The Law as Treated in Fiction. legal pitfallsd.isGlazier to advise with4 aBurr. lawyer. 2Goodright v. Glazier, 2512. Are such means worth the trying? They were tried, to the knowledge of the public, in two books, Sir Edward Bulwer's Night and Morning, and George Eliot's Felix Holt. Each, in matters of law, is founded upon a rock. On the other hand, one might fill a library with fiction in which this or that assumption has been made, so utterly at variance with the actual state of the law that the mistake could not have passed any lawyer's censorship. George Eliot, for example, seems to have abandoned the Felix Holt plan when she came to write Middlemarch. Recall, if you please, the death scene of the miserly Featherstone. Having made two wills, the second purport ing to revoke the first, he has preserved both documents, and on his death-night commands Mary Garth, who attends him, to destroy the second in order that the first may revive. Mary Garth refuses, and the second will takes effect. Mary Garth feels, vaguely, that she has wronged those who would have taken under the first will; but her disquiet is smoothed away by assurances, coming from lawyers, that that will could in no event have been validated by her tearing up the other. The lawyers' reason was presumably that the first will was, by the making of the second, absolutely re voked, — dead forever. Such was the Eng lish rule when Middlemarch was written.' The law up to the Wills Act of 1837, how ever, was just the other way/ and it is that law that is important, for, by the story, Featherstone's death came before the Reform Bill of. 1832 was passed. Mary Garth's infor mant, therefore, showed the traits rather of a prophet than of a lawyer. That she may later hear the law correctly stated and begin to suffer anew is naturally a source of pres1 Stat. 7 Wm. IV. and I Vict. c. 26, § 22.
365
ent anxiety in the reader; and this result, from a literary point of view, is unfortunate. In Peregrine Pickle there is a mistake. When Peregrine's father disappointed Pere grine's mother by dying without a will, Peregrine, their first born, inherited, it is said, all his father's estate of eighty thou sand pounds. Since this eighty thousand pounds was all personal property, it should by the English law have gone a very dif ferent way, — one-third to the contriving mother, and of the remainder equal portions to the children,3 who were three, counting Peregrine. So that of the fortune he cast into the lap of Emilia, his bride, but twoninths were lawfully his to cast. An excellent example of a legal diff1culty entirely overlooked is a short story pub lished last year in a collection called A House Party. Artemisia 's Mirror is the name of the story, which, dismantled of much of the incident which makes it de lightful, is this. Artemisia's grandfather, when young, had owned a great patroon estate in New York. A fire burned the mansion, Grandsir's title-deeds were lost, and Grandsir, lacking proof of his right, was turned out by his brother, who claimed by descent. He saved from the fire and from his brother a single heirloom, an antique Italian mirror. When he died, long after ward, with no one left to him but Artemisia, this mirror was in his hands. It fell to the floor. The glass broke, and out from be hind tumbled the lost title-deeds. " Safe, these fifty years, lay Artemisia's fortune," cries the writer. Enthusiasm has led him astray. True, the deeds showed that Grandsir when he was turned out really owned the property, but in the long meantime the grasping brother had held adverse posses sion, the first twenty years of which, by 3 Lovelass Disposal of a Person's Property who dies without Will or Testament, 12th ed., p. 137.
