and Burma and China. A thousand years later, the touchingly beautiful records of the courage and devotion of the Chinese pilgrims who crossed the Sand-ocean" to visit the Holy Land of Magadha fail not to tell the story

་་

of Jetavana and in particular the curious circumstances of its purchase.1 Nor is this all. Thanks to Hindu piety and Hindu art, the story has been made the subject of one of the most interesting sculptures of a noted Buddhist monument of 250 B.C., the Stupa of Bharhut.2 A medallion, of which a reproduction is given here, shows us the unyoked bullocks, the cart in which the coins were brought, a man unloading them, another carrying them, and yet two others at work covering the ground with a layer of them. The coins are quadrangular and rudely swaged, just such as we know from the texts.3 In the center stands the great treasurer with his golden vessel ready to pour. And, that nothing may be lacking, there is underneath the medallion the legend, Anathapindika giveth Jetavana, [having become its] purchaser for a layer of ten million.

Jetavana Anādhapeḍiko deti koti-santhatena keṭā

Jetavana Anathapindika giveth, by a-crore-layer a-buyer.

So perfectly does the venerable monument confirm the books.

That the donor should have the right or capacity to give, that he should actually deliver, that the donee should actually accept, - such conditions of validity are so obviously necessary as to be universal, and herein they differ from the condition that the act of gift should be confirmed by a pouring of water. This seems to me to be primarily a symbolic act. Its implication is: As this water which is now let go by me cannot be gathered up and taken back, so shall it be with this gift which I now let go to thee, the donee. It was doubtless an immemorial Hindu usage, that grew (as we have seen) to be established custom at an early time, and thus came to be embodied in the law-books. The limits of this paper have allowed the discussion of a few details and no more, but enough, let me hope, to suggest that a systematic comparative study of the legal aspects of donation would make an interesting chapter in the history of Indo-European legal antiquities.

1 Samuel Beal, Si-yu-ki, Vol. II, p. 4. Cf. James Legge's Få-hien, p. 59.

2 See Alex. Cunningham, The Stupa of Bharhut.

3 Visuddhi Magga, Book xiv, Rangoon ed. of 1901, p. 374, l. 25.

+ The German word schenke means primarily 'pour' and secondarily 'give,' but the latter meaning does not appear until the post-classical period of Middle High German. As to the semantic connection, see Jacob Grimm's essay, "Ueber Schenken und Geben," in Kleinere Schriften, Vol. II (Berlin, 1865), pp. 173-210, and especially p. 204. He mentions the Indian water-pouring in his Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer, 2d ed., p. 190.

1

THE MOTHER-IN-LAW

FRANCIS B. GUMMERE

In two lectures,1 fortified by ample notes and references, Professor Schrader has traced back the tradition of the wicked mother-in-law. He argues partly from old literature, partly from survivals. A sinister figure, yet the most conspicuous member of the actual household, the husband's mother keeps her "wicked" name in Russian ballads and in the popular literature of Southeastern Europe. Conditions of family life in those lands which lie apart from the highways of civilization have changed but little in the course of centuries; and the mother-in-law seems to hold there still the place and power which she once held throughout the Aryan world. "Wicked," of course, is not her own word; it expresses the young wife's point of view, and has long been current. Old literature, Germanic and Celtic, older Greek and Latin, yet older Indian, testify to the envy and hatred of the wife towards her husband's mother. An older and better state of affairs in the family, however, can be faintly but definitely discerned, and a far better reputation of the mother-in-law, which survives by implication in English "goodmother."2 Ranging far and wide for evidence, Professor Schrader finds not only that the relation between the husband's mother and his wife is one of the oldest concepts recorded in Aryan speech, and therefore one of the primitive facts of our household organization, but also that this mother-in-law was a leader in the struggle for domestic order and a decent family life.3 Vivid is the contrast of that ancient dignity with the mother-in-law's present state, powerless, the butt of cheap wit or cheaper pathos. Excluding this third stage, however, one may ask whether the second and first stages in the career of the mother-in-law, particularly the first, are illuminated at all by a study of the English and Scottish traditional ballads.

1 Die Schwiegermutter und der Hagestolz, eine Studie aus der Geschichte unserer Familie, Braunschweig, 1904. — The author assumes patriarchal conditions for the Aryans as far back as their history can be followed or inferred. The matriarchate, by his reckoning, has always belonged to quite alien peoples.

2 The ballads use "mother deere” both in description (Childe Waters, A, 33) and in address (by the husband, passim; by the new wife, Gil Brenton, C, 55). So the Danish usage, even where the mother is a bad witch: "hans kiere moder" (Hustru og Mandsmoder, F, 2). A similar formula, perhaps, was the aldolŋ (Iliad, xxii, 451) which Schrader notes as given by the "good" daughter-in-law, Andromache, to Hecuba. Later views of the case would thus be responsible for the change of Hecuba's attribute in Plautus (Menaechmi, 714 ff.), and make Schrader's "doch" (note 15, work quoted) unnecessary.

3 Work quoted, pp. 26, 79.— The husband's mother is now to a large extent superseded for jocose purposes by the wife's mother, a relation practically unnoticed in oldest times.

The question was put by Professor Schrader, when he was gathering his material, to the present writer; and the answer, too hastily given, was mainly negative. A subsequent review of the ballads has led to some positive results.

What sort of evidence can the ballads, which rest upon tradition of five or six centuries at the utmost, give for a state of affairs which belongs by the hypothesis to a far older date? Only the survival in sentiment, in the setting of an ancient story which has been cast anew in the ballad mold, in fossil phrases, wreckage of old habits of speech that once expressed a definite custom or a forgotten attitude of mind. The ballads are not a bank upon which one draws at will; but they are a very likely place for finding lost money. Theirs is the romance of tradition, a kind of obsolete reality, as different from literary romance of the past as it is from modern realism. They have not much of the fantastic element so plentiful in popular tales, and speak more willingly of old custom than of old myth. The ballad is more stubborn, its form is far from the flexible prose of the tale, its choral and dramatic origins keep it "near the ground," and it gives fancy too narrow range. Rare are the wafts from the fantastic world of the tales, such as the stanza about that hypothetical wolf in Johnie Cock, an impressive passage, which seems to have strayed from some story of "the grateful beast"; and commonplace, if common, are the recurring lines about birds who tell tales, bring first aid to the injured husband, and carry messages, an affable and serviceable band. It is easy, perhaps too easy, for the tales to point back from witch to matriarch; witches are fantastic and cannot be explained by the modern instance. On the other hand, the tradition of ballads about old custom, and their sentiment of a vanished way of life, are always in danger of this modern parallel and its easy explanation. Scott pointed out the reference to sworn brotherhood in Bewick and Graham. It is a survival in sentiment

In every town that I ride through,

They'll say, "There rides a brotherless man”

to be compared with the fine realism used by Chaucer's pardoner,1 and with the unreal character of relationship generally in the popular tales. Here, indeed, is the great difficulty in taking the evidence of the ballads. The brotherless man, one may say, needs no stay in tradition; he can be found in any modern kailyard story. It may be. But that phrase and that sentiment cannot be found in the modern transcript from life. The stay in tradition is demanded because of the incongruity of the old sentiment with the modern facts, with the actual narrative setting; and this demand holds good of the sentiment about actual as well as artificial kindred. A preference, inexplicable in the life of the balladists, for the inferior bond of kin, as modern eyes see it, over the superior, must pass as traditional sentiment sprung from earlier custom.

1 "Herkneth, felawes," etc., C. T., C, 696 ff.