omit a single circumstance or step of the argument, it would be lost to
the world for ever, like an estate by a flaw in the title-deeds. This
is over-rating the importance of our own discoveries, and mistaking the
nature and object of language altogether. Mr. Bentham has _acquired_
this disability--it is not natural to him. His admirable little work _On
Usury_, published forty years ago, is clear, easy, and vigorous. But Mr.
Bentham has shut himself up since then "in nook monastic," conversing
only with followers of his own, or with "men of Ind," and has
endeavoured to overlay his natural humour, sense, spirit, and style
with the dust and cobwebs of an obscure solitude. The best of it is, he
thinks his present mode of expressing himself perfect, and that whatever
may be objected to his law or logic, no one can find the least fault
with the purity, simplicity, and perspicuity of his style.

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