There is, I believe, a certain school of economic reformers who would wholly abolish the prerogative of Will-making, and would decree that whatever a man leaves behind him should pass automatically to his children, or, failing them, to the State. On the social and fiscal results of such a system I forbear to speculate; but, as a sincere friend to Literature in all its branches, I would ask, if that were law, what would become of the Novelists and the Playwrights? The law of Stageland has been codified for us by the laborious care of Mr. Jerome K. Jerome, and among its best-established principles seem to be these: If a man dies without leaving a will, then all his property goes to the nearest villain; but, if a man dies and leaves a will, then all his property goes to whoever can get possession of that will. Here are the raw materials of dramatic litigation enough to hold the Stage for a century; and ill would it fare with the embarrassed playwright if a mechanical process of law were substituted for the strange possibilities of Will-making, with its startling caprices, its incalculable miscarriages, and its eventual triumph of injured innocence. Then again, as to Fiction. Foul fall the day when our fiction-writers shall be unable to traffic any longer in testamentary mystification. How would their predecessors have fared if they had laboured under such a disability? I am by nature too cautious to "intromit with" the mysteries of Scotch law, and in the romances of the beloved Sir Walter the complications of Entail and of Will-making are curiously intertwined. Certainly it was under the provisions of an entail that Harry Bertram recovered the estates of Ellangowan, and I am inclined to think that it was an Entail which prompted the Countess of Glenallan to her hideous crime; but it was by will that Miss Margaret Bertram devised the lands of Singleside, and it was under old Sir Hildebrand's will that Francis Osbaldistone succeeded to Osbaldistone Hall.