To Dives, after a life of accretion, the prospect of frittering his wealth into fragments must be painful. Heirs will waste what he toiled to win. That fortune which grew so great while he rolled it on turns out, after all, but a snowball, to be broken apart and trampled by careless spoilers when he is gone. There are, to be sure, hard-headed philosophers who contemplate coolly the dispersion of their hoard. I remember from boyhood that when somebody rallied Squire Anthony Briggs, of Milldale, on his veteran vigilance in money-getting, saying, "Your children will spend as fast as you have made it," stanch old Tony answered: "If they get as much pleasure from spending my money as I have in making it, they are welcome." But with prodigious fortunes like Astor's and Vanderbilt's, the instinct of accumulation which increases what is already preposterously great may struggle to keep it accumulating after death. When Bishop Timothy sonorously declares from the desk that we brought nothing into this world, neither may we carry anything out, Croesus in the pew below takes this as a very solemn warning to him--warning to secure betimes the utmost posthumous control of his money that the laws allow. Dombey's soul is not wrapt up in the miser's clutching love of money, but in the money-getting institution of Dombey & Son; and not only in the Dombey & Son of to-day, but the Dombeys & Sons of centuries hence. To found a dry-goods dynasty, a line of railway kings, a house of landed Astors, its owner puts the bulk of his vast wealth into a single hand--in that _exegi monumentum_ spirit common to bard and broker, soldier and salesman. _Non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam_, the millionaire may then triumphantly say. On the other hand, the Cornells and Licks of our day, wonderfully numerous, have made America renowned by their public uses of wealth, either in lifetime gift or testamentary bequest; and this devotion of private fortune to the common weal is fostered by the observed independence of each generation in pursuing its own mode of life without regard to the customs of ancestors.