to take away that from one which his fortune has allotted him, and to which the public equity gives him title; and that it is against reason to abuse this liberty, in making it serve our own frivolous and private fancies.  My destiny has been kind to me in not presenting me with occasions to tempt me and divert my affection from the common and legitimate institution.  I see many with whom ’tis time lost to employ a long exercise of good offices:  a word ill taken obliterates ten years’ merit; he is happy who is in a position to oil their goodwill at this last passage.  The last action carries it, not the best and most frequent offices, but the most recent and present do the work.  These are people that play with their wills as with apples or rods, to gratify or chastise every action of those who pretend to an interest in their care.  ’Tis a thing of too great weight and consequence to be so tumbled and tossed and altered every moment, and wherein the wise determine once for all, having above all things regard to reason and the public observance.  We lay these masculine substitutions too much to heart, proposing a ridiculous eternity to our names.  We are, moreover, too superstitious in vain conjectures as to the future, that we derive from the words and actions of children.  Peradventure they might have done me an injustice, in dispossessing me of my right, for having been the most dull and heavy, the most slow and unwilling at my book, not of all my brothers only, but of all the boys in the whole province:  whether about learning my lesson, or about any bodily exercise.  ’Tis a folly to make an election out of the ordinary course upon the credit of these divinations wherein we are so often deceived.  If the ordinary rule of descent were to be violated, and the destinies corrected in the choice they have made of our heirs, one might more plausibly do it upon the account of some remarkable and enormous personal deformity, a permanent and incorrigible defect, and in the opinion of us French, who are great admirers of beauty, an important prejudice.

The pleasant dialogue betwixt Plato’s legislator and his citizens will be an ornament to this place, “What,” said they, feeling themselves about to die, “may we not dispose of our own to whom we please?  God! what cruelty that it shall not be lawful for us, according as we have been served and attended in our sickness, in our old age, in our affairs, to give more or less to those whom we have found most diligent about us, at our own fancy and discretion!” To which the legislator answers thus: 

“My friends, who are now, without question, very soon to die, it is hard for you in the condition you are, either to know yourselves, or what is yours, according to the delphic inscription.  I, who make the laws, am of opinion, that you neither are yourselves your own, nor is that yours of which you are possessed.  Both your goods and you belong to your families, as well those past as those to come;