"Ah," said Mrs. Wheeler, a strong-minded, clever woman, the Mary Wollstonecraft of her day, on hearing that I had been asked to the "Hermitage" of Queen-Square Place by Mr. Bentham,—"Ah, you have no idea of what is before you! I wonder you are not afraid."

"Afraid, my dear Madam! Of what should I be afraid?"

"Afraid of being left alone with him after dinner. He cannot bear contradiction. The queerest old man alive. One of his most intimate friends told me that he was undoubtedly deranged, mad as a March hare upon some subjects, and a monomaniac upon others. Do you know that he keeps a relay of young men, thoroughly trained for the work, to follow him round all day and pick up his droppings,—or what his followers call 'sibylline leaves,'—bits of paper, that is, written all over with cabalistic signs, which no mortal could ever hope to decipher without a long apprenticeship? These 'leaves' he scatters round him right and left, while on the trot through his large, beautiful garden, or, if in the house, while taking his 'post-prandial' vibration,—the after-dinner walk through a narrow passageway running between a raised platform in what he calls his 'workshop,' and the outer partition. Here he labors day after day, and year after year, at codification, without stopping to draw a long breath, or even to look up, so afraid is he of what may happen to the world, if he should be taken away before it is all finished. And here, on this platform, the table for one guest, two secretaries, and himself is always set, and he never has more than one guest at a time."

Extravagant and laughable as all this appeared to me at the time, I found truth enough at the bottom, before six months were over, to justify many of the drollest caricatures.

That Mr. Bentham's minutes were drops of gold about this time, and his half-hours ingots, in the estimation of others, I had reason to know,—of others, too, among the foremost celebrities of the age. Hence, though he gave capital dinners, it was one of the rarest things in the world for a stranger to be seen at his table. The curious and the inquisitive stood no chance; and men of the highest rank were constantly refused the introductions they sought.

"Anne, if the Duke of Sussex calls, I am not at home," said he one day to his housekeeper: nobody ever knew why.

And there were hundreds of distinguished men, otherwise well-informed, who believed in Jeremy Bentham, afar off, somewhat as others do in the heroes of Ossian, or in their great Scandinavian prototypes, Woden and Thor. If to be met with at all, it was only along the tops of mountains, where "mist and moonlight mingle fitfully."

For myself, I can truly say, that, of those I met with, who talked most freely about him, and who wrote as if well acquainted, not only with his works, but with the man himself, there was not one in fifty who had ever set eyes on him or knew where to look for the "Hermitage," while the fiftieth could not tell me whether he was an Englishman or Frenchman by birth, (most of his writings on jurisprudence being written by him in French,) nor whether he was living or dead.

Nevertheless, they were full of anecdotes. They went with the scoffers, and quoted Sydney Smith and "Blackwood," while "the world's dread laugh" made them shy of committing themselves to any decided opinion. But if Bentham was a myth, surely Dumont was not, and the shadow might well be allowed to prove the substance; and yet they persisted in believing the most extravagant inventions, and the drollest, without investigation or misgiving.

And even I,—I, myself,—though familiar with his works, both in French and English, was so much influenced by the mystery about him, and by the stories I heard of him, and by the flings I saw in the leading journals, that I was betrayed into writing as follows in "Blackwood," about a year before I first met Mr. Bentham, notwithstanding my profound convictions of his worth and greatness, and my fixed belief that he was cruelly misunderstood and shamefully misrepresented, and that his "Morals and Legislation" and his "Theory of Rewards and Punishments" would change the jurisprudence of the world, as they certainly have done:—