Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/388

378[March 20, 1869] of these instruments is specially favourable. It is attended also by the love of authorship, with the tolerable certainty that the composition will be received with a favour and consideration it could not obtain under other circumstances, and when dealing with less important matters. When the testator takes pen in hand, the temptation is to enlarge on his own piety—that is, on his own personal defects and shortcomings—but as it were challenging contradiction. The feeling in the reader's mind is to be, "Here is this rich man, yet how humble, how good, how he acknowledges his faults!" Of this pattern, too, are the testators who bequeath trifling articles, each accompanied with a sort of homily supposed to be of far greater value. Here, again, in dealing with the reception of both these articles, a Molière or Balzac has the most delightful field for dramatic effect, in the disgust and impatience of the legatee, and the struggle between a decent deportment, and disappointment. Thus, a Yorkshireman, Mr. North, who died in 1773, went into an elaborate catalogue of pennyworth trifles, ballasted by an intolerable quantity of what he thought sack. "I give," said this gentleman, "to Mrs. R. G., my English walnut bureau, made large to contain clothes, but hope she will not forget when she makes use of it that graces and virtue are a lady's most ornamental dress." We may conceive the toss of the head and contemptuous sniff with which this double present was received; with, perhaps, a "like his impudence! his old trumpery rattletrap!" If testators are sincere in wishing their parting advice to go home and benefit the recipient, they must surely know that their best chance is to balance it handsomely; just as a person wishing to send a note over a wall to a prisoner wraps a heavy stone up in it. This gentleman also gave his old sword to a lieutenant, "hoping, if ever occasion require it, he will convince a rash world he has learnt to obey his God as well as his general." No doubt the officer welcomed this present with the choice words then fashionable in the army. Having disposed of his property, the testator then took "this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to the Grand Original Proprietor," a phrase that recalsrecalls [sic] the speech of a strolling manager which the writer once heard, and who, in announcing the fresh engagements he proposed making, devotionally qualified his intentions, by submission to the decrees of "The Great Manager of All!" "All my faults and follies," goes on the testator, "almost infinite as they have been, I leave behind me, with wishes that they may be buried. My infant graces and embryo virtues are, I trust, gone before me into heaven." This is a faithful precedent.

One would have liked a peep into the wicked old heart of a certain Lambeth parishioner, who died in 1772, and in whose fingers the pen must have quivered with rage and senile spite. No doubt the revenge was unfelt by its object, who must have long since given up all hope of receiving anything from his bounty, as indeed he also knew. He—and people like him—had only the bare satisfaction of a profitless spite. "Whereas," wrote this precious testator, "it was my misfortune to be made very uneasy by Elizabeth G., my wife, for many years, by her turbulent behaviour, for she was not content with despising my admonition, but she contrived every method to make me unhappy. She was so perverse in her nature that she would not be reclaimed, but seemed only to be born to be a plague to me. The strength of Samson, the knowledge of Homer, the prudence of Augustus, the cunning of Pyrrhus, the patience of Job, the subtilty of Hannibal, and the watchfulness of Hermogenes, could not have been sufficient to subdue her. And as we have lived separate and apart from each other eight years, and she having perverted her son to leave and totally abandon me, therefore I give her one shilling only." The shilling thus contemptuously left was not meant, as is sometimes supposed, as a compliance with the letter of some obsolete legal form, which required that the object should be mentioned, in some shape, in the will. It was meant as an evidence that the testator was aware of what he was doing, and had not omitted the person thus marked out, through forgetfulness.

An old Welshman, Mr. Morgan, within two years of a hundred, left all he had to his "old faithful housekeeper," with, however, this good-humoured "hit" at her. "She is a tolerably good woman, but would be much better if she had not so clamorous a tongue."

That wealthy Mrs. Gatford, of Horsham, who died in 1799, was certainly "odd" during the later years of her life. For twenty years she had never gone out once, and though she kept a carriage, it was seen gradually rotting away in the coach-house until it fell to pieces. Her horses lived luxuriously all that time, enjoying the richest pastures, and doing as they pleased. But, at the end, the main portion of her will was found to be sane enough, as she left nearly all to the poor, with the exception of fifteen pounds a year for the support of her cats and dogs. She was of the class that is morbidly solicitous as to what is done with their remains, a feeling that is intelligible if not pushed too far, as in the present instance. She ordered that her remains were to be kept a whole month in her room, and to be diligently washed in spirits every night to keep away decomposition. She was to be then laid in no less than four coffins, and the outer one was to be of marble. All these directions were strictly carried out. Even this feeling, morbid as it is, is more excusable than that of the man who "does not care what is done with his carcase," and says they "may throw him out on a dunghill if they like." We can understand, too, the feeling that thinks of "a sweet spot" under trees or aisles, and longs to be laid there, but scarcely that selfishness which imposes upon sorrowing relatives the weary duty of gratifying a whim, and of bearing away the dead to some distant spot in a foreign land, which was once seen and fancied. No one can conceive the inconvenience, misery, and cost of these mortuary shifting deportations. The wish