LEGACY HUNTING. "Quand li œil pleure, li cuer rit.”—La Bible Guyot. "I HAVE no doubt, Sir, but your will will be my pleasure," said a graceless nephew to a good-natured old uncle, who announced the intention of leaving him a fat legacy; and let sentimentalists say what "soft sorrows, ""the pleasures of methey please of " tender pains," lancholy," and the "joy of grief;" there are no tears half so satisfactory as those of a legatee. In this sense, at least, most people will feel -"that I shocked at Sterne's jocular commencement of a sermon, deny,"—and will, in Yorick's despite, freely and at once acknowledge with the preacher of antiquity, that "it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting." The merriest faces, it has been said, are to be seen in mourningcoaches; and though a ride in a mourning-coach (as my own woful experience has too frequently testified), does not necessarily imply a legacy, the circumstance can hardly fail to put the idea into a man's head; the memento mori reminding him of his legitimate expectations in some other quarter, and forcibly impressing on him the conviction, that, notwithstanding the man may still live who stands between himself and an estate, yet "in him nature's copy's not etern," of which truth the mourner's corollary, like Macbeth's, ("then be thou jocund") follows, "as ready as a borrower's cap." This hypothesis for explaining the paradoxical combination of "inky suits" and "broad grins," will prove sufficient, I imagine, for the latitude of England: in Ireland, as we all know, "it's the whiskey does it ;" and what necessity can there be for looking farther into the causes of that country's excessive population, since it is well known, that one man is never interred beneath the shamrock, without giving occasion to the production of at least two-uno avulso non deficiunt plures? As a zealous disciple of the doctrine of final causes, which has a why for every wherefore, I firmly maintain that legacies exist in rerum natura for no other purpose than to dry our tears, to reconcile us to the loss of friends, and prevent that sinful despair which might otherwise unfit us for the business of life; and this will explain the cause of lachrymatories falling into disuse, and giving way to bottles of sal volatile, the pungency of which may supply the place of our gold-stifled sensibilities. Franklin does not mention of the lady, who, he said, "had not forgiven God Almighty the death of her husband," that she was handsomely provided for by will, or that she succeeded to a large jointure; but if this was the case, she must have been of a singularly unforgiving temper, a living monument of morosity and rancune, and an impugner of the decrees of Providence, beyond the ordinary temerity of human discontent and perverseness. In the silence of authority, I should rather imagine, that, like many other widows, she had been sacrificed to the heir, and that, with the man, the lady also missed his comfortable establishment. Although when death takes place in families, some natural tears" are shed by the most obdurate heirs-atlaw, and some tender regrets are indulged by men of the worst dispositions for those with whom they have long associated, yet, when the first quarter's rents are coming in, it may be doubted whether the most VOL. VIII. NO. XXXVI. 2 M pious and affectionate of us all would not hesitate to accept the resurrection of our lost friend, if that resurrection implied a resumption of his testamentary donations. The closing of the grave, like that of the sea over a sinking ship, leaves no trace behind it. As each man drops from among the living, the ranks close over him, his place is supplied, and if a Prince Hohenloe should contrive to bring him back to life at the end of a week, it is but too probable that he would find "no standing-room" upon the whole face of the earth. I am not of Hamlet's philosophy, who thinks building churches the way to make "a great man's memory outlive his life half-a-year." No, no; let him who would really be regretted, take his money with him to the next world; and who knows what the force of association may then do for him? Such is human nature-" "Tis true 'tis pity, pity 'tis 'tis true ;” but we must even accept of it upon its own terms. This being the lamentable truth, need we be surprised to find legacyhunting the vice of all nations, or to see among the landed aristocracy, father and son considering each other as natural enemies? The savage, no less than the civilized man, is desirous of living at the expense of his neighbour, and with a characteristic impetuosity he knocks his friends on the head without scruple, in order to obtain the reversion of their good properties,—a practice wisely enough forbidden in Christian communities, lest estates should exist perpetually in transitu, and possession, instead of being nine points of the law, should become nine posts towards the next world. For if the savage goes to such extremities to procure the sense, spirit, and physical force he envies in his neighbour, what would not the auri sacra fames effect in the civilized animal! The song says “L'uom senza denaro è un morto che cammina," "the man without money is a mere walking corpse;"—but if the savage notion prevailed among Europeans, the reverse would be the truth; and every man of wealth might be considered, if not dead in law, at least, in the language of the common people, all as one. Proletarians would have it all to themselves, a landholder would have scarcely time to bespeak his own coffin, the world would no longer be "a stage to feed contention in the lingering act," but "heir" would indeed "Urge heir like wave impelling wave,” * "inexorable death" would "level all" with a vengeance; and however it might fare with the "trees and stones" no proprietor's life would be worth three days' purchase. The Romans, who are celebrated among nations as the first in recorded story who reduced legacy-hunting to a system, did not hesitate, under the Tiberiuses and Neros, to denounce their dearest friends and relations, for the purpose of hastening the succession-an example sometimes imitated during the calamitous period of the French revolution. Of this practice, however, there is the less reason for vaunting, inasmuch as it partakes largely of the savage knock-me-down method above mentioned, and can in civilized life rank only with George Barnwell's commentary upon testamentary law * Pope. "Make nunky surrender his dibs, Rub his pate with a pair of lead towels, I'll warrant he'll then show some bowels. Cætera quid referam? Why should I mention the elder Hamlet, who was "murdered in his garden for his estate?" or Philippe Egalité, who helped, if common fame be not a common liar, Louis XVI. to the scaffold, for the sake of a reversionary interest in his crown? this mode of legacy-hunting being too common in aristocratical families to need illustration in these pages. Esau's "Jew's trick" upon his brother is, however, of more importance, both as the type of modern Hebraical dealings in the post obit line, and the model of that species of legacyhunting in which Mother Church in her younger days was a perfect Nimrod. The passion of churchmen for legacies is of so violent a nature, that no English parliament was ever strong enough to contend with it, or cunning enough to draw up a statute of mortmain, through the meshes of which the church could not slip. It must be owned that their "adveniente mundi vespero" was a capital hit in this line; and the getting men to part with their property, under the notion that all property was about to be instantly destroyed, without causing their own rapacity to bring the plea into suspicion, was a tour de force, which shames the droit d'Aubaine of old France, and throws all regal and imperial schemes of legacy-hunting to an immeasurable distance. This remnant, however, of the good old times, as well as the savage method of doing business, is gone by. Since the invention of the funding system, men do not care to place their money out in so long an adventure as the "twilight of the universe;" or perhaps, as Swift has it, they don't like the security, or peradventure they think more of their money than their souls, (and Heaven knows, a good many of them are just enough in their appraisement of the commodity); although, therefore, the Holy Alliance may succeed in restoring the church to its old possessions, it is not probable that all the committee of right-lined extinguishers, with all their ribbons and baronies to boot, could persuade the bulls and bears in 'Change-alley to give a Benjamin's share of their loans and debentures to the parsons. But to descend from these sublimer speculations to mere private adventure, it may be observed, that the état of a legacy-hunter belongs exclusively to an advanced state of civilization, and to a rich community. Where the forms of society are simple, and the labour of supporting life is small, every body marries, and every body has children. There are no miserly bachelor uncles, no servant-starving maiden aunts, who, by dint of celibacy and tremulousness, acquire dominion over all who approach them. In this state of society, too, every one loves his own kin; and if accident or constitution now and then deprives a man of offspring, it is rare that he will chouse his collateral descendants, or disinherit even a third cousin once removed, in favour of a flattering apothecary, or cajoling attorney. On the other hand, nobody is willing to undergo the hardships and restraints of expectancy, and submit to the drudgery of currying favour, where the rewards of pro * Rejected Addresses. ductive industry are at all proportionate to the labour. Who, indeed, (if a spade or a shuttle would support existence,) would give up twenty of the best years of life to the abnegation of self, to the curbing of every wish, to the hiding of every opinion-in one word, to the simulation and dissimulation of dependency, to eating the viands they detest, coaxing the cat, the monkey, or the parrot they abhor, flattering the lady's-maid they fear, or the valet of whom they are jealous? Who would voluntarily incur the paroxysms of anticipation, the cold fits of apprehension, and the hot fits of hope, which recur with every variation in "the old man's" mood? Who would consent to diminish his own little funds, by incessant presents to Volpone and his atours, upon the forlorn hope of an unknown will; or would endure the ceaseless anxiety of watching his cough, divided between the certainty of his death and the chance that he may not yet have signed his will? who would do and suffer all this, and much more indeed than my paper would contain, if he could hold up his head, and breathe the fresh air of heaven in independence?—I had almost said, "when he could his quietus make with a bare bodkin!" Blessed (says Pope in one of his letters) are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed; and blessed, doubly blessed, say I, are they, for they are masters of their own house, keep their own hours, rule their own servants, vote as they please for the county, order their own dinner, and eat their share of the brown, without reference to the whims and caprices of "ame qui vive:" that is, provided always that they have not a shrew for a wife. To live in the constant desire for another man's death, if it be not a misprision of murder, is a baseness beneath the dignity of a free man, and incompatible with the integrity of an honest one. But these casuistical refinements in morals, I admit, though amusing enough for the elder children of Fortune, are too expensive for the poor and lowly. In these Malthusian days, in which population drives so hard againsttaxation, (for coilà le mot de l'énigme,) and in which wealth and poverty, like the galvanism of Sir Humphrey's great pile, accumulate round the opposite poles of society in an all-destructive intensity, there must be rich old bachelors to be courted, and poor young bachelors to be cora+b-c rupted: so that it is as plain as x == 2√3 ab that legacy-hunting will increase till Pitt and paper, notes and non-representation, shall be forgotten; and those "martyred saints the five per cents." shall be followed by their other kindred stocks into that abyss of by-gone things, into which they must all finally sink, and "leave not a-dividend behind." Of all modes of trading adventure, legacy-hunting is the most provokingly uncertain. Depending on the caprice of sickness and of age, a vapour or a whim may overturn the expectations of a long life; and the most artist-like combinations, after years of patience and perseverance, may be defeated by a sly hussy with a warming-pan, a methodist parson, or a fit of the blue devils. Nor is this without some appearance of poetical justice; for let a man make his will as he pleases, it is ten to one that he does not please any one else. Even when he gives all to one universal legatee, the heir may grudge the servants their mourning, and the corpse its funeral honours; or he may be angry that the testator has tied him down in some particular in which he wishes to have been free. Not many years ago, a Scotch gentleman, who had realized a large fortune in India, died, and bequeathed all his wealth to two brothers, partners in a mercantile house in the city, on the condition that he should be buried in great state in his native village, and how, think you, did the heirs comply with the letter of this injunction? Why, they packed up the dead man in a cask of damaged rum, and shipped him on board the Lovely Kitty, bound, God willing, for the port of Leith: there a cart waited to receive this singular item of invoice, (upon which it must have puzzled the customhouse folks to fix the ad valorem duty,) and to convey it to the markettown nearest the place of sepulture. The body was then taken out of pickle, put into a sumptuous coffin, and conducted to its final abode with the customary paraphernalia: and thus the charge of a funeral procession from London was saved, and the function performed "in the cheapest and most expeditious manner :❞—and so much for the spirit of trade! Pliny well observes (Lib. viii. Epist. 18.) that the vulgar opinion, which regards a man's will as a reflection of his disposition, is wholly false. It is, in fact, a mere reflection of the particular moment in which it is written; and much depends whether it be dictated before or after dinner. When the making a will is deferred to a late period of life, it is more usually a contradiction than a corollary to the testator's habitual modes of thinking and feeling. This remark of the Roman letter-writer is apropos to an old gentleman, who, after lending himself to the legacy-hunters, taking all their bribes, and accepting all their adulation, died, and left his property, as he ought, to his own relations. 66 Upon this occasion," says Pliny, "the town-talk was considerable; some said he was ungrateful, some said he was false, some that he forgot his old friends, thus betraying their own unworthiness by their open expression of disappointment:" (seque ipsos, dum insectantur illum, turpissimis confessionibus produnt:) others, on the contrary, praised him for thus cheating the cheaters, and reading them "a great moral lesson" on the prevalent vice of the day. Of all the uncertainties of human life, the uncertainty of a legacy is the greatest. The extent to which the vice of legacy-hunting prevailed among the Romans is among the most extraordinary moral phenomena which the political combination of their day presents. The coarseness of the methods employed betrays an inconceivable relaxation of the social affections, and developes a selfishness the most disgustingly revolting. One man comes into the house of a dying woman, with whose family he had lived in constant variance, and by the help of a few grimaces, an affected zeal for her recovery, a sacrifice, and a declaration that the victim predicts long life to the patient, he worms himself into a good legacy. Another meddles in the dictation of all his neighbours' wills, on the speculation (which rarely failed) of insinuating an item in his own favour. In our days the world is grown something wiser, if not better, and a man must play his cards much more dextrously if he hopes to win any thing at this game. Indeed, it is now the expectant who is most generally the dupe in these transactions; and we more frequently hear of old folks quartering themselves upon some credulous and greedy family, and pestering them through life with their maladies, whims, and caprices, (or, as Winifrid Jenkins calls them, their |