script,--the worst you ever saw, perhaps, not
excepting Rufus Choate's or Napoleon Bonaparte's,--day after day, and
year after year, while adding his marginal annotations in "Benthamee" to
what has been corrected over and over again, and rewritten more than
once by the secretary.

He wears a plain, single-breasted coat, of the Quaker type, with a
narrow, straight collar, and a waistcoat of thin, striped calico, all
open to the weather, and trousers,--not small-clothes, nor breeches,
never being able to look at himself in breeches without laughing, he
says; thick woollen stockings rolled up over his knees, and shoes with
ties instead of buckles,--in short, the every-day costume of our
Revolutionary fathers, barring the breeches, the shoe-buckles, and the
ruffles, which he never could endure.

In the warmest weather he wears thick leather gloves, and in the coldest
a straw hat, bound and edged with the brightest green ribbon, and
carries a stout stick of buckthorn, which he has named Dapple, after the
ass of Sancho Panza, for whom he professes the greatest admiration.

While thus equipped, and while you are in conversation with him perhaps,
or answering one of his hurried questions, he starts off ahead in a slow
trot, up one alley and down another, or to and fro in the large garden
of Queen-Square Place,--the largest but one of all that open into the
Green Park; and this trot he will continue for a whole hour
sometimes, without losing his breath or evincing any signs of
weariness,--occasionally shouting at the top of his lungs, to show that
his wind is untouched, till the whole neighborhood rings with the echo,
and the blank walls of the Knightsbridge Barracks "answer from their
misty shroud."

On the whole, therefore, that extravagant story told by Captain Parry
has a pretty good foundation, though he never saw with his own eyes what
he describes with so much drollery, but took the whole upon trust; for
Mr. Bentham was in the habit of going after his annuity every year,
trotting all the way down and back through Fleet Street, with his white
hair flying loose, and followed by one or both of his two secretaries.
He was the last survivor--the very last--of the beneficiaries, and
seemed to take a pleasure in astonishing the managers once a year with
his "wind and bottom." Parry represents him as being taken for a
lunatic running away from his keepers.

Having now the man himself before you, let me give you some idea of