158 MEMOIR OF DR WRIGHT. 



fortune had been acquired. The ordinary laws of na- 

 ture appeared, in the case of Dr Garthshore, to 

 have been completely inverted. He had survived all 

 his descendants, and through them had succeeded to a 

 princely inheritance. It was a case, therefore, which 

 required a deviation from the legal order of succession ; 

 and Dr Garthshore appears to have acted under a 

 becoming sense of moral duty, in causing a part of the 

 golden tide to revert to the source from which it had 

 originally flowed. It was a case, too, in which no one 

 could be said to have been injured, if Dr Wright 

 had permitted his friend to insert a legacy in his own 

 favour ; but, under the peculiar circumstances in which 

 he found himself placed, as the original proposer of the 

 measure, he felt that, by compliance with the wishes of 

 Dr Garthshore, he might subject his own high cha- 

 racter to misconstruction ; so that he thought himself 

 called upon- to use his influence with his friend, to ex- 

 punge his own name, with a bequest of L. 5000, from 

 the instructions which Dr Garthshore had prepared 

 for the use of his solicitor in framing his testamentary 

 disposition. 



Dr Garthshore appears to have postponed the exe- 

 cution of his purpose until he saw that it would be fi- 

 nally defeated by longer delay. His mind and that of 

 his friend were very differently constituted ; and it is 

 probable that, in place of lengthening his life, as, 

 judging from his own feelings, Dr Wright had pre- 

 dicted, the discharge of this last duty had relaxed the 

 tension of the cords which supported his existence, and 

 he felt that to live longer would be but to survive his 



