helped to form, was Romilly's. … By Lord Mansfield I was disappointed; at Lord Shelburne's I was indemnified; at Ken Wood, I should have been mortified and disgusted; at Bowood I was caressed and delighted. … Lord Shelburne raised me from the bottomless pit of humiliation he made me feel I was something."[1]
Bentham has left an amusing account of his nervousness on arriving, of his anxiety to persuade Mr. Alexander Popham to convoy him to the house; of his attempts to get rid of the company of a chambermaid who was travelling in the same coach; and how one of his earliest exploits was to assist in carrying off to bed a drunken German servant, who at a late hour of the night had deposited his carcase in the housekeeper's room, instead of in his own.[2] At Bowood Bentham found a large society, including many of the leading men of the day; but the sketches of their characters which he has left are unfortunately too much disfigured by his own prejudices to be of much interest. They all seemed to him wanting in the great elements of statesmanship; always engaged in discussing what was; never what ought to be. A due appreciation of the Fragment on Government was at this period the one unfailing test of merit with Bentham, and it may be doubted if the favourable opinion he formed of Lord Shelburne did not as entirely depend on the approval of that work expressed by his host, as the opposite estimate he made of Dunning and Camden, to both of whom the Fragment had been attributed, was due to their neglect of it. Bentham too was very easily offended, and very suspicious. He was, for example, perpetually haunted with the idea that his friends were plotting to marry him to one of their relations. Camden seems one day to have told him in joke that he played on the violin too loud, and another day that he ate too much, and Bentham took these
- ↑ Bentham, i. 248; x. 114. Kenwood was the country seat of Lord Mansfield. The quotations which follow—except where otherwise stated—are gathered from Bentham's Works, x., edited by Sir John Bowring, who had the use of the correspondence between Bentham and Lord Lansdowne.
- ↑ Bentham, Works, x. 89, 90, 99, and C. M. Atkinson, Jeremy Bentham, ch. iii.
