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"Make nunkey surrender his dibs,

Rub his pate with a pair of lead towels,
Or stick a knife into his ribs,

I'll warrant he 'll then show some bowels.
Rum ti iddle ti, &c."*

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 misprison 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 voilà 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 =

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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. "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 "picklearities”), and then dying intestate, or, what's worse, willing their property away God knows where, than of great fortunes derived from obsequiousness. I remember a man, who, after having failed in trade, retired to a remote country town at an advanced period of life, with little or nothing but his wits to live upon. After receiving the civilities of his neighbours, in virtue of an imposing exterior, a few well-applied innuendoes, and frequent dissertations on the relative value of landed and funded security, he gradually began to express his regard for his new friends, his satisfaction at his reception among them, the pleasure he derived from their society, and his admiration at their several virtues; and, at length, sending for the attorney, he dictated the sketch of a will, in which he inserted the names of the most considerable residents in the environs. To some names he put two cyphers, and to others three, leaving the prepositive numeral which was to give value to the whole-a blank. This will he ordered the man of law to draw up in form, of course with the strictest possible injunctions of secrecy. The secret was of course confidentially betrayed to every one of the interested parties, with a friendly hint "to stick to the warm old fellow, without a relation of his own on the face of the earth." Thus the testator contrived to pass the rest of his life very comfortably from house to house; and from that day forward never wanted a hare, or a brace of pheasants, a basket of fish, or of grapes, when he chose, for the sake of appearances, to dine at his own lodgings. At the day of his death he very honourably divided all he had equally among these numerous expectants; bequeathing to each, in the strict fulfilment of his implied promise, just £00 Os. Od.

Against frauds like these, the poor legacy-hunter cannot be too guarded; for there is no tread-mill to punish this species of vagrancy— unless, indeed, the devil, the true inventor of that anti-English species of legal torture, has a round-about of his own, where, by the_by, he cannot at least punish the prisoner before trial and judgment. Indeed, old folks in general have an unlucky pride in thus overreaching their prey, and chuckle heartily (in their sleeve) at the idea of the disappointment which the opening of their will will produce. When the party is a female, and not within the prohibited degrees of kindred, the best means of proceeding is to marry at once; and then the law and the usage combine to leave the lady no longer a will of her own. If this be not possible, the case is too often all but desperate. Waiting for dead men's shoes is at best but a tedious business; and the bailiffs of this world may be more expeditious than their great prototype of the next, who, being always sure of his man, is very often most provokingly forgetful, and keeps the writ a long while in his pocket. All things, in short, considered, as long as lotteries and little-goes exist, I would not advise a friend to take to legacy-hunting. Even gambling in foreign securities, or joining the Poyais or the Cape of Hood Hope settlers, may be made a better trade, or at all events a pleasanter one, than dodging the whims or watching the growing decrepitude of a fellow who continues to exist long after he has ceased to live, for the mere pleasure of balking your most reasonable expectations, laughing at your agonies, and making your life an "eternal renewal of hope, with an everlasting disappointment." M.

ELEGIAC STANZAS.

I WANDER'D When the shadows fell,
'Till darkness brooded o'er the deep;
And thoughts of her, I loved so well,
Came o'er me-but I could not weep.
The night was silent as the grave—
I thought of her who slumber'd there:
Of her I would have died to save-
The young, the beautiful, the fair.
I could not weep a single tear,—
The wave of ocean roll'd below,
And evil thoughts were gathering near-
But oh, thank God! it was not so.

I wept not still-but when the light
Was kindled on the beacon tower,
And stream'd on ocean through the night,
I felt an influence from the hour:

My better feelings, that had slept,

Gush'd like the water from the rock
When Israel's leader smote-I wept
Such tears as can the heart unlock.

They were not tears of bitterness,
But such as contrite spirits shed;
For thus Religion comes to bless

The darken'd hour, when hope is fled.

I wept-but they were tears of balm,
And soon was felt throughout my frame
A blessed, and a holy calm-

And call'd I then upon his name.

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SOCIAL AND SAVAGE LIFE.-DANIEL BOON.

An attachment to what is called civilized life, is considered to be interwoven with our existence; but perhaps it is not so much so as we in general suspect. Like an attachment to the locality where we spent our earliest years, the value which we feel for it arises less from its intrinsic superiority over savage life being properly estimated by us, than from the effect of habit. Local attachments we owe to accident, they relate to things, and therefore there can be no interchange of regard, no mutual tie between them and ourselves, beyond what may arise from fancy and the associations that they may recall. They offer us nothing like the affection we feel towards friends and relatives who receive our kind offices and render us theirs in exchange. Local attachments are experienced in their greatest intensity by those who live remote from large cities and great congregations of men. Inhabitants of mountainous districts, however unpolished in manners and less advanced in civilization than those of plains, feel much stronger the charm that binds them to the scenes of their early life-the countryman much

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