The Spirit of the Age eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 291 pages of information about The Spirit of the Age.

The Spirit of the Age eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 291 pages of information about The Spirit of the Age.
may see the lively old man, his mind still buoyant with thought and with the prospect of futurity, in eager conversation with some Opposition Member, some expatriated Patriot, or Transatlantic Adventurer, urging the extinction of Close Boroughs, or planning a code of laws for some “lone island in the watery waste,” his walk almost amounting to a run, his tongue keeping pace with it in shrill, cluttering accents, negligent of his person, his dress, and his manner, intent only on his grand theme of utility—­or pausing, perhaps, for want of breath and with lack-lustre eye to point out to the stranger a stone in the wall at the end of his garden (overarched by two beautiful cotton-trees) Inscribed to the Prince of Poets, which marks the house where Milton formerly lived.  To shew how little the refinements of taste or fancy enter into our author’s system, he proposed at one time to cut down these beautiful trees, to convert the garden where he had breathed the air of Truth and Heaven for near half a century into a paltry Chreistomathic School, and to make Milton’s house (the cradle of Paradise Lost) a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster to pass backwards and forwards to it with their cloven hoofs.  Let us not, however, be getting on too fast—­Milton himself taught school!  There is something not altogether dissimilar between Mr. Bentham’s appearance, and the portraits of Milton, the same silvery tone, a few dishevelled hairs, a peevish, yet puritanical expression, an irritable temperament corrected by habit and discipline.  Or in modern times, he is something between Franklin and Charles Fox, with the comfortable double-chin and sleek thriving look of the one, and the quivering lip, the restless eye, and animated acuteness of the other.  His eye is quick and lively; but it glances not from object to object, but from thought to thought.  He is evidently a man occupied with some train of fine and inward association.  He regards the people about him no more than the flies of a summer.  He meditates the coming age.  He hears and sees only what suits his purpose, or some “foregone conclusion;” and looks out for facts and passing occurrences in order to put them into his logical machinery and grind them into the dust and powder of some subtle theory, as the miller looks out for grist to his mill!  Add to this physiognomical sketch the minor points of costume, the open shirt-collar, the single-breasted coat, the old-fashioned half-boots and ribbed stockings; and you will find in Mr. Bentham’s general appearance a singular mixture of boyish simplicity and of the venerableness of age.  In a word, our celebrated jurist presents a striking illustration of the difference between the philosophical and the regal look; that is, between the merely abstracted and the merely personal.  There is a lackadaisical bonhommie about his whole aspect, none of the fierceness of pride or power; an unconscious neglect of his own
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The Spirit of the Age from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.