interested. The vagueness, the magnitude, the remoteness of the
object, the resolute sacrifice of all immediate and gross advantages,
clothe it with the privileges of an abstract idea, so that the project
has the air of a fiction or of a story in a novel. It was an instance
of what might be called posthumous avarice, like the love of posthumous
fame. It had little more to do with selfishness than if the testator
had appropriated the same sums in the same way to build a pyramid,
to construct an aqueduct, to endow a hospital, or effect any other
patriotic or merely fantastic purpose. He wished to heap up a pile of
wealth (millions of acres) in the dim horizon of future years, that
could be of no use to him or to those with whom he was connected by
positive and personal ties, but as a crotchet of the brain, a gewgaw of
the fancy.(2) Yet to enable himself to put this scheme in execution, he
had perhaps toiled and watched all his life, denied himself rest,
food, pleasure, liberty, society, and persevered with the patience and
self-denial of a martyr. I have insisted on this point the more, to show
how much of the imaginary and speculative there is interfused even in
those passions and purposes which have not the good of others for their
object, and how little reason this honest citizen and builder of castles
in the air would have had to treat those who devoted themselves to the
pursuit of fame, to obloquy and persecution for the sake of truth and
liberty, or who sacrificed their lives for their country in a just
cause, as visionaries and enthusiasts, who did not understand what was
properly due to their own interest and the securing of the main chance.
Man is not the creature of sense and selfishness, even in those pursuits
which grow out of that origin, so much as of imagination, custom,
passion, whim, and humour.

I have heard of a singular instance of a will made by a person who was
addicted to a habit of lying. He was so notorious for this propensity
(not out of spite or cunning, but as a gratuitous exercise of invention)
that from a child no one could ever believe a syllable he uttered. From
the want of any dependence to be placed on him, he became the jest and
by-word of the school where he was brought up. The last act of his
life did not disgrace him; for, having gone abroad, and falling into a
dangerous decline, he was advised to return home. He paid all that
he was worth for his passage, went on ship-board, and emplo