Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 2).djvu/351

Rh story proceeds, went over to a farmhouse called Pinhills near Calne, and there succeeded in persuading a female farm servant to allow herself to be vaccinated. This servant used to relate how her friends expected her to have swollen suddenly or fallen down dead, as a punishment for trusting herself to the experiments of the strange foreigner. None of these fatal consequences however ensued; the farm servant lived to a very advanced old age; the experiment succeeded, and the success of vaccination was assured. Such is the story. .

Ingenhousz died at Bowood. He was going to leave it for fear of giving trouble in his last illness. Lord Lansdowne said he should not end his days in an inn, and induced him to stay.

The figure however which is most indissolubly connected with Bowood at the end of the last century is that of Jeremy Bentham. Four years after the publication of the Fragment on Government, Shelburne happened to read the work and determined to make the acquaintance of the author, and in July 1780 called on him in his chambers in Lincoln's Inn. "The visit to Lincoln's Inn produced one to Shelburne House, and that one of some weeks to Bowood." The acquaintance thus formed soon ripened into friendship, and Bentham became an almost constant inmate of Bowood. "Of esteem not to speak of affection," he says, "marks more unequivocal one man could not receive from another, than, in the course of about twelve years, I received from Lord Shelburne. Though not its existence, my attachment to the great cause of mankind received its first development in the affections I found in that heart, and the company I found in that house. Amongst the friendships it gave me, was Dumont's; one that it