Mr. Bentham, in private life, is an amiable and exemplary character.  He is a little romantic, or so; and has dissipated part of a handsome fortune in practical speculations.  He lends an ear to plausible projectors, and, if he cannot prove them to be wrong in their premises or their conclusions, thinks himself bound in reason to stake his money on the venture.  Strict logicians are licensed visionaries.  Mr. Bentham is half-brother to the late Mr. Speaker Abbott[A]—­Proh pudor!  He was educated at Eton, and still takes our novices to task about a passage in Homer, or a metre in Virgil.  He was afterwards at the University, and he has described the scruples of an ingenuous youthful mind about subscribing the articles, in a passage in his Church-of-Englandism, which smacks of truth and honour both, and does one good to read it in an age, when “to be honest” (or not to laugh at the very idea of honesty) “is to be one man picked out of ten thousand!” Mr. Bentham relieves his mind sometimes, after the fatigue of study, by playing on a fine old organ, and has a relish for Hogarth’s prints.  He turns wooden utensils in a lathe for exercise, and fancies he can turn men in the same manner.  He has no great fondness for poetry, and can hardly extract a moral out of Shakespear.  His house is warmed and lighted by steam.  He is one of those who prefer the artificial to the natural in most things, and think the mind of man omnipotent.  He has a great contempt for out-of-door prospects, for green fields and trees, and is for referring every thing to Utility.  There is a little narrowness in this; for if all the sources of satisfaction are taken away, what is to become of utility itself?  It is, indeed, the great fault of this able and extraordinary man, that he has concentrated his faculties and feelings too entirely on one subject and pursuit, and has not “looked enough abroad into universality."[B]

[Footnote A:  Now Lord Colchester.]

[Footnote B:  Lord Bacon’s Advancement of Learning.]

* * * * *

WILLIAM GODWIN

The Spirit of the Age was never more fully-shewn than in its treatment of this writer—­its love of paradox and change, its dastard submission to prejudice and to the fashion of the day.  Five-and-twenty years ago he was in the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity; he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off:—­now he has sunk below the horizon, and enjoys the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality.  Mr. Godwin, during his lifetime, has secured to himself the triumphs and the mortifications of an extreme notoriety and of a sort of posthumous fame.