The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits | Page 2

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 person,
instead of a stately assumption of superiority; a good-humoured, placid
intelligence, instead of a lynx-eyed watchfulness, as if it wished to
make others its prey, or was afraid they might turn and rend him; he is
a beneficent spirit, prying into the universe, not lording it over it; a
thoughtful spectator of the scenes of life, or ruminator on the fate of
mankind, not a painted pageant, a stupid idol set up on its pedestal of
pride for men to fall down and worship with idiot fear and wonder at
the thing themselves have made, and which, without that fear and
wonder, would in itself be nothing!
Mr. Bentham, perhaps, over-rates the importance of his own theories.
He has been heard to say (without any appearance of pride or
affectation) that "he should like to live the remaining years of his life, a
year at a time at the end of the next six or eight centuries, to see the
effect which his writings would by that time have had upon the world."
Alas! his name will hardly live so long! Nor do we think, in point of
fact, that Mr. Bentham has given any new or decided impulse to the
human mind. He cannot be looked upon in the light of a discoverer in
legislation or morals. He has not struck out any great leading principle
or parent-truth, from which a number of others might be deduced; nor
has he enriched the common and established stock of intelligence with
original observations, like pearls thrown into wine. One truth
discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so: for, like a new
substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed. But Mr. Bentham's forte is
arrangement; and the form of truth, though not its essence, varies with
time and circumstance. He has methodised, collated, and condensed all
the materials prepared to his hand on the subjects of which he treats, in
a masterly and scientific manner; but we should find a difficulty in
adducing from his different works (however elaborate or closely
reasoned) any new element of thought, or even a new fact or illustration.
His writings are, therefore, chiefly valuable as books of reference, as
bringing down the account of intellectual inquiry to the present period,
and disposing the results in a compendious, connected, and tangible
shape; but books of reference are chiefly