"Yet there was about him a good deal of sympathy; a curious mixture, too, of what was natural and what was factitious. He had a sort of systematic plan for gaining people. I was quite surprised to find the interest he had shown towards me. The particulars did not immediately occur to my thoughts, nor did I immediately gather up the threads of them till long afterwards. He had a way of talking in fits and starts. His mind seemed always in a state of agitation with the passion of ambition and the desire of splendour. His head was not clear. He felt the want of clearness. He had had a most wretched education, and a foolish father and mother, of whose management of him he always talked with horror. When I once spoke to him of the family mausoleum he refused to show it to me; for he said it was associated with such disgraceful recollections. He took much pains to consult particular men. I remember going with him to Warwick Castle for a week. There came a man from Birmingham, a man of great eminence, whom he had sent for, to get all manner of details in relation to some branch of political economy."[1] Bentham considered him to be in politics a man in advance of his time. "He did not talk," he says, "in the pride of ancestry. What endears his memory to me is, that though ambitious of rising, he was desirous of rising by means of the people. He was really radically disposed. He had quarrelled with the Whig aristocracy, who did not do him justice; so he had a horror of the clan, and looked towards them with great bitterness of feeling. That bitterness did not break out in words, though of him they spoke most bitterly."[2]
The second Lady Shelburne did not follow the example of her predecessor in keeping a diary; but the letters of Bentham to his father to a certain extent fill the place of one, in giving a description of the daily life of the house of which Lady Shelburne was the mistress, and of the Society
