PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

I HAVE endeavoured in this edition to make the work more complete by adding chapters on the execution of wills and other cognate subjects. A short chapter has also been added on the powers which it is usual to confer upon the trustees of wills. I have done my best to correct the mistakes and supply the omissions of the first edition. With the exception of some small matters of detail, the arrangement remains unaltered. The cases will be found brought down to May, 1881. References to some cases which were reported too late to be inserted in the text have been added in the Index. My best thanks are due to my friend Mr. J. F. H. Bethell of Lincoln's Inn for many useful suggestions.

33, CHANCERY LANE,

July, 1881.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

THE fact that the last comprehensive treatise on the Construction of Wills is now fifteen years old, might alone be a sufficient justification of a new work on the subject. Whether it is a sufficient justification of the work now offered to the profession, experience alone can show. My object has been to produce something more compendious than Jarman's classical work—the scheme of which, involving the statement of cases at length, would now be very cumbersome, in consequence of the large accumulation of cases since the last edition of his work; and on the other hand, something more detailed and elaborate than Mr. Vaughan Hawkins' useful little book. I may say at once that without Jarman's book, my own would probably never have been written. But I have throughout used his work rather as a guide than a key to the authorities. In details I have consulted Mr. Vaughan Hawkins only incidentally, though the general scheme of his book has served in the main as the model for my own.

The value of authority in questions of testamentary construction has so frequently been called in question

of late, that it may perhaps be allowable to say a few words as to the point of view from which the present work has been written.

No two wills are alike, it is said; it is therefore useless to cite a decision upon one will as governing the interpretation of another; one man's "nonsense affords no clue to the meaning of another man's "nonsense."

Such expressions as these are very natural, and as a protest against hard and fast rules of construction, very valuable. The stream of English law is so continuous, and the mass of reported decisions so enormous, that very few points arise in practice upon which it is not possible to cite some more or less appropriate authority. Counsel, in their anxiety to omit nothing which may support their client's interests, overlay their argument with cases, the majority of which have no more than a superficial resemblance to the point in question. It is no wonder that judges, wearied with the citation of irrelevant cases, have sometimes gone so far as to object to the citation of cases upon the construction of wills altogether. And often the argument from authority is carried further. It is contended that there is some hard and fast rule which is to be applied regardless of the words of the will and the intention of the testator. The assumption of rules of construction in this sense is an almost unmixed evil. It tends to divorce law from common sense, and to reduce it to a set of technicalities which none but the initiated can understand. Unfortunately this point of view has not been without its influence upon English law. The