THE DEAD HAND.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 24, Issue 19, 11 March 1913, Page 2

THE DEAD HAND.

ANECDOTES ABOUT THE MAKING OF WILLS. Moderation and commonsense are rarely found in wills—or, indeed anywhere else. Why, if you have been rather a tool all /our life, should you cease to be a fool in those written regulations whereby, being dead, you hope to control the living? Deathbed repentances sometimes make good wills. But.genera:ly wills are but the last expression of the folly that inspired their makers all along. Hence the Probate Co.irt, which is always busy. Mr. Edgar Vine Hall, in his "Romance of Wills and Testaments,” published by Fisher Unwin, has made a curious collection of odd wills, but he does not analyse the strange eccentricities he recounts. Cne of them is the famed Unwillingness to make a will at all. No doubt Montaigne gives the true explanation of this wbi.n he says ; —“Because mention is made of Death in men’s wills, I warrant you there is none will set his hand to them, till the physician hath given his last doom, and utterly forsaken him.” It is a wellknown mania—no will. People otherwise rational, otherwise methodical, will err in this.

The opposite craze is for making many wills or for maVrng wills with many codicils. People have died with wills in every bureau and drawer. One even buried wills in his garden, not unlike the novelist’s hero who left the laconic direction, “Search well,’’ in reference to his will. It was long before they thought of looking in the well at the foot of the garden. .Another person, quoted by Mr. Hall, made six wills during the period of his lunacy—all Invalid. It was necessary to go back forty-four years to find the valid will, which probably w r as not much more reasonable than the mad ones.

Conditional wills have always afforded the best instance of pathetic efforts in the dead to hold the living. One man insists that moustaches shall not be .worn” by his sons who inherit. Others want no racecourses kept, certain houses to be avoided, certain others lived in. Daniel Seton (1803) would have Andrew, his son, to be residuary heir “on condition he goes to Europe on his mother’s death and marries and settles.” That was less verations to Andrew than another will was to Jane Mering, who had 40s. left her on ‘This condition, that she shall profess and acknowledge herself not to have done her duty to me and my wife, before Mr. Parson and four or five of the honester men in ihe parish.” Intoxicating liquors and religions play a large part in other conditional bequests. Spiteful bequests, typified by that famous one in Bulwer Lytton’s “Money,” of the ‘‘empty bottles of the Cheltenham waters./' left to the poor man who had presented such bottles full to the testator, a re only too common. We may quote, as exceeding nasty, Sir Humphrey Style’s disposition (1658) of £2O to his wife to buy mourning for him if sho pleased, and a further sum of ss. only “for good reasons best known in to myself, but not for her honour to be published.” The neighbours talked a good deal ! We like to forget these evidences of posthumous spite in a quotation of the most beautiful wall here printed, '"said to be the work of a lunatic in America.” Here it is “I leave the children for the term of their childhood the flowers, fields, blossoms, and woods, with the right to play among them freely, warning them at the same time against thistles and thorns. I devise to the children the banks, the brooks, and the golden sands beneath waters thereof, and the white clouds that float high over the giant trees,, and I leave to the children long long days to be merry in. ‘To lovers I devise their imaginary world with whatever they may need, as stars, sky, red roses by the wall, the bloom of the hawthorn, the sweet strains of music, and aught else they may desire. . . To the loved ones with snowy crowns I bequeath old age, the love and gratitude of their children, until they fall asleep." Gentle madman ! Would that all men shared in your love of the things that purify and exalt above the need of money and the Probate Court !—’“Mirror.”