Jeremy Bentham died in 1832. He was an English jurist, philosopher and writer of great ability. In his latter years he desired that his preserved figure might be placed in a chair at the banquet-table of his friends and disciples when they met on any great occasions of philosophy and philanthropy. He died, and his wish was carefully carried out by his favorite disciple, the late Dr. Southwood Smith, to whom he bequeathed his body in his will. Dressed in his usual clothes, wearing a gray broad-brimmed hat, and with his old hazel walking-stick, called Dapple (after a favorite old horse), the farmer-like figure of the benevolent philosopher sat in a large armchair, with a smiling, fresh-colored countenance, locked up in a mahogany case with a plate-glass front. This was his actual body preserved by some scientific process. A French artist made a wax mask. The real face was underneath it.
The body of Bentham was some years ago removed to University College, and placed in an out-of-the-way corner, and “Old Bentham” was the subject of frequent jokes among the more thoughtless of the students.
This is what Dr. Southwood Smith says on the subject:
“Jeremy Bentham,” writes Dr. Southwood Smith, “left by will his body to me for dissection. I was also to deliver a public lecture over it to medical students and the public generally. The latter I did at Well Street School. After the usual anatomical demonstration a skeleton was made of the bones. I endeavoured to preserve the head untouched, merely drawing away the fluids by placing it under an air-pump over sulphuric acid. By this means the head was rendered as hard as the skulls of the New Zealanders, but all expression was gone, of course. Seeing this would not do for exhibition, I had a model made in wax by a distinguished French artist. I then had the skeleton stuffed out to fit Bentham’s own clothes, and this wax likeness fitted to the trunk. The whole was then enclosed in a mahogany case with folding glass doors, seated in his armchair, and holding in his hand his favourite walking-stick, and for some years it remained in a room of my house in Finsbury Square. But I ultimately gave it to University College, where it now is.”
A Capricious Bequest of Sixpences
A curious custom has existed from time almost immemorial at St. Bartholomew’s the Great, Smithfield, in the churchyard, which is the oldest in the city. Its anniversary is Good Friday, on which day the incumbent is enjoined, by the will of a lady who left a foundation for the purpose, to lay down twenty-one sixpences in a row on a particular gravestone, whence they are to be picked up by as many widows, kneeling, having first attended a sermon which is to be preached on the occasion.
Letters and Portraits in her Coffin
Many persons have a singular mode of disposing of objects for which they have too great a regard to destroy, or even order them after their death to be destroyed, and as a sort of half-measure, desire that they may be buried with them. Not long since a lady died, who being fondly attached to a brother she had lost, had his portrait, in a ponderous gilt frame (which she always carried about with her when she travelled), placed in her coffin at her death.
Actuated by a similar sentiment, Mrs. Anna Margaret Birkbeck, of Inverness Terrace (who died July 2, 1877, and whose will and two codicils, dated January, 1868, were proved on 29th of July, 1877), directs that the letters of her late daughters, of her late son, and of her late husband, both before and after her marriage, be buried with her.
Will of L. Cortusio, Jurisconsultus of Padua