in part, and afterwards in all its integrity. The influence
of the Church had much to do with this rapid assimilation. The
ecclesiastical power had very early succeeded to those privileges of
custody and registration of Testaments which several of the heathen
temples had enjoyed; and even thus early it was almost exclusively to
private bequests that the religious foundations owed their temporal
possessions. Hence it is that the decrees of the earliest Provincial
Councils perpetually contain anathemas against those who deny the
sanctity of Wills. Here, in England, Church influence was certainly
chief among the causes which by universal acknowledgment have
prevented that discontinuity in the history of Testamentary Law, which
is sometimes believed to exist in the history of other provinces of
Jurisprudence. The jurisdiction over one class of Wills was delegated
to the Ecclesiastical Courts, which applied to them, though not always
intelligently, the principles of Roman jurisprudence; and, though
neither the courts of Common Law nor the Court of Chancery owned any
positive obligation to follow the Ecclesiastical tribunals, they could
not escape the potent influence of a system of settled rules in course
of application by their side. The English law of testamentary
succession to personalty has become a modified form of the
dispensation under which the inheritances of Roman citizens were
administered.

It is not difficult to point out the extreme difference of the
conclusions forced on us by the historical treatment of the subject
from those to which we are conducted when, without the help of
history, we merely strive to analyse our _prima facie_ impressions. I
suppose there is nobody who, starting from the popular or even the
legal conception of a Will, would not imagine that certain qualities
are necessarily attached to it. He would say, for example, that a Will
necessarily takes effect _at death only_--that it is _secret_, not
known as a matter of course to persons taking interests under its
provisions--that it is _revocable_, _i.e._ always capable of being
superseded by a new act of testation. Yet I shall be able to show
that there was a time when none of these characteristics belonged to a
Will. The Testaments from which our Wills are directly descended at
first took effect immediately on their execution; they were not
secret; they were not revocable. Few legal agencies are, in fact, the
fruit of more complex historica