Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/519

 15. DILLON: INFLUENCE OF BENT HAM 505 a benefactor of his race, while in reality he was passing his life uselessly in Utopia. ^ It does not essentially detract from Bentham's merits, or the regard in which posterity should hold him, that he ex- aggerated, as he doubtless did, the absurdities and defects of the system that he assailed, or that his invectives against lawyers, who as a body supported it and resisted all attempts to reform it, were extravagant and unjust. All this may well be pardoned to his honest convictions, to his lifelong labors and his disinterested zeal for the public good. Nor does it essentially detract from his just estimation that he is an illustration of Bacon's observation that " there is a super- " stition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best " if they go farthest from the superstition formerly received." Nor does it materially diminish his fame that we cannot ac- cept all of his doctrines as sound, or all of his conclusions from doctrines whose general soundness are no longer ques- tioned. The following which I give in John Stuart Mill's own words, seems to me to set forth with judicial fairness Ben- tham's chief merits and the nature of the obligations of the world to him : — " Bentham," he says, " is one of the great seminal minds he made in 1817 to Bentham: — " Our last visit was to my old and most valuable friend, Jeremy Ben- tham, at Ford Abbey. The grandeur and stateliness of the buildings form as strange a contrast to his philosophy, as the number and spa- ciousness of the apartments, the hall, the chapel, the corridors, and the cloisters, do to the modesty and scantiness of his domestic establishment. The society we found and left with him were Mill and his family and a Mr. Place, — the Charing Cross radical tailor. We found Bentham pass- ing his time, as he has always been passing it since I have known him, " — which is now more than thirty years, — closely applying himself six or eight hours a day in writing upon laws and legislation and in compiling his Civil and Criminal Codes, and spending the remaining hours of every day in reading, or taking exercise by way of fitting himself for his labors, or, to use his own strangely-invented phraseology, taking ante-jentacular and post-prandial walks to prepare himself for his task of codification. There is something burlesque enough in this language; but it is impossible to know Bentham, and to have witnessed his benevo- lence, his disinterestedness, and the zeal with which he has devoted his whole life to the service of his fellow-creatures, without admiring and revering him." Life of Sir Samuel Romilly, edited by his sons, vol. ii., p. 473 (3d ed. Diary, under date September, 1817).
 * Sir Samuel Romilly gives this interesting account of a visit which