THE life of Jeremy Bentham was peculiarly that of a student, and, consequently, in common with the lives of many others who have acquired extensive celebrity, it presents few passages of a personal kind that can be separated from the account of his studies and his publications. Bentham was the son of an eminent solicitor, resident in the city of London, and was born February 15, 1748. At an early age he was sent to Westminster School, from which he removed to Queen's College, Oxford. Both at school and at the university he is said to have distinguished himself. At sixteen years of age he took the degree of B.A., and before he was twenty he took that of M.A. No inference, however, as to the development of his

talents, or the extent of his acquirements, is to be drawn from the early age at which these degrees were obtained for it was the common practice, until towards the end of the last century, for students to commence and terminate their studies at the universities at a very early period of life. While at

Oxford, Mr. Bentham subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, under exceedingly painful feelings of doubt respecting their interpretation. He yielded to the authority of the university, which requires that subscription from its graduates; but this compliance in opposition to his judgment was followed by a sense of bitter regret, which the lapse of time never removed. During his residence at Oxford, he attended the celebrated lectures delivered by Blackstone upon the English law, and his dissent to the almost universal panegyric of the lecturer upon every part of the system of which he treated, was expressed in a work published by him soon after he left the university, entitled A Fragment upon Government. In this treatise he exposes, with great force, many of the errors that are chargeable upon the Commentaries. The style in which it is written is exceedingly correct, and, like all his earlier works, it is entirely free from those peculiar expressions which abound in the later writings of the author, expressions which, though they have been the subject of much mirth and ridicule, favoured a precision and accuracy of thought that excuses their use. This Fragment contains the germ of his later works, and is remarkable for the mode it introduced of dealing with the science of government. It was the first philosophic attack upon many of the distinguishing characteristics of the English constitution.

After leaving Oxford, Mr. Bentham became a member of Lincoln's Inn, and in 1772 was called

to the bar. The connexions of his father afforded to him a very favourable prospect of professional advancement, which was greatly extended by his own extraordinary habits of industry. But he was repelled from the practice of the law by the moral sacrifices which he conceived it to require, and by the impossibility of combining it with speculative pursuits. He continued, however, a member of Lincoln's Inn, of which society he became a bencher in 1817. In the year 1785 he left England for nearly three years, and, after proceeding through France and part of Italy, went on to Smyrna and Constantinople, through Bulgaria, Wallachia, and Moldavia, and joined his brother, afterwards Sir Samuel Bentham, then a lieutenant-colonel in the service of the Emperor of Russia, at Crichoff, in White Russia. At Crichoff he wrote his celebrated letters in defence of usury, which very shortly and accurately expound the principles upon which loans of money are effected, and the impolicy of laws regulating the amount of interest at which loans may be made. When these letters were published, the subject was surrounded with every kind of prejudice, and both judges of our courts of law and moral writers had treated excessive rates of interest as highly censurable and immoral. On this question, however, as upon several others, Mr. Bentham preceded his age. Long before he died, his opinions upon usury were supported by the great body of mercantile men, the nature of whose business was once considered hostile to any alteration in the laws regulating rate of interest. His principles have not as yet been fully adopted by the legislature, but he lived to see several acts of parliament passed, in which they were very extensively acted upon. It was also at Crichoff that the letters which subsequently formed the greater portion of his work en

titled Panopticon, proposing a systematic plan for the construction and general administration of prisons, were written. The suggestions it contained were afterwards formally submitted by him to Mr. Pitt, who readily acknowledged their importance and his willingness to carry them into effect. Difficulties, however, occurred; and, though the Milbank Penitentiary was the result of Mr. Pitt's intercourse with Mr. Bentham, its plan is very different from that which Mr. Bentham proposed; its arrangements are imperfect, and have been found, as was foreseen, very inadequate for its purposes, and it was erected at a cost enormously exceeding that which would have accompanied the execution of the original design.

Mr. Bentham died at his residence in Queen Square, Westminster, June 6, 1832, at the advanced age of eighty-five. He had long been possessed of a handsome patrimony, which afforded him an income considerably exceeding his own necessities. His studies were pursued without being affected by any of the interruptions which arise, either from an insufficient income, or from the occupations or distractions which a large one invites. His habits were retiring, and the number of his intimate friends were few, but this arose from no moroseness or unkindness of disposition. "Had he engaged," says his friend Dr. Southwood Smith, "in the active pursuits of life-moneygetting, power-acquiring pursuits,-he, like other men so engaged, must have had prejudices to humour, interests to conciliate, friends to serve, and enemies to subdue; and, therefore, like other men under the influence of such motives, must sometimes have missed the truth, and sometimes have concealed or modified it. But he placed himself above all danger of the kind, by retiring from the practice of the profession for which he had been educated, and by living in a simple manner on a small income allowed him

by his father and when, by the death of his father, he at length came to the possession of a patrimony which secured to him a moderate competence, from that moment he dismissed from his mind all further thoughts about his private fortune, and lent the whole powers of his mind, without distraction, to his legislative and moral labours. Nor was he less careful to keep his benevolent affections fervent, than his understanding free from a wrong bias. He surrounded himself only with persons whose sympathies were like his own, and whose sympathies he might direct to their appropriate objects in the active pursuits of life."

Though his frame of body was weak, he enjoyed remarkable health. For upwards of sixty years he never suffered from any serious indisposition; and at eighty, his appearance by no means indicated his advanced age. For upwards of fifty years he devoted eight, and often ten hours, daily, to study, and he adhered with punctilious regularity to a certain fixed distribution of his time and employments.

The works published during his life, though very numerous, formed but a small part of his manuscripts. Those that were published were chiefly edited by friends, who, in most instances, performed the task with great ability and fidelity. Some of his best treatises were published first in France, and in the French language, by his friend M. Dumont, who was also the well-known friend of Romilly and Mirabeau. Through them Mr. Bentham obtained a very extensive reputation in foreign countries before his name was generally known in England. His admirable book upon Fallacies was also edited in a similar manner; and his masterly treatise upon the Rationale of Evidence was prepared for the press by Mr. John Mill, with more correctness, and a more careful regard for the expressions of Mr. Bentham,