There is unrivalled scope for the imagination in perusing the last dispositions of the dead. How easy it is, with these documents before us, to picture the figures of each generation; the fervent Catholic of the fifteenth century, the pious benefactor of the sixteenth, the “heroic English gentleman” of the seventeenth, the Whig or Tory of the eighteenth; and at all times the homely or eccentric testator who allows many a secret comedy or tragedy to appear, many a prejudice or foible, many a sentiment of resignation or revolt. Some give the impression of peevishness and irresolution, of spite or hate; some of sentimental or petty desires; some of serene care for the future, of dignity and calm.
Little, indeed, in all literature is more arresting than the revelation of personality, the unveiling of intimacies that are seldom seen: in wills these intimacies occur, the veil is withdrawn, in a manner that elsewhere can rarely be observed. Whether they be light or serious, amusing or tragic, the occurrence of such vivid traits in a will gives them a character peculiarly humorous or correspondingly sad. The idiosyncrasy is magnified, the bias more distorted, when placed in such a setting.
On the other hand, the interest of a will may arise not merely or so much from its provisions in themselves, as from our knowledge of the inner history of the testator’s life and death. Bishop Corbet, that witty and jovial soul, was one of those fathers who, for all their love and longing, for all their piety, are disgraced by their sons. In his will, dated July 7, 1635, and proved on the 5th of the following September, he wrote: “I commit and commend the nurture education and maintenance of my son and daughter into the faithful and loving care of my mother-in-law, declaring my intent by this my last will, as I have often in my health expressed the same, that my desire is that my said son be brought up in good learning, and that as soon as he shall be fit be placed in Oxford or Cambridge, where I require him upon my blessing to apply himself to his books studiously and industriously.”
He had in “health expressed the same” by verse: but the son Vincent, in spite of prayer and admonition, was a ne’er-do-well, and after the Bishop’s death a beggar in London. These lines were addressed to him upon his third birthday by his fond but ill-requited father:—