tely
defraud their sworn friends and nearest kindred of what would be of the
utmost use to them? No, they will thrust their heaps of gold and silver
into the hands of others (as their proxies) to keep for them untouched,
still increasing, still of no use to any one, but to pamper pride and
avarice, to glitter in the huge, watchful, insatiable eye of fancy, to
be deposited as a new offering at the shrine of Mammon, their God,--this
is with them to put it to its intelligible and proper use; this is
fulfilling a sacred, indispensable duty; this cheers them in the
solitude of the grave, and throws a gleam of satisfaction across the
stony eye of death. But to think of frittering it down, of sinking it
in charity, of throwing it away on the idle claims of humanity, where
it would no longer peer in monumental pomp over their heads,--and that,
too, when on the point of death themselves, _in articulo mortis,_ oh!
it would be madness, waste, extravagance, impiety!--Thus worldlings feel
and argue without knowing it; and while they fancy they are studying
their own interest or that of some booby successor, their _alter
idem,_ are but the dupes and puppets of a favourite idea, a phantom, a
prejudice, that must be kept up somewhere (no matter where), if it still
plays before and haunts their imagination, while they have sense or
understanding left to cling to their darling follies.

There was a remarkable instance of this tendency _to the heap,_ this
desire to cultivate an abstract passion for wealth, in a will of one of
the Thelussons some time back. This will went to keep the greater part
of a large property from the use of the natural heirs and next-of-kin
for a length of time, and to let it accumulate at compound interest in
such a way and so long, that it would at last mount up in value to the
purchase-money of a whole county. The interest accruing from the funded
property or the rent of the lands at certain periods was to be employed
to purchase other estates, other parks and manors in the neighbourhood
or farther off, so that the prospect of the future demesne that was to
devolve at some distant time to the unborn lord of acres swelled and
enlarged itself, like a sea, circle without circle, vista beyond vista,
till the imagination was staggered and the mind exhausted. Now here was
a scheme for the accumulation of wealth and for laying the foundation of
family aggrandisement purely imaginary, romantic--one might almost
say, dis