The life of Jeremy Bentham was peculiarly that of a student, and, consequently, in common with the lives of many others who have acquired extensive celebrity, it presents few passages of a personal kind that can be separated from the account of his studies and his publications. Bentham was the son of an eminent solicitor, resident in the city of London, and was born February 15, 1748. At an early age he was sent to Westminster School, from which he removed to Queen’s College, Oxford. Both at school and at the university he is said to have distinguished himself. At sixteen years of age he took the degree of B.A., and before he was twenty he took that of M.A. No inference, however, as to the development of his talents, or the extent of his acquirements, is to be drawn from the early age at which these degrees were obtained: for it was the common practice, until towards the end of the last century, for students to commence and terminate their studies at the universities, at a very early period of life. While at Oxford, Mr. Bentham subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, under exceedingly painful feelings of doubt respecting their interpretation. He yielded to the authority of the university, which requires that subscription from its graduates; but this compliance in opposition to his judgment was followed by a sense of bitter regret, which the lapse of time never removed. During his residence at Oxford he attended the celebrated lectures delivered by Blackstone upon the English law, and his dissent to the almost universal panegyric of the lecturer upon every part of the system of which he treated, was expressed in a work published by him soon after he left the university, entitled A Fragment upon Government. In this treatise he exposes, with great force, many of the errors that are chargeable upon the Commentaries. The style in which it is written is exceedingly correct, and, like all his earlier works, it is entirely free from those peculiar expressions which abound in the later writings of the author,—expressions which, though they have been the subject of much mirth and ridicule, favoured a precision and accuracy of thought that excuses their use. This Fragment contains the germ of his later works, and is remarkable for the mode it introduced of dealing with the science of government. It was the first philosophic attack upon many of the distinguishing characteristics of the English constitution.

After leaving Oxford, Mr. Bentham became a member of Lincoln’s Inn, and in 1772 was called to the bar. The connexions of his father afforded to him a very favourable prospect of professional advancement, which was greatly extended by his own extraordinary habits of industry. But he was repelled from the practice of the law by the moral sacrifices which he conceived it to require, and by the impossibility of combining it with speculative pursuits. He continued, however, a member of Lincoln’s Inn, of which society he became a bencher in 1817. In the year 1785 he left England for nearly three years, and, after proceeding through France and part of Italy, went on to Smyrna and Constantinople, through Bulgaria, Wallachia, and Moldavia, and joined his brother, afterwards Sir Samuel Bentham, then a lieutenant-colonel in the service of the Emperor of Russia, at Crichoff, in White Russia. At Crichoff he wrote his celebrated letters in defence of usury, which very shortly and accurately expound the principles upon which loans of money are effected, and the impolicy of laws regulating the amount of interest at which loans may be made. When these letters were published, the subject was surrounded with every kind of prejudice, and both judges of our courts of law and moral writers had treated excessive rates of interest as highly censurable and immoral. On this question however, as upon several others, Mr. Bentham preceded his age. Long before he died, his opinions upon usury were supported by the great body of mercantile men, the nature of whose business was once considered hostile to any alteration in the laws regulating rate of interest. His principles have not as yet been fully adopted by the legislature, but he lived to see several acts of parliament passed, in which they were very extensively acted upon. It was also at Crichoff that the letters which subsequently formed the greater portion of his work entitled Panopticon, proposing a systematic plan for the construction and general administration of prisons, were written. The suggestions it contained were afterwards formally submitted by him to Mr. Pitt, who readily acknowledged their importance and his willingness to carry them into effect. Difficulties, however, occurred; and though the Milbank Penitentiary was the result of Mr. Pitt’s intercourse with Mr. Bentham, its plan is very different from that which Mr. Bentham proposed; its arrangements are imperfect and have been found, as was foreseen, very inadequate for its purposes, and it was erected at a cost enormously exceeding that which would have accompanied the execution of the original design.

Mr. Bentham died at his residence in Queen Square, Westminster, June 6, 1832, at the advanced age of eighty-five. He had long been possessed of a handsome patrimony, which afforded him an income considerably exceeding his own necessities. His studies were pursued without being affected by any of the interruptions which arise, either from an insufficient income, or from the occupations or distractions which a large one invites. His habits were retiring, and the number of his intimate friends were few, but this arose from no moroseness or unkindness of disposition. “Had he engaged,” says his friend Dr. Southwood Smith, “in the active pursuits of life,—money-getting, power-acquiring pursuits,—he, like other men so engaged, must have had prejudices to humour, interests to conciliate, friends to serve, and enemies to subdue; and, therefore, like other men under the influence of such motives, must sometimes have missed the truth, and sometimes have concealed or modified it. But he placed himself above all danger of the kind, by retiring from the practice of the profession for which he had been educated, and by living in a simple manner on a small income allowed him by his father: and when, by the death of his father, he at length came to the possession of a patrimony which secured to him a moderate competence, from that moment he dismissed from his mind all further thoughts about his private fortune, and lent the whole power of his mind, without distraction, to his legislative and moral labours. Nor was he less careful to keep his benevolent affections fervent, than his understanding free from a wrong bias. He surrounded himself only with persons whose sympathies were like his own, and whose sympathies he might direct to their appropriate objects in the active pursuits of life.”

Though his frame of body was weak, he enjoyed remarkable health. For upwards of sixty years he never suffered from any serious indisposition; and at eighty, his appearance by no means indicated his advanced age. For upwards of fifty years, he devoted eight, and often ten hours, daily, to study, and he adhered with punctilious regularity, to a certain fixed distribution of his time and employments.

The works published during his life, though very numerous, formed but a small part of his manuscripts. Those that were published were chiefly edited by friends, who, in most instances, performed the task with great ability and fidelity. Some of his best treatises were published first in France, and in the French language, by his friend M. Dumont, who was also the well-known friend of Romilly and Mirabeau. Through them Mr. Bentham obtained a very extensive reputation in foreign countries, before his name was generally known in England. His admirable book upon Fallacies was also edited in a similar manner; and his masterly treatise upon the Rationale of Evidence was prepared for the press by Mr. John Mill, with more correctness, and a more careful regard for the expressions of Mr. Bentham, than most of his other works. It exhausts its subject, and most thoroughly investigates the doctrines of the English law of evidence. The leading principle which it establishes is, that objections may be made to the credibility of witnesses, but that none should be admitted to their competence. The manuscripts of Mr. Bentham were generally in a state requiring great trouble and labour to render them fit for the press. He often wrote upon the same branch of a subject at different times, adding to and repeating what he had before written. In order, therefore, to bring together all his remarks upon the same subject, much discrimination was required. The temptation to neglect the words of the author, under such circumstances, is necessarily great, and that some of his writings should be published with less attention to them than those above-mentioned, can excite no surprise. He ordered by his will, that his manuscripts should be published by his executors, and left a considerable sum of money for the purpose. One posthumous publication has already shown the difficulty that attends the fulfilment of his directions.

The chief merits of Bentham have been thus stated by Mr. Mill in the Appendix to Mr. E. L. Bulwer’s work, entitled England and the English, in the following words:—“Mr. Bentham, unlike Bacon, did not merely prophesy a science; he made large strides towards the creation of one. He was the first who conceived, with anything approaching to precision, the idea of a Code, or complete body of law; and the distinctive characters of its essential parts,—the Civil Law, the Penal Law, and the Law of Procedure. On the first of these three departments, he rendered valuable service; the third, he actually created. Conformably to the habits of his mind, he set about investigating, ab initio, a philosophy, or science, for each of the three branches. He did, with the received principles of each, what a good code would do with the laws themselves;—extirpating the bad; substituting others; re-enacting the good, but in so much clearer and more methodical a form, that those who were most familiar with them before, scarcely recognised them as the same. Even upon old truths, when they pass through his hands, he leaves so many of his marks, that often he almost seems to claim the discovery of what he only systematized.

“In erecting the philosophy of the civil law, he proceeded not much beyond establishing upon its proper basis some of its most general principles, and cursorily discussing some of the most interesting of its details. Nearly the whole of what he has published upon this branch of the law is contained in the TraitÉs de LÉgislation, edited by M. Dumont. To the most difficult part, and that which needed a master-hand to clear away its difficulties, the nomenclature and arrangement of the civil code, he contributed little, except detailed observations and criticisms upon the errors of his predecessors. The “Vue GÉnÉrale d’un corps complet de LÉgislation,” included in the work just cited, contains almost all that he has given to us upon this subject. In the department of the penal law, he is the author of the best attempt yet made towards a philosophical classification of offences. The theory of punishments (for which, however, more had been done by his predecessors than for any other part of the science of law), he left nearly complete. The theory of procedure (including that of the constitution of the courts of justice), he found in a more utterly barbarous state than even either of the other branches; and he left it incomparably the most perfect. There is scarcely a question of practical importance in the most important department which he has not settled. He has left next to nothing for his successors.”

His work on Judicial Establishments, is one of the best and the most important of those he published; and it will afford the great tests that must hereafter be applied to ascertain the progress of principles which he first expounded. His labours were so much a series of attacks upon the faults of existing institutions, accompanied at the same time with the specific reforms that should follow their correction, and related to matters generally so far removed from the studies of the great body of readers, that they could not be expected to obtain, for many years, that popularity for their writer which he deserved. It is, however, not difficult already to trace the progress of opinions which he was the first to advance, and we may already observe changes suggested and adopted by the legislature, which he many years since proposed. The same reasons which have secured to Bacon a reputation upon questions of physical science, which his contemporaries refused to award to him, will, in legislative science, secure a similar reputation to Bentham. The talents of the latter will appear not less important than those of the former, when their effects shall, in the progress of time, be traced upon the opinions and the institutions of the people of this and of other countries.