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