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 = 24/ Зав 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 0s. Od. Against frauds like these, the poor legacy-hunter cannot be too guarded; for there is no tread-mill to punish this species of vagrancyunless, 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, I wept not still-but when the light My better feelings, that had slept, Gush'd like the water from the rock They were not tears of bitterness, The darken'd hour, when hope is fled. I wept-but they were tears of balm, And call'd I then upon his name. 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 more than the citizen. Climate seems in this respect to make little distinction; the Laplander, the Swiss, and the Negro whom we steal from among his native mangroves and his pestilential marshes to steep in slavery, are alike strongly sensible of its influence. In great capitals it is almost obliterated; the early habits of their inhabitants being singularly unpropitious to its operation. The endless change of objects, the soul-engrossing traffic, and the bustle and turmoil of London, for example, soon stifle every trace of the feeling, if the smallest portion of it exist at all among its natives. In truth, what local attachment, in the sense I allude to, can be experienced by him who was born and resided two or three years in Smithfield, lived two or three more in the purlieus of Fleet-street, or among the dirty alleys of Holborn, his residence for ever shifted as the calls of business might require? The local attachment of a Londoner is a very general and indefinite thing, and perhaps only consists in his regard for the name of the city itself, and its high claims upon public estimation, and because he will have every thing with which he is connected, to be better than any other. His early removal into the shop or manufactory, his artificial mode of life, his associates, and the demoralization around, make him incapable of feeling any of the sensations experienced by the unsophisticated inhabitant of the country, who has spent his youth amid the charms of nature, gazed with a delight of which the Londoner is utterly ignorant, upon the blue stream, the craggy mountain, or the tufted wood, from the door of the tenement in which he was born, and which has sheltered his ancestors for ages-who has noted every tree in the landscape on which he has looked with fondness for years, and has completely identified with his own heart "the hill that lifts him to the storms :"-his neighbours are all in his horizon of view; it is his little universe, and he would exchange it for no other. Thus, what may be called the highest congregated state of man, tends to obliterate local attachments, which will be found strongest in that state of society which approaches nearest to the simplicity of Nature. It has been remarked, that those who have been educated in civilized society, if they have at any time been forced to quit it by some accidental circumstance, and mingled with the Indian tribes in the forests of America, adopting for any considerable time their mode of life, and ranging unrestrained through the vast domains which have never yet submitted to the plough, have found it extremely difficult to return again and yield obedience to its restraints and institutions. A Mr. Hunter has lately published a most interesting work, containing an account of his life and residence among the Indian tribes of North America, having been made captive by them, when an infant, in one of their attacks upon the White settlements. According to their custom, they adopted him into a family, and reared him up in their own mode of life. He wandered with them across the vast territory of the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean, and back again to the western states of America. He made his escape from them to one of the American cities, where he attracted much notice. This gentleman has stated to his intimate friends, that, particularly since be has been initiated into the forms of polished life, he has felt at times an almost irresistible inclination to return and join again his former associates; every thing seeming beyond measure cramped and restrained when con |