But what then?"

"His wife was buried in the Campo Santo."

          A LEGAL FICTION.

THERE is no fiction in the Arabian Nights'
Entertainments, in the Memoirs of the Baron
Munchausen, or in the Journey to the Moon,
more wildly extravagant than some of the
fictions of English law. Perversions of truth
and nature, more grotesque than the griffins
and dragons of old story-books, have, for ages,
been poured forth out of the tight curls and
hoary records of that rusty institution. Some
have been slowly and painfully worn away
from the rock of bigotry by the droppings of
common-sense; but others remain, which no
power of ridicule, no amount of conviction,
no strength of reasoning, can overcome.
Amongst them, few represent injustice pushed
to the extreme of absurdity more vividly than
that legal fiction — an English wife.

Neither statute law nor equity law can be
brought to acknowledge that the spring of
our being and of our best affections lives and
breathes in that part of Great Britain called
England. Law is totally blind to its existence
within that limit. There are English
daughters, sisters, aunts, nieces, widows and
mistresses. There are also English mothers,
—they having been recently brought within
the range of the Great Owl's vision—but
there are no English wives. The proclaiming
of bans in an English church is a proclamation
of outlawry a due notice that the
woman is to be banned from the protection of
the law. When she marries, she dies; being
handed over to be buried in her husband's
arms, or pounded and pummelled into the
grave with his arms. Not only she herself,
but every semblance of property she
possesses, is handed over to her lord; unless
she has previously passed it away to somebody
else. In the curious eye of the law
(which does not see her, but sees her natural
or acquired rights plainly enough to deprive
her of them) a wife—like a convict—cannot
have or hold one iota of anything that has
value. Even the clothes she wears at the
altar, the ornaments with which her friends
have decked her, the ring the bridegroom
pretends to give her, belong to him from that
time forward. The law does not forbid him
to cut off the hair of her head, and to sell it
to adorn the heads of other women. Time
was, when her very children might be torn
from her breast, without any fault on her
part. There is one instance in which a
husband did actually seize and carry away a
suckling infant, as his wife sate nursing it in
her own mother's house. Another, in which
the husband being himself in prison for
debt, gave his wife's legitimate child to the
woman he cohabited with. A third (in
which the parties were of high rank), where
the husband deserted his wife; claimed the
baby born after his desertion; and left her
to learn its death from the newspapers. In
all these cases, the claim of the father was
held to be indisputable. There was no law
then to help the mother, as there is no law
now to help the wife. It is only recently
that this has been altered, so as to give a wife
a partial power over her children.

Having nothing for herself, the wife can
leave nothing to others: consequently, if she
make a will, it is void; and if she made a will
before marriage, that ceremony annuls it. She
cannot legally claim her own earnings,
whether she weed potatoes, or paint pictures,
or mangle linen, or educate other people's
children, or make shirts, or sing operas, or
knit purses, or write poems. Every farthing
she gains belongs to her husband; and, if the
employer pay her without his sanction, he
can compel a second payment to himself. The
English wife cannot make a contract with
her husband binding upon him; her signature
to any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation,
is so much wasted ink. Any person may
publicly vilify, libel, cheat her — do, in short, any
injury to her, out of the reach of the criminal
law—with impunity, if her husband
refuse to prosecute the offender. She must not
leave her husband's house under the cruellest
persecution, and he may force her out of any
other house with, if he pleases, the aid of the
police. If she be accused of infidelity, and
her alleged lover be sued for pecuniary
damages—in accordance with a chivalrous
custom of this country — she is allowed no
voice in the proceedings, although it is
her reputation that is always the point, in
discussion. She cannot claim support as a
matter of personal right from her husband;
for, although, nominally, he is bound to
maintain her, he is not bound to her
to do so; he is only bound to the country;
and to see that she does not cumber the
parish. If parochial relief be denied her,
because she has help from friends, or for other
sufficient reason, he need not contribute a
sixpence towards her support, however large
the fortune she may have brought him, and
which he enjoys.

The short cut to the Gordian knot of miseries,
Divorce, is impossible either to wife or
husband, unless the wife or husband, yearning
for that release from misery, can command
several thousand pounds to obtain an act
of parliament. Even if there be riches, the
wife cannot divorce the husband, except
under circumstances of extreme atrocity—
only four cases of the kind having been
successful in a century—although the
husband can divorce the wife. " In lower life
a respectable tradesman was tried for bigamy,
and convicted. The second wife deposed, that
he had courted her for six years; had no
money with her; on the contrary, supplied
her with money since his apprehension; had
always been very kind; and that they had a