Mrs. Craigie’s, Mrs. Dudeney’s, and Mrs. Barclay’s imaginary wills are no less binding and coercive than many real wills seek to be. Conditional legacies are indeed become a byword, and are often of a difficult, not to say preposterous, nature. G. K. Chesterton in “Orthodoxy” has a fanciful but suggestive passage, in which he conceives of life itself as so strange a legacy that man must not gape or wonder if the conditions too are strange. “If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. He must not look a winged horse in the mouth.” Legally, it may be of interest to note in passing, a devise of property on an impossible condition will not take effect. If a man is to inherit lands on condition that he goes from Britain to Rome in an hour, he will not (until flying-machines are more perfect) ever succeed to the lands. Such provisions are stock material in the drama, from Shakespeare to “The New Sin.” “So is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father,” sighs Portia in “The Merchant of Venice.” Lesser comedy and melodrama are much indebted to conditional wills. To take two recent examples: In “The Pin and the Pudding” the rich uncle of the poor hero Malkin leaves him his riches—on condition that he has never been in prison: whereby hangs the tale. In “The Beggar Girl’s Wedding” Jack Cunningham only inherits his father’s fortune if he is married by the time he is twenty-five: whence a thrilling plot develops. But to study real life. A legacy of £20,000 was left recently by a father to a son if, within ten years of the testator’s death, he should have returned to the religious faith in which he was brought up. The difference between the two sects appeared to be slight, but the legacy was under such conditions intolerable. Another strange distinction or definition is that of “member of the Anglican Catholic Church,” as opposed to “member of the Evangelical Protestant Church”: but recently a testator stipulated that no one should take a benefit who deserved the former appellation.