weapons, tools for artificers, cattle, victuals, corn, ploughgear, and the like." It is questionable whether these terms would convey a gallery of pictures kept as specimens of art, or a library of scarce books. To devise a house will not carry hangings and looking-glasses; which are matters of ornament and furniture. There are many other seeming anomalies, which must all be duly weighed. Shakspeare left his second-best bed to his wife, and his will has been adduced to prove that he was an attorney's clerk, as indeed some crack-brained writers have attempted to prove that he was a chemist, a surgeon, secretary of state, or a painter. The fact is, that his judgment was universal; and what he wrote was universally true, because his was the poetry of common sense. But a great to-do has been made because he left Mrs. Shakspeare, née Ann Hathaway, his second-best bedstead. Charles Knight, and other defenders of the poet, rule that the bequest carried other property with it, and that it was usual to leave wives in those grand Elizabethan days secondbest furniture. Others declare that the poet, like other poets, was unhappy in marriage, and that he thus marked his spite; which supposition, in regard to so healthy a mind as "Sweet Will's," seems to us monstrous. Shakspeare's last testament is in this respect a mystery. The truth is, we, very luckily, know as little about his death as we do of his life. It is a common error to suppose that you must leave your heir a shilling “to cut him off” with. A father can very well do that without leaving him a farthing. Some great cruelties have been thus perpetrated by the will-makers, but they have but covered themselves with execration. The practice of cutting off with a shilling was introduced to show the legatee that he was not entirely forgotten. It was a sort of malice prepense (premeditated spite), an insult added to an injury, as you add a goose's feather to an arrow to make it fly straighter and pierce deeper. Hazlitt has said, that "the last act of our life seldom belies the former tenour of it, for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. We disinherit relations for the most venial offences, and not for base actions. We punish out of pique, to revenge some case in which we have been disappointed of our wills." One old lady left her money from her grandson because he did not cut his nails. Lord Fitzwilliam thought that he saw want of refinement in him whom he intended to be his heir. This was Lord Onslow; and the fault was, that, after helping himself to cream, he brought the rim of the cup in contact with that of the cream-jug, and his lip had touched that of the cup. Lord Onslow ridiculed this oversensitiveness, and lost the Fitzwilliam estates. Hundreds of such instances could be cited from those family archives which Sir Bernard Burke is so fond of quoting. That good man Jonas Hanway held that he who left anything to the poor in his will could have no merit in the gift, because after his death it was no longer his. We brought nothing with us : we cannot take anything away. Yet some have thought otherwise, and have done wisely: such was the founder of Heriot's Hospital in Edinburgh, and of our Guy's; and such, too, was that of the great Irish Dean, Swift's Hospital in Dublin, which we hope may last as long as the epigram which accompanies it :— 66 He gave the little wealth he had To show by one satiric touch No nation wanted it so much." But if some endow hospitals for the sick and wretched, others forget them for an animal. Lord Eldon left his favourite dog Pincher a clear annual income of £8 per annum ; "not more than enough to make him a good customer of the dogs-meat man," it has been said. Perhaps not; but more than is sometimes awarded to the annuitants of some of our charitable institutions. Such eccentric bequests betoken a feeling which the testators may blush at, and are like "the fantastic tricks played before high Heaven, which," says Shakspeare, "make the angels weep." ON GOOD WISHES AT CHRISTMAS. A T Christmas, which is a good holiday for most of us, but especially for that larger and better half of us, the young, there is, as everybody knows, a profusion of good things. The final cause of a great many existences is Christmas Day. How many of that vast flock of geese, which are now peacefully feeding over the long, cold wolds of Norfolk, or are driven gabbling and hissing by the gozzard to their pasture-how many of those very geese were called into being simply for Christmas Day! In the towns, with close streets and fetid courts, where the flaring gas at the corner of an alley marks the only bright spot, a gin-palace, there a goose-club is held; and there, for a short time, is the resting-place, side by side with a bottle of gin, of one of those wise-looking and self-concentrated gobblers, whose name men have generally, and, as we think, unjustly, applied to the silly one amongst themselves. But it is not only the profusion of good things, of cakes, puddings, spices, oranges, and fruits, from sunny Italy and Spain, from India and from Asia, from America, North and South, and even from distant Australia; it is not that amongst us, as, long ago, with the Frankelein in Chaucer, that at this time "It snewed in his hous of mete and drynk;" it is not that we have huge loads of beef chines, ribs, sirloins, legs, necks, breasts, and shoulders of mutton, fillets of veal, whole hogs, and pigs in various stages, from the tender suckling to the stiff-jointed father of a family, whose "back hair" makes good clothes-brushes, and whose head is brought in at college feasts; it is not that the air gives up its choicest fowl, and the waters yield their best fish plentiful as these are with us, they are nothing in profusion to the kindly greetings and good wishes that fly about in the cold weather, and that circulate from land's end to land's end. The whole coast of England is surrounded by a general "shake hands." The coast-guard on their wintry walks do not greet each other more surely than old friends all over England do : one clasps another, and another a third, till from Dover to London and so on to York, from Yarmouth on the East to Bristol on the west, from John O'Groat's house at the extreme north to the Land's End-the very toe-nail of England on the south-a kindly greeting, we may be sure, will pass. And a cheerful thing it is, on this day of universal equality, on this day which "To the cottage and the crown, to think that we can touch and hold each other with friendly hands all over our land. Ours is a very small land, but it is X |