Few things show the human character in a more ridiculous light than the
circumstance of will-making. It is the latest opportunity we have of
exercising the natural perversity of the disposition, and we take care
to make a good use of it. We husband it with jealousy, put it off as
long as we can, and then use every precaution that the world shall be
no gainer by our deaths. This last act of our lives seldom belies the
former tenor of them for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. All
that we seem to think of is to manage matters so (in settling accounts
with those who are so unmannerly as to survive us) as to do as little
good, and to plague and disappoint as many people, as possible.
Many persons have a superstition on the subject of making their last
will and testament, and think that when everything is ready signed and
sealed, there is nothing further left to delay their departure. I have
heard of an instance of one person who, having a feeling of this kind
on his mind, and being teased into making his will by those about him,
actually fell ill with pure apprehension, and thought he was going to
die in good earnest, but having executed the deed over-night, awoke, to
his great surprise, the next morning, and found himself as well as ever
he was.(1)
An elderly gentleman possessed of a good estate and the same idle
notion, and who found himself in a dangerous way, was anxious to do this
piece of justice to those who remained behind him, but when it came to
the point, his heart failed him, and his nervous fancies returned in
full force. Even on his death-bed he still held back and was averse to
sign what he looked upon as his own death-warrant, and just at the last
gasp, amidst the anxious looks and silent upbraidings of friends and
relatives that surrounded him, he summoned resolution to hold out his
feeble hand, which was guided by others, to trace his name, and he fell
back--a corpse! If there is any pressing reason for it, that is, if
any particular person would be relieved from a state of harassing
uncertainty or materially benefited by their making a will, the old and
infirm (who do not like to be put out of their way) generally make this
an excuse to themselves for putting it off to the very last moment,
probably till it is too late; or where this is sure to make the greatest
number of blank faces, contrive to give their friends the slip, without
signifying their final determination in their favour. Where some
unfortunate individual has been kept long in suspense, who has been
perhaps sought out for that very purpose, and who may be in a great
measure dependent on this as a last resource, it is nearly a certainty
that there will be no will to be found; no trace, no sign to discover
whether the person dying thus intestate ever had any intention of the
sort, or why they relinquished it. This is to bespeak the thoughts and
imaginations of others for victims after we are dead, as well as
their persons and expectations for hangers-on while we are living. A
celebrated beauty of the middle of the last century, towards its close,
sought out a female relative, the friend and companion of her youth,
who had lived during the forty years of their separation in rather
straitened circumstances, and in a situation which admitted of some
alleviations. Twice they met after that long lapse of time--once her
relation visited her in the splendour of a rich old family mansion, and
once she crossed the country to become an inmate of the humble dwelling
of her early and only remaining friend. What was this for? Was it to
revive the image of her youth in the pale and careworn face of her
friend? Or was it to display the decay of her charms and recall her
long-forgotten triumphs to the memory of the only person who could bear
witness to them? Was it to show the proud remains of herself to those
who remembered or had often heard what she was--her skin like shrivelled
alabaster, her emaciated features chiselled by Nature's finest hand, her
eyes that, when a smile lighted them up, still shone like diamonds,
the vermilion hues that still bloomed among wrinkles? Was it to talk
of bone-lace, of the flounces and brocades of the last century, of
race-balls in the year '62, and of the scores of lovers that had died at
her feet, and to set whole counties in a flame again, only with a dream
of faded beauty? Whether it was for this, or whether she meant to leave
her friend anything (as was indeed expected, all things considered, not
without reason), nobody knows--for she never breathed a syllable on the
subject herself, and died without a will. The accomplished coquette
of twenty, who had pampered hopes only to kill them, who had kindled
rapture with a look and extinguished it with a breath, could find no
better employment at seventy than to revive the fond recollections and
raise up the drooping hopes of her kinswoman only to let them fall--to
rise no more. Such is the delight we have in trifling with and
tantalising the feelings of others by the exquisite refinements, the
studied sleights of love or friendship!
Where a property is actually bequeathed, supposing the circumstances of
the case and the usages of society to leave a practical discretion to
the testator, it is most frequently in such portions as can be of the
least service. Where there is much already, much is given; where much is
wanted, little or nothing. Poverty invites a sort of pity, a miserable
dole of assistance; necessity, neglect and scorn; wealth attracts and
allures to itself more wealth by natural association of ideas or by that
innate love of inequality and injustice which is the favourite principle
of the imagination. Men like to collect money into large heaps in their
lifetime; they like to leave it in large heaps after they are dead. They
grasp it into their own hands, not to use it for their own good, but to
hoard, to lock it up, to make an object, an idol, and a wonder of it. Do
you expect them to distribute it so as to do others good; that they will
like those who come after them better than themselves; that if they
were willing to pinch and starve themselves, they will not deliberately
defraud their sworn friends and nearest kindred of what would be of the
utmost use to them? No, they will thrust their heaps of gold and silver
into the hands of others (as their proxies) to keep for them untouched,
still increasing, still of no use to any one, but to pamper pride and
avarice, to glitter in the huge, watchful, insatiable eye of fancy, to
be deposited as a new offering at the shrine of Mammon, their God,--this
is with them to put it to its intelligible and proper use; this is
fulfilling a sacred, indispensable duty; this cheers them in the
solitude of the grave, and throws a gleam of satisfaction across the
stony eye of death. But to think of frittering it down, of sinking it
in charity, of throwing it away on the idle claims of humanity, where
it would no longer peer in monumental pomp over their heads,--and that,
too, when on the point of death themselves, _in articulo mortis,_ oh!
it would be madness, waste, extravagance, impiety!--Thus worldlings feel
and argue without knowing it; and while they fancy they are studying
their own interest or that of some booby successor, their _alter
idem,_ are but the dupes and puppets of a favourite idea, a phantom, a
prejudice, that must be kept up somewhere (no matter where), if it still
plays before and haunts their imagination, while they have sense or
understanding left to cling to their darling follies.
There was a remarkable instance of this tendency _to the heap,_ this
desire to cultivate an abstract passion for wealth, in a will of one of
the Thelussons some time back. This will went to keep the greater part
of a large property from the use of the natural heirs and next-of-kin
for a length of time, and to let it accumulate at compound interest in
such a way and so long, that it would at last mount up in value to the
purchase-money of a whole county. The interest accruing from the funded
property or the rent of the lands at certain periods was to be employed
to purchase other estates, other parks and manors in the neighbourhood
or farther off, so that the prospect of the future demesne that was to
devolve at some distant time to the unborn lord of acres swelled and
enlarged itself, like a sea, circle without circle, vista beyond vista,
till the imagination was staggered and the mind exhausted. Now here was
a scheme for the accumulation of wealth and for laying the foundation of
family aggrandisement purely imaginary, romantic--one might almost
say, disinterested. The vagueness, the magnitude, the remoteness of the
object, the resolute sacrifice of all immediate and gross advantages,
clothe it with the privileges of an abstract idea, so that the project
has the air of a fiction or of a story in a novel. It was an instance
of what might be called posthumous avarice, like the love of posthumous
fame. It had little more to do with selfishness than if the testator
had appropriated the same sums in the same way to build a pyramid,
to construct an aqueduct, to endow a hospital, or effect any other
patriotic or merely fantastic purpose. He wished to heap up a pile of
wealth (millions of acres) in the dim horizon of future years, that
could be of no use to him or to those with whom he was connected by
positive and personal ties, but as a crotchet of the brain, a gewgaw of
the fancy.(2) Yet to enable himself to put this scheme in execution, he
had perhaps toiled and watched all his life, denied himself rest,
food, pleasure, liberty, society, and persevered with the patience and
self-denial of a martyr. I have insisted on this point the more, to show
how much of the imaginary and speculative there is interfused even in
those passions and purposes which have not the good of others for their
object, and how little reason this honest citizen and builder of castles
in the air would have had to treat those who devoted themselves to the
pursuit of fame, to obloquy and persecution for the sake of truth and
liberty, or who sacrificed their lives for their country in a just
cause, as visionaries and enthusiasts, who did not understand what was
properly due to their own interest and the securing of the main chance.
Man is not the creature of sense and selfishness, even in those pursuits
which grow out of that origin, so much as of imagination, custom,
passion, whim, and humour.
I have heard of a singular instance of a will made by a person who was
addicted to a habit of lying. He was so notorious for this propensity
(not out of spite or cunning, but as a gratuitous exercise of invention)
that from a child no one could ever believe a syllable he uttered. From
the want of any dependence to be placed on him, he became the jest and
by-word of the school where he was brought up. The last act of his
life did not disgrace him; for, having gone abroad, and falling into a
dangerous decline, he was advised to return home. He paid all that
he was worth for his passage, went on ship-board, and employed a few
remaining days he had to live in making and executing his will; in which
he bequeathed large estates in different parts of England, money in the
funds, rich jewels, rings, and all kinds of valuables to his old friends
and acquaintance, who, not knowing how far the force of nature could go,
were not for some time convinced that all this fairy wealth had never
had an existence anywhere but in the idle coinage of his brain, whose
whims and projects were no more!--The extreme keeping in this character
is only to be accounted for by supposing such an original constitutional
levity as made truth entirely indifferent to him, and the serious
importance attached to it by others an object of perpetual sport and
ridicule!
The art of will-making chiefly consists in baffling the importunity of
expectation. I do not so much find fault with this when it is done as
a punishment and oblique satire on servility and selfishness. It is
in that case _Diamond cut Diamond_--a trial of skill between the
legacy-hunter and the legacy-maker, which shall fool the other. The
cringing toad-eater, the officious tale-bearer, is perhaps well paid for
years of obsequious attendance with a bare mention and a mourning-ring;
nor can I think that Gil Blas' library was not quite as much as the
coxcombry of his pretensions deserved. There are some admirable scenes
in Ben Jonson's _Volpone,_ showing the humours of a legacy-hunter, and
the different ways of fobbing him off with excuses and assurances of not
being forgotten. Yet it is hardly right, after all, to encourage this
kind of pitiful, barefaced intercourse without meaning to pay for it,
as the coquette has no right to jilt the lovers she has trifled with.
Flattery and submission are marketable commodities like any other, have
their price, and ought scarcely to be obtained under false pretences. If
we see through and despise the wretched creature that attempts to impose
on our credulity, we can at any time dispense with his services: if we
are soothed by this mockery of respect and friendship, why not pay him
like any other drudge, or as we satisfy the actor who performs a part
in a play by our particular desire? But often these premeditated
disappointments are as unjust as they are cruel, and are marked with
circumstances of indignity, in proportion to the worth of the object.
The suspecting, the taking it for granted that your name is down in the
will, is sufficient provocation to have it struck out: the hinting at
an obligation, the consciousness of it on the part of the testator,
will make him determined to avoid the formal acknowledgment of it at any
expense. The disinheriting of relations is mostly for venial offences,
not for base actions: we punish out of pique, to revenge some case in
which we been disappointed of our wills, some act of disobedience
to what had no reasonable ground to go upon; and we are obstinate in
adhering to our resolution, as it was sudden and rash, and doubly bent
on asserting our authority in what we have least right to interfere in.
It is the wound inflicted upon our self-love, not the stain upon
the character of the thoughtless offender, that calls for condign
punishment. Crimes, vices may go unchecked or unnoticed; but it is the
laughing at our weaknesses, or thwarting our humours, that is never
to be forgotten. It is not the errors of others, but our own
miscalculations, on which we wreak our lasting vengeance. It is
ourselves that we cannot forgive. In the will of Nicholas Gimcrack the
virtuoso, recorded in the _Tatler,_ we learn, among other items, that
his eldest son is cut off with a single cockleshell for his undutiful
behaviour in laughing at his little sister whom his father kept
preserved in spirits of wine. Another of his relations has a collection
of grasshoppers bequeathed him, as in the testator's opinion an adequate
reward and acknowledgment due to his merit. The whole will of the said
Nicholas Gimcrack, Esq., is a curious document and exact picture of
the mind of the worthy virtuoso defunct, where his various follies,
littlenesses, and quaint humours are set forth as orderly and distinct
as his butterflies' wings and cockle-shells and skeletons of fleas in
glass cases.(3) We often successfully try, in this way, to give the
finishing stroke to our pictures, hang up our weaknesses in perpetuity,
and embalm our mistakes in the memories of others.
Even from the tomb the voice of nature cries,
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.
I shall not speak here of unwarrantable commands imposed upon survivors,
by which they were to carry into effect the sullen and revengeful
purposes of unprincipled men, after they had breathed their last; but we
meet with continual examples of the desire to keep up the farce (if not
the tragedy) of life after we, the performers in it, have quitted the
stage, and to have our parts rehearsed by proxy. We thus make a caprice
immortal, a peculiarity proverbial. Hence we see the number of legacies
and fortunes left on condition that the legatee shall take the name and
style of the testator, by which device we provide for the continuance
of the sounds that formed our names, and endow them with an estate, that
they may be repeated with proper respect. In the _Memoirs of an Heiress_
all the difficulties of the plot turn on the necessity imposed by a
clause in her uncle's will that her future husband should take the
family name of Beverley. Poor Cecilia! What delicate perplexities she
was thrown into by this improvident provision; and with what minute,
endless, intricate distresses has the fair authoress been enabled to
harrow up the reader on this account! There was a Sir Thomas Dyot in the
reign of Charles II. who left the whole range of property which forms
Dyot Street, in St. Giles's, and the neighbourhood, on the sole and
express condition that it should be appropriated entirely to that sort
of buildings, and to the reception of that sort of population, which
still keeps undisputed, undivided possession of it. The name was changed
the other day to George Street as a more genteel appellation, which, I
should think, is an indirect forfeiture of the estate. This Sir
Thomas Dyot I should be disposed to put upon the list of old English
worthies--as humane, liberal, and no flincher from what he took in
his head. He was no common-place man in his line. He was the best
commentator on that old-fashioned text--'The foxes have holes, and the
birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay
his head.' We find some that are curious in the mode in which they
shall be buried, and others in the place. Lord Camelford had his
remains buried under an ash tree that grew on one of the mountains in
Switzerland; and Sir Francis Bourgeois had a little mausoleum built for
him in the college at Dulwich, where he once spent a pleasant, jovial
day with the masters and wardens.(4) It is, no doubt, proper to attend,
except for strong reasons to the contrary, to these sort of requests;
for by breaking faith with the dead we loosen the confidence of the
living. Besides, there is a stronger argument: we sympathise with the
dead as well as with the living, and are bound to them by the most
sacred of all ties, our own involuntary follow-feeling with others!
Thieves, as a last donation, leave advice to their friends, physicians a
nostrum, authors a manuscript work, rakes a confession of their faith
in the virtue of the sex--all, the last drivellings of their egotism and
impertinence. One might suppose that if anything could, the approach
and contemplation of death might bring men to a sense of reason and
self-knowledge. On the contrary, it seems only to deprive them of the
little wit they had, and to make them even more the sport of their
wilfulness and shortsightedness. Some men think that because they are
going to be hanged, they are fully authorised to declare a future state
of rewards and punishments. All either indulge their caprices or cling
to their prejudices. They make a desperate attempt to escape from
reflection by taking hold of any whim or fancy that crosses their minds,
or by throwing themselves implicitly on old habits and attachments.
An old man is twice a child: the dying man becomes the property of his
family. He has no choice left, and his voluntary power is merged in
old saws and prescriptive usages. The property we have derived from our
kindred reverts tacitly to them; and not to let it take its course is a
sort of violence done to nature as well as custom. The idea of property,
of something in common, does not mix cordially with friendship, but is
inseparable from near relationship. We owe a return in kind, where we
feel no obligation for a favour; and consign our possessions to our
next-of-kin as mechanically as we lean our heads on the pillow, and go
out of the world in the same state of stupid amazement that we came into
it!..._Caetera desunt._