Chapter V: Part 5

Some notion may be formed of the impulse which Brindley’s energy and skill gave to the system of internal navigation, when it is stated that during the few years which elapsed between the completion of the Bridgewater Canal, and his death in 1772, he was engaged in at least eighteen different projects for cutting canals, or for improving rivers, without including those we have already mentioned. The mere names of these would be matter of little interest; they may be seen in the Biographia Britannica. Nor shall we now be expected to dwell on the unprecedented increase of trade and manufactures during the last century, and to point out how closely this is connected with our great facilities of internal communication. One thing, however, is too remarkable to be passed over: it was as nearly as possible at the same time that Watt, Arkwright, and Brindley, were effecting, each in his own department, those wonderful improvements in mechanical science, which conjointly have given such vast extent and importance to all branches of our manufactures, and which singly would have been, as it were, each of them crippled and imperfect. Of Brindley’s private history, scarcely any particulars are preserved. The following account of his character is stated by Dr. Kippis to proceed from the pen of Mr. Bentley, a partner in the celebrated house of Wedgwood, who knew him well:—

“When any extraordinary difficulty occurred to Mr. Brindley in the execution of his works, having little or no assistance from books, or the labours of other men, his resources lay within himself. In order therefore to be quiet and uninterrupted, whilst he was in search of the necessary expedients, he generally retired to his bed; and he has been known to lie there one, two, or three days, till he had attained the object in view. He then would get up, and execute his design without any drawing or model. Indeed, it never was his custom to make either, unless he was obliged to do it to satisfy his employers. His memory was so remarkable, that he has often declared that he could remember and execute all the parts of the most complex machine, provided he had time, in his survey of it, to settle in his mind the several departments, and their relation to each other. His method of calculating the powers of any machine invented by him was peculiar to himself. He worked the question for some time in his head, and then put down the results in figures; after this, taking it up again in that stage, he worked it further in his mind for a certain time, and set down the results as before. In the same way, he still proceeded, making use of figures only at stated periods of the question. Yet the ultimate result was generally true, though the road he travelled in search of it was unknown to all but himself; and, perhaps, it would not have been in his power to have shown it to another.

“The attention which was paid by Mr. Brindley to objects of peculiar magnitude did not permit him to indulge himself in the common diversions of life. Indeed, he had not the least relish for the amusements to which mankind in general are so much devoted. He never seemed in his element, if he was not either planning or executing some great work, or conversing with his friends upon subjects of importance. He was once prevailed upon, when in London, to see a play. Having never been at an entertainment of this kind before, it had a powerful effect upon him, and he complained for several days afterwards, that it had disturbed his ideas, and rendered him unfit for business. He declared, therefore, that he would not go to another play upon any account. It might, however, have contributed to the longer duration of Mr. Brindley’s life, and consequently to the further benefit of the public, if he could have occasionally relaxed the tone of his mind. His not being able to do so, might not solely arise from the vigour of his genius, always bent upon capital designs; but be, in part, the result of that total want of education, which, while it might add strength to his powers in the particular way in which they were exerted, precluded him, at the same time, from those agreeable reliefs that are administered by miscellaneous reading, and a taste in the polite and elegant arts. The only fault he was observed to fall into, was his suffering himself to be prevailed upon to engage in more concerns than could be completely attended to by any single man, how eminent soever might be his abilities and diligence. It is apprehended that, by this means, Mr. Brindley shortened his days, and in a certain degree abridged his usefulness. There is, at least, the utmost reason to believe, that his intense application in general to the important undertakings he had in hand brought on a hectic fever, which continued upon him, with little or no intermission, for some years, and at length terminated his life. He died at Turnhurst, in Staffordshire, on the 27th of September, 1772, in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and was buried at New Chapel in the same county. The vast works Mr. Brindley was engaged in at the time of his death, he left to be carried on and completed by his brother-in-law Mr. Henshall, for whom he had a peculiar regard, and of whose integrity and abilities in conducting these works he had the highest opinion.

“The public could only recognise the merit of this extraordinary man in the stupendous undertakings which he carried to perfection, and exhibited to general view. But those who had the advantage of conversing with him familiarly, and of knowing him well in his private character, respected him still more for the uniform and unshaken integrity of his conduct; for his steady attachment to the interest of the community; for the vast compass of his understanding, which seemed to have a natural affinity with all grand objects; and likewise for many noble and beneficent designs, constantly generating in his mind, and which the multiplicity of his engagements, and the shortness of his life, prevented him from bringing to maturity.”

]

_Engraved by J. Posselwhite._

SCHILLER.

_From a Print by Faustin Anderloni, after a Picture by G. von
Kügelgen._

Under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge.

_London, Published by Charles Knight & C^o. Ludgate Street._
]

SCHILLER.

Schiller is as universally acknowledged to be the second of German, as Milton is of English poets: and these great names, after those of Goethe and Shakspeare, denote the chiefs of the national literature of their respective countries. But the German poets were not merely contemporaries, but associated in friendship and congenial pursuits; and so much light is thrown upon the character of each by its being contemplated in connexion with that of the other, that in our endeavour to compress within very narrow limits the pregnant matter which this great man’s name suggests, we shall take leave to call in aid our attempted characteristics of his greater friend, and request that this article may be considered as a sequel to the former.

Frederick Christopher von Schiller was born at Marbach, in the duchy of Wurtemburg, November 10, 1759. His father held the rank of captain in the service of the duke, and was in fortune so low, that he was glad to place his son, in 1773, after an ordinary school-education, in the ducal academy of Stuttgard, which, partaking of an eleemosynary character, subjected the pupils to military discipline, though training for arts and professions called liberal. Schiller had early in life manifested the sensibilities common to the religious and poetic temperament, but was compelled to forego the study of theology, because this institution made no provision for it. He began with law, but finally went through a course of medical study, so as to obtain the post of regimental surgeon in 1780. These pursuits were against his inclination. During eight years, as he said, his genius was in conflict with military subjection. He ought rather to have said, that thereby his genius received the direction which determined the course of his life. For it was while under the sad impressions produced by a life of restraint within the walls of the academy, that he composed his tragedy of The Robbers, which he found means to print in 1781. Germany was at that period without a national theatre; scarcely half-a-dozen original stock-plays could be now produced which were then popular. Hence this juvenile work, with all its faults and extravagances (perhaps on account of these), was received with a tumult of applause in many parts of Germany. He was invited to adapt it to the stage, and it was performed the following year at Manheim. Of this most faulty and most famous maiden-play, it will be sufficient to remark that it exhibits, in over-charged colours, relations of life and character most likely to strike a youthful imagination. It represents in contrast two brothers. One, originally noble and heroic, becomes the perpetrator of those crimes against society, which law punishes with its severest penalties. The other betrays a character far more odious and revolting to the moral sense of mankind. The result is a catastrophe of appalling horror. The young poet solicited for leave of absence to witness the representation of his first play, which was refused him. He therefore, in defiance, made a journey to Manheim, and was punished by a fortnight’s arrest in his own house. He was also found guilty of having in his play uttered a national reflection on the people of the Grisons. For this he was reprimanded, ordered by his sovereign not to write on any subject but medicine, or at least to submit any literary work to the inspection and correction of his Serenity, and threatened with imprisonment in a fortress. While he was compelled to submit to a tyranny so humiliating, he learned that beyond the limits of the petty state to which he belonged, his work was the subject of loud and even extravagant applause. After a severe conflict, he abandoned his parents and the friends of his youth, and in October of the same year made his escape from an intolerable servitude. It has been gravely stated, to the credit of the duke, that he suffered his disobedient subject, some ten years afterwards, when he had acquired celebrity, to visit his family unmolested. That is, he was not seized and shot as a deserter.

When Schiller thus threw himself on the world, he had no other friends than those whom these early fruits of his talents had raised, no other support than the consciousness of those talents, nor other immediate resource than the unwrought materials of two other tragedies in prose, which he produced almost immediately, and which established his character as a dramatic poet. These were the Conspiracy of Fiesco, a political play taken from the romantic tale of St. Real, in which the intrigues of republican faction were picturesquely exhibited, and Cabal and Love, in which the tragic distress arises from the conflict between the natural passion of love, and the conventional social duties which originate in the relations of birth and station. During the completion of these juvenile works, which appeared in 1783 and 1784, his first asylum was Manheim, where he even deliberated about becoming an actor; and his first patron was the munificent ecclesiastic Baron von Dalberg, who became at a future period, under the French government, Prince-primate of Catholic Germany. Schiller also became the editor of the Rhenish Mercury, a monthly miscellany devoted to literature and the arts, and engaged in manifold literary labours, for which he had to qualify himself by supplying the defects of a very imperfect education. He early felt the necessity of studying history as indispensable to the cultivation of the serious drama, and so he became an historian by profession. At that time, it was a fashionable opinion that all sciences and arts were to be founded on metaphysics, and he became also a metaphysician. But in order to pursue these studies, it was not on the north-western frontier of Germany that he could profitably remain.

Saxony was already become the seat of literature as well as philosophy. He removed thither, and during the years 1785–1789, he resided at Leipzic, Dresden, Rudolstadt, and Weimar. At the latter place he gained the favour of Wieland and Herder, during the absence of Goethe in Italy. It was in 1787 that these great poets met. Though mutually repelled at first by obvious dissimilarities of character and genius, they were soon attracted and united by their common love of art and poetry. Under the auspices of his new friend, Schiller obtained, in 1789, the professorship of history at the neighbouring University of Jena, where he cultivated, as a teacher and as a writer, both history and philosophy, which in that university were followed with great celebrity: he himself lectured on history and æsthetics (the science of taste). In the year 1790 he united himself in a happy marriage with a lady of good family but small fortune, Fraûlein Lengenfeld. But at this early period he was attacked by disease; and the state of his health compelled his removal to Weimar, whence he never departed. Here he lived in the closest intimacy with Goethe. Their union was a memorable incident, even in the life of Goethe. But it was the one great event in the life of Schiller, by which his education was consummated, and he was enabled to execute nearly all the great works on which his reputation rests. A few years were now spent in intense intellectual labour, rendered painful by the attacks of disease. He edited first the Thalia, and then a monthly work of higher pretensions, ‘Die Horen’ [the Hours]. He published for several years an Almanac of the Muses, and with unwearied assiduity devoted himself to the drama as literary manager, translator, editor, and author. The eagerness with which he pursued these various avocations, it has been generally thought, undermined his constitution. For several years before his death he devoted his nights, not days, to poetic composition; and his pale and emaciated countenance, and the lassitude and debility of his frame, announced the ravages of disease which carried him off, May 9, 1805, in the forty-sixth year of his age. He left a widow and several children, who were enabled to occupy an honourable station in society. During his latter years, Schiller enjoyed a pension from the Duke of Weimar, sufficient, in addition to the profits of his works, to enable him to live in comfort; and a patent of nobility was procured for him by the Duke, to replace his lady in her station at the court of Weimar, from which her marriage with a commoner had excluded her. Schiller was in figure tall and thin. The characteristic features of his feeling and melancholy countenance are admirably represented on the colossal bust executed in marble, by Dannecker, which is preserved at Stuttgard.

Schiller’s numerous works may be classed under the heads of criticism, history, lyrical poetry, and the drama. We shall endeavour to characterise them, in the inverse order of their importance. In all of these departments his writings acquired immediate popularity. And in the latter they will enjoy permanent distinction, more from the vigorous style, warm sensibility, and fine moral feeling which are diffused over all his compositions, than from the development of the peculiar genius which any one class especially requires. When Schiller emancipated himself from the thraldom of his youth, the Kantian metaphysics were become popular among students. With characteristic ardour he became a disciple of the new school, and laboured to apply the critical philosophy to poetry and the arts. His first writings were scholastic exercises performed in public. But as the philosophy of his country, like his own mind, was in a state of transition, his metaphysical dissertations on æsthetical education, on naive and sentimental poetry, &c., deserve notice chiefly as appertaining to the literary history of a memorable philosophical crisis. They did not serve even to lay the foundation of a system of poetics, which was reserved for the Schlegels. These constitute three volumes.

The historical works of Schiller originated in his dramatic studies. These led him to the subjects of his histories; and his mode of treating these subjects as a dramatist, and an historian, is such that we must blend the consideration of his two historical works with two of his most famous tragedies. The first of his elaborate dramas in blank verse was Don Carlos, in connexion with which was written the commencement of a history of the successful insurrection of the Dutch against the Spanish despotism. In his play he has not, like Otway in his forgotten tragedy, and Alfieri in his Filippo, rendered the real or supposed love of the young prince to his step-mother the most important incident. The heroic reformer, Marquis Posa, is the character that most excites the sympathy of the reader. And it is the sort of prophetic prelude to the reformation that engrosses his attention. So in the history, the author addresses himself rhetorically to the patriotism, the love of religious and civil liberty, and other virtuous feelings of his reader. Schiller is no where the critical investigator of doubtful facts, nor is he an authority to decide the merits of a doubtful character. His other great subject was the Thirty Years’ War. This narrative also is a series of eloquent dissertations, splendid descriptions, and pregnant moral reflections, rather than a philosophic development of the chain of events. His Wallenstein, which dramatises a chapter of that history, is the most laboured of his dramas; and it obtained for him the honour of a translation from a man of kindred genius, Coleridge. In the half comic prelude, called The Camp, and the two parts of the tragedy, all the varieties of the military character and of military cabal are unfolded. Besides the hero himself, the subtle intriguer the elder Piccolomini, is finely contrasted with his high-minded, enthusiastic son, the lover of Thekla, the exquisite daughter of the heroic victim.

Besides the four volumes of these histories, there are two others of minor historical treatises. And it may be noticed here, in connexion with this class of his writings, that he began a romance called the Ghost-Seer, the historical foundation of which lay in the tragi-comic absurdities, and mischievous vagaries of the German illuminati and freemasons, a strange compound of superstition and infidelity, with which were blended political fanaticism, fraud, and sentimental philanthropy. This disease was partly cured by, and partly absorbed in the events of the French Revolution.

But it was as a philosophic and lyric poet that Schiller’s peculiar genius developed itself, and in this class of his works chiefly do we find those qualities which characterise him morally and intellectually, and exhibit him in striking contrast to his friend Goethe. As in his philosophical and historical writings, Schiller never wrote under the influence of the mere love of truth, but was impelled by moral feelings, always generous and noble; so it was in his poems. They neither mainly originated in, nor were addressed especially to the imagination. A large portion of them were metaphysical exercises in verse. There were scattered, even among these, the “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,” but they were not poetical, because they were addressed either to the mere intellect, the faculty of solving philosophical problems, or to the will, under the excitement of passions, which, however exalted in their character, are far remote from the exercise of imagination, and do not originate in the sense of beauty. Even the ballads of Schiller are didactic and moral, and therein strikingly contrasted with those of Goethe. Each poet idealised in his own way; but the ideal of the one was framed according to a law of natural, that of the other, according to a law of moral beauty. Goethe avowed his creed, “faults as well as virtue look well in song.” He therefore, availing himself of a style incomparably graceful, exhibits the passions of humanity in all their natural charm, and so fascinates the sense of natural beauty in the reader, that he is content to disregard what a severe moral sense might require. Schiller’s ballads, on the contrary, originate in, and have no other object than to excite, a passionate sympathy with virtuous and heroic affections and actions. But though there is “a pomp and prodigality of phrase,” there is seldom that magic of style that leaves the most fastidious taste gratified. Among these lyric poems, a considerable portion originated in his political and patriotic, or rather philanthropic feelings. To appreciate these, we must bear in mind that Schiller was brought up in a country, the people of which possessed no political power, nor any civil liberty but under sufferance; and that during the more important period of his life, his country suffered under the aggravated oppression of a foreign yoke. No English reader can form a correct judgment of any German political work of the last age, be it of thought or imagination, who for an instant forgets either of these two facts; and in the study of the works of Goethe and Schiller, it is especially necessary to keep them always before us. It must otherwise appear unaccountable, that since the youth of Schiller had been passed in the suffering incident to oppressed poverty; since he had the consciousness of not occupying that station in society to which his natural superiority over others entitled him; since he had the constitutional ardour of a man of genius, and was, by his position in society, led to feel, as a reformer, not to say agitator, on every polemical question that could arise between the people and the privileged orders; there should, notwithstanding all this, be so little that is stimulating and practical in his writings. But the wonder ceases, when it is borne in mind, that while in Britain the French Revolution was an object of hope or fear, and was held up as party feelings prompted, either as a warning or an example, in Germany it was seldom more than a problem for the exercise of the talents of speculative men: and whatever susceptibility to insurrectional excitements there might be among any class of the people, was repressed, not merely by the utter extinction of all liberty in France, but by all the humiliations and oppressions endured in every part of Germany from an imperious conquering enemy. Hence, while the German people went far beyond the British in the intensity of their hatred towards France, the privileged order of thinkers among them, from their habits of abstract speculation, were able to contemplate the events of the day, as well as the principles set afloat, with an unsympathising coolness unknown either in England or France. Hence, even in Schiller, whose earliest writings betrayed tendencies from which it might be feared that a German Jacobin would be formed, the love of liberty soon subsided from a passion into a taste. It became a quiet, moral sentiment, like the love of religion, of virtue, of country: he never could indeed lay aside his essentially moral and sentimental nature; nor during the period of his country’s abasement, which to the irretrievable loss of the nation he did not survive, could he, like Goethe, devoting himself to the studies of pure art and science, dismiss by an effort from his mind the consideration of the painful incidents of the day. On the contrary, they entirely filled his soul; they formed the background of all his speculations and feelings, in his dramas, histories, disquisitions, and poems. A sentiment which for years pressed on him, and which appropriately terminates the collection of his poems in two volumes, we will venture to render in prose, as most expressive of the sort of philosophic resignation to which he at length brought himself at the close of the century. “Two mighty nations are wrestling for the sole possession of the world. To annihilate freedom in every country, they wield the trident and the thunderbolt. To them every land must pay tribute. The Gaul, like Brennus, throws his iron sword into the scale of justice, and the Briton greedily stretches out his polypus arms on every side, and will shut up the free realm of Amphitrite, as if it were his own mansion.... Into the still and sacred recesses of the heart you must fly from the pressure of life. Freedom is only in the realm of dreams, and the beautiful blooms only in song.”

But it was not as a lyric poet that Schiller exercised the widest influence over his countrymen. It was in the more popular form of the drama, to which perhaps his genius was less adapted, that he sought and acquired a fame that has already reached the utmost limits of European civilization.

His dramatic works fill seven volumes. Not to repeat our remarks on the three juvenile prose tragedies, and on Don Carlos and Wallenstein, we proceed to enumerate the master-pieces which he produced during the last years of his life; but we must, for want of space, pass over unnoticed his less successful attempts at comedy, his translations of Shakspeare’s Macbeth, Racine’s Phaedra, and Gozzi’s Turandot; and his labours on the works of other authors. The result of these, his various studies, was the production of a form of tragedy, which, to be fairly appreciated, must be compared with the French, not the English, drama: for Schiller stands at an immeasurable distance, not merely from Shakspeare, but from the great body of the romantic dramatists of the English and Spanish schools, in whom are to be found either profound development of character, or elaborate skill in the entanglement and management of incident. Schiller has however, on the other hand, enhanced the dignity, and poetically enriched that form of tragedy which the French gratify their vanity by claiming as peculiarly their own, and which they do not hesitate to proclaim an improvement on the Greek! This class is essentially rhetorical. The French public seem to estimate the master-pieces of their favourite tragic poets, chiefly by the number of fine quotable passages they supply; while their critics estimate their worth by their conformity with certain purely artificial rules. One of them says, “Though the English stage has not one perfect tragedy [we had thought Cato to be perfect in their eyes], yet it has many fine scenes: we cannot say so much for the German.” In this the critic is wrong on his own principle. The great works of Schiller contain, relatively, as many splendid declamatory passages as are to be met with in the tragedies of Corneille, Racine, or Voltaire: and he has in the structure of his pieces amply made up for his disregard of the dramatic unities, by the infusion of higher beauties, both of sentiment and character, than the French school can boast of. In the enumeration of his later tragedies, we can merely point out the subjects to which his taste and opinions naturally led him.

In 1800 he attained the summit of his dramatic reputation by Maria Stuart. This tragedy exhibits, not the early and guilty love, but the late sufferings and death of the Queen of Scots. The author, as becomes the poet, takes no part in the controversies which her ambiguous character has produced. With an allowable departure from historic truth, he brings together the rival queens, and succeeds in rendering Mary an object of admiration and pity, and Elizabeth, not of disgust. He finely opposes the heroic enthusiasm of the youthful Mortimer to the flagitious wiles of the practised courtier Leicester, and avails himself of the most solemn rite of the Roman Catholic church to enhance the picturesque effect, and clothe poetically the religious feeling that adorns and sanctifies the character of the heroine.

In 1801 he produced the most poetical of his historic dramas, the Jungfrau von Orleans. It was reserved for a German to render due honour to the most romantic of French heroines, who was degraded, perhaps, by Shakspeare. The unworthy caricature which passes under his name at least, only shows the virulence of national prejudices. Joan of Arc has been not only shut out from the temple of Fame erected in her own country, but her name has been polluted by the impurities so vilely cast on it by Voltaire: while French literature has only its infamous _Pucelle_, the German stage has its _Virgin_ of Orleans. In this romantic play, Schiller has poured a richer stream of poetry over the camp and military glory than in his Wallenstein; and has exquisitely contrasted with the sacred virago, the frail, tender, most lovely, and admirable Agnes Sorel.

In 1803 appeared the Braut von Messina, a lyrical play, in which the author has introduced not only a chorus, but other prominent ingredients of the Grecian tragedy, oracles, dreams, an overwhelming fate, and a Nemesis, whose vengeance falls alike on the evil and good; by means of which pity and terror are excited. The odes are splendid, but the dramatic effect on the stage is weak.

In 1804, in the year preceding his death, Schiller produced the most picturesque of his dramas, Wilhelm Tell. The name sufficiently announces the plot, in which well-known incidents are inartificially exhibited. The characters display all the varieties of moral beauty which harmonize with the scene, and those virtues which the incidents are likely to call forth. Throughout there is an exhilarating predominance of good over evil, which forms a pleasing contrast to the fierce passions and barbarous themes which attracted the author in his youth. It was the fit termination of his short career, for it impresses the spectator and reader with the feeling that the poet ended his labours a happier and better man than he began. His untimely death while his last work was in the enjoyment of its fresh popularity, spread a universal sorrow over Germany, which had never yet beheld so powerful an intellect devoted to interests of such high morality, and in such perfect harmony, with the wants and wishes of his age and country.

For a further account, we refer to the life by Thomas Carlyle—Leben von Döring; and the brief memoir by Körner, prefixed to the edition in eighteen volumes, Vienna and Stuttgard 1819. Of English translations we may enumerate, besides two of Wallenstein, The Maid of Orleans, printed, but not yet published, by Mr. Drinkwater; Maria Stuart, by Mr. Mellish; and also Don Carlos, and the three prose tragedies by we know not whom. Translations have also been published of the Ghost Seer, and the two historical works; and also of a number of the poems in periodical works, besides several of the ballads, and the Song of the Bell, with illustrations by Retsch.

]

_Engraved by J. Posselwhite._

BENTHAM.

_From an Original Picture by J. Watts, in the possession of J.A.
Roebuck. Esq._

Under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge.

_London, Published by Charles Knight & C^o. Ludgate Street._
]

BENTHAM

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.

_Engraved by R. Woodman._

CATHERINE.

_From a Print by Caroline Watson, after a Picture by Rosselin._

Under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge.

_London, Published by Charles Knight & C^o. Ludgate Street._
]

CATHERINE II.

After the death of Peter I., the sceptre of Russia passed into hands incompetent to carry on the great scheme of national aggrandizement and civilization which he had originated. Nearly forty years elapsed before there appeared a worthy successor to that remarkable prince: and at last it was a German woman, who, under the title of CATHERINE II., established Russia in that lofty position which she now occupies among the powers of Europe.

This masculine-minded woman was the daughter of Christian Frederic, prince of Anhalt Zerbst Dornberg, and major-general in the Prussian service. She was born at Stettin, May 2, 1729, and was named at her baptism Sophia Augusta Frederica. In her sixteenth year she was selected by the Empress Elizabeth to become the wife of the Grand-Duke, afterwards Peter III.; and their marriage was solemnized, September 1, 1745, after the bride had made public profession of the faith of the Greek church, and received the name of Catherina Alexiewna. On the events of her life during the next sixteen years, until the death of Elizabeth, it is not necessary to dwell: she then exercised no influence in affairs of state. The example of a most corrupt court, and a sovereign sunk in the grossest sensuality, exerted their natural effect upon her youthful mind: and if she brought principles of morality and chastity from Germany, they were soon extinguished by the evil influence of all around her, and the disgust inspired by an ignorant and besotted husband; during whose life, as well as after her own accession to the throne, she bestowed her favour on a succession of paramours. Her behaviour was less revolting, but her rule of life was hardly more strict than that of the Empress Elizabeth.

The history of Russia gave encouragement to an able, ambitious spirit, like that of Catherine, to shape for itself a more brilliant prospect than that which lay before her as the wife of a despotic prince, whom she hated, and had reason to fear. Even before the death of Elizabeth, which took place January 2, 1762, N. S., she had intrigued to supplant her husband on the throne; and he had hardly occupied it six months, before she organized the revolution which conducted him to a prison and a grave. The only extenuation of her conduct in this crisis, is the probability, we might almost say certainty, that a similar fate would otherwise have befallen herself. Early on the morning of the 9th of July, Catherine quitted the palace of Peterhoff, on the Neva, to invoke the affection of the regiments of guards at St. Petersburg, who, like the Prætorian troops of Rome, had often bestowed the crown at their free pleasure. Her ready attention to Russian habits and prejudices, her assumed devotion to the Greek church, and the arts of her accomplices, had disposed, not only the soldiers, but a large portion of the citizens, to declare in her favour: and when she applied for protection, and told them “that her danger had driven her to the necessity of coming to ask their assistance, that the Czar had intended to put her to death that very night, together with her son; that she had no other means than by flight of escaping death, and that she had so much confidence in their dispositions as to put herself entirely in their hands,” the assembled crowd was not slow to hail her as their prince, and before the end of the day she had been crowned and proclaimed sovereign of all the Russias, by the title of Catherine II., had been acknowledged by crowds of citizens, and saw herself at the head of 15,000 picked soldiers. The Czar, confused and affrighted, consulted neither his safety nor his honour. On the following day, after some futile demonstrations of resistance, he surrendered his person unconditionally; and on the 17th he perished by a violent death, with the concurrence, no doubt, if not by the command of Catherine.

Nevertheless her situation for some time was critical. The common people reverenced the blood of Peter the Great, and lamented, with anger, the cruel fate which had befallen his grandson. The priests, whose favour Catherine had courted while Grand-Duchess, were disappointed and indignant to find her resolved to cast them off, when they had served her turn, and to limit as much as possible their influence, which had often been troublesome to her predecessors. The courtiers, many of them, were indignant at the sudden elevation of the daring adventurers who had won Catherine her throne. But her promptitude and sagacity overcame these troubles and difficulties; and without any very alarming commotions, she gradually acquired that prescriptive right to the throne, which does so much for princes of doubtful title.

The power thus acquired by fraud and murder, Catherine used, on the whole, to the benefit of her subjects, with liberal intentions and with a judicious and enlightened policy. Abroad her views were directed to conquest, with the usual disregard of the common rules of honour and justice, as they are recognised between man and man. This fault she shares with the majority of princes: but the dismemberment of Poland pollutes her memory with one of the foulest stains recorded in history. Without proceeding seriatim through the multifarious events of her long reign, we shall attempt a short sketch of the leading features of her domestic policy and meditated improvements; and conclude with an equally concise outline of its foreign relations.

Her earliest cares and her zealous attention were directed to the fostering of commerce, and the encouragement of national industry in all its important branches: and it ought not to detract from her credit, that some of her measures, in accordance with the system of the age, were not such as modern economical science approves. But we may mention with unmixed praise, as indicative of a far-sighted and disinterested policy, the abolition of numerous monopolies, as well belonging to the crown, as granted to trading companies and private persons. Among these were the caravan-trade between Russia and China, several branches of fisheries, the manufacture of chintzes, the preparation of sugar, the tobacco-trade, and other things which were freely thrown open to individual competition. In promoting agriculture she was no less zealous. She established an experimental school of farming at her country-palace of Tzarsko-Tzelo, at which the most improved system of English agriculture was introduced, and gratuitous instruction was given to persons from all parts of the empire. One of her schemes was the establishment of numerous colonies over the uncultivated steppes of her vast empire: and thousands of families were allured from Poland, Germany, and even France, by the advantages which she held out, not merely to agricultural settlers, but to artificers, merchants, and all who were willing to aid in developing by their industry the unknown resources of the Russian empire. She sought to amend the administration of justice, and, to her high honour, put an end to the use of torture for extracting the truth in criminal proceedings. She abolished an odious tribunal, established by Peter I., called the Secret Inquisition Chancery, a kind of Star-Chamber, which gave facility to the most frivolous and malicious investigations, and had recourse to the most intolerable severities in conducting its inquiries. Aspiring to the glory of reforming the government, and giving a new code of laws to the empire, she summoned, in 1767, deputies to Moscow from every part and nation of her dominions, for whose consideration she had previously drawn up a body of instructions, of which the original manuscript, written in her own hand, is preserved in the library of the Academy of Petersburg. The work was greatly needed; for not merely were the general laws of the empire voluminous, insufficient, perplexed, and contradictory, but the particular laws of different provinces were confused and conflicting, and the difficulties arising out of this state of things were increased in a tenfold degree by the venality of the judges. But Catherine wanted perseverance and vigour to work out her scheme through the vexations of conflicting interests and tedious details. The history of this meeting of legislators illustrates the fate of most of her mighty undertakings. In their early sittings anger rose so high on the question of emancipating the serfs, that Catherine dismissed them, never to be recalled. She had acquired the glory of propounding a new code, not of laws, but of instructions for legislators; and the restless activity of her mind was satisfied, and passed to spend itself in some other channel. The instructions abound in philanthropic and wise suggestions; and satisfactorily show that it is much easier to talk than to perform. They are printed under the title “Instructions de Catherine II., pour la Commission chargée de dresser le projet d’un nouveau code des Loix.”