reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine. He scarcely
ever goes out, and sees very little company. The favoured few, who have
the privilege of the _entrée_, are always admitted one by one. He does
not like to have witnesses to his conversation. He talks a great deal,
and listens to nothing but facts. When any one calls upon him, he
invites them to take a turn round his garden with him (Mr. Bentham is
an economist of his time, and sets apart this portion of it to air and
exercise)--and there you 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