ound books and a eulogy of
the old Franklin Square Library.

THE DEVIL'S MOTHER-IN-LAW

BY FERNAN CABALLERO

Fernan Caballero is the pseudonym of Mrs. Cecilia Boehl von Faber,
Marchioness de Arco-Hermoso, who was a Swiss by birth, daughter of the
literary historian Johann Boehl von Faber, the Johannes of Campe's
_Robinson_ (1779). Her father initiated her early into Spanish
literature, which he interpreted for her in the spirit of the Romantic
movement of those early days. The interest in mediaeval traditions,
which she owes to this early training, increased when, later, she went
to Catholic Spain. The charm of her popular Andalusian tales consists
in the fact that she fully shares with the Catholic peasants of that
province an implicit faith in the truth of these mediaeval legends. In
her stories we find perhaps the purest expression of mediaevalism in
modern times. Fernan Caballero gradually drifted to the extreme Right
in all questions of religion, art and life. She hated every liberal
expression in matters of faith or art with the fanaticism of a
Torquemada. This author not only shared the somewhat general Catholic
view that all Protestants were eternally damned, but she naively
believed that every son of Israel had a tail (Julian Schmidt).

The story of woman's triumph over the Devil is well characteristic of
the Land of the Blessed Lady, as Andalusia is commonly called.

The legend of a devil imprisoned in a phial is also found in the work
of the Spaniard Luis Velez de Guevara called _El Diablo cojuelo_
(1641), from whom Alain Le Sage borrowed both title and plot for his
novel _Le Diable boiteux_ (1707). Asmodeus, liberated from a bottle,
into which he had been confined by a magician, entertains his
deliverer with the secret sights of a big city at midnight, by
unroofing the houses of the Spanish capital and showing him the life
that was going on in them. The legend was introduced into Spain from
the East by the Moors and finally acclimated to find a place in local
traditions. From that country it spread over the whole of Europe. The
Asiatics believed that by abstinence and special prayers evil spirits
could be reduced into obedience and confined in black bottles. The
tradition forms a part of the Solomonic lore, and is frequently told
in esoteric works. In the cabalistic book _Vinculum Spirituum_, which
is of Eastern origin, it is said that Solomon discovered, by means of
a certain learned book, the