698 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" When I received your letter on Monday, John, who is so desirous to 

 be your inmate, was in the room, and observed me smiling [at Ben- 

 tham's fun] as I read it. This excited his curiosity to know what it 

 was about. I said it was Mr. Bentham asking us to go to Barrow Green. 

 He desii-ed to read that. I gave it to him to see what he would say, 

 when he began, as if reading — Why have you not come to Barrow 

 Green, and brought John with you ? " The letter closes — " John asks 

 if Monday (the day fixed) is not to-morrow." Not much is to be made 

 of this, except that the child's precocious intellect is equal to a bit of 

 waggery. The remark may seem natural, that if he were then learning 

 his Greek cards he might actually have read the letter; but no one that 

 ever saw Bentham's handwriting would make that remark. As I take 

 it, the interest of the scene lies in disclosing a sunny moment in the 

 habitually stern relationship of the father and son. 



As an introduction to the next contemporary landmark of his prog- 

 ress, I need to quote from himself the account of his earliest reading. 

 He says nothing of English books till he has first given a long string 

 of Greek authors — ^sop's Fables, the Anabasis, Cyropajdia, and Memo- 

 rabilia of Xenophon, Herodotus, some of Diogenes Laertius, part of 

 Lucian, two speeches of Isocrates ; all these seem to have been gone 

 through before his eighth year. His English reading he does not con- 

 nect with his Greek, but brings up at another stage of his narrative. 

 From 1810 to 1813 (age, four to seven) the family had their residence 

 in Newington Green, and his father took him out in morning walks in 

 the lanes toward Hornsey, and in those walks he gave his father an ac- 

 count of his reading ; the books cited being now histories in English — 

 Robertson, Hume, Gibbon, Watson's Philip the Second and Third (his 

 greatest favorite), Hooke's Histoiy of Rome (his favorite after Wat- 

 son), Rollin in English, Langhorne's Plutarch, Burnet's Own Time, the 

 history in the Annual Register ; he goes on, after a remark or two, to 

 add Millar on the English Government, Mosheim, McCrie's Knox, a 

 quantity of voyages and travels — Anson, Cook, etc. ; Robinson Crusoe, 

 Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Miss Edgeworth's Tales, and Brooke's 

 Fool of Quality. I repeat that all this was within the same four years 

 as the Greek list above enumerated. At a later stage, he speaks of his 

 fondness for writing histories ; he successively composed a Roman His- 

 tory from Hooke, an abridgment of the Universal History, a History of 

 Holland, and (in his eleventh and twelfth years) a History of the Ro- 

 man Government. All these, he says, he destroyed. It happens, how- 

 ever, that a lady friend of the family copied and preserved the first of 

 these essays, the Roman History ; upon the copy is marked his age, six 

 and a half years, which would be near the termination of the two for- 

 midable courses of reading now summarized. The sketch is very short, 

 equal to between two and three of the present printed pages, and gives 

 but a few scraps of the earlier traditions. If it is wonderful for the 

 writer's age, it also shows that his enormous reading had as yet done 



