Of course if young people allow their conduct to be in any way
influenced by regard to the wills of living persons, they are doing
very wrong and must expect to be sufferers in the end; nevertheless,
the powers of will-dangling and will-shaking are so liable to abuse
and are continually made so great an engine of torture that I would
pass a law, if I could, to incapacitate any man from making a will for
three months from the date of each offence in either of the above
respects and let the bench of magistrates or judge, before whom he has
been convicted, dispose of his property as they shall think right
and reasonable if he dies during the time that his willmaking power is
suspended.
Mr. Pontifex would have the boys into the dining-room. "My dear
John, my dear Theobald," he would say, "look at me. I began life
with nothing but the clothes with which my father and mother sent me
up to London. My father gave me ten shillings and my mother five for
pocket-money and I thought them munificent. I never asked my father
for a shilling in the whole course of my Life, nor took aught from him
beyond the small sum he used to allow me monthly till I was in receipt
of a salary.
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