his
habits and characteristics, his temper,--and I never saw him out of
temper in my life, though he had enough to try him almost every day in
his household arrangements,--his kindness of heart, his drollery, and
his wonderful powers of endurance, while working out the great problem
of his life.

At the time I knew him, he used to sleep in a bag, and sometimes with
most of his clothes on. This he did for economy. "It took less of
sheeting," he said. Then, too, there was not so much likelihood of his
getting the clothes off, should he get restless or fidgety. He was read
to sleep every night by one of his secretaries, who told me that he
often amused himself with reading the same paragraph or the same page
over and over again, without turning a leaf, the philosopher declaring
that he had never lost a word of the whole, and that he not only
understood, but remembered, the drift of the author. In this way my
"Brother Jonathan," then just published by Blackwood in three large
volumes, was read to him every night for weeks, and greatly to his
satisfaction, as I then understood; though it seems by what Dr.
Bowring--I beg his pardon, Sir John Bowring--says on the subject, that
the "white-haired sage" was wide enough awake, on the whole, to form a
pretty fair estimate of its unnaturalness and extravagance: being
himself a great admirer of Richardson's ten-volume stories, like
"Pamela" and "Clarissa Harlowe," and always looking upon them as the
standard for novel-writers.

Mr. Bentham was very "regular" in his habits, _very_,--and timed most of
his doings, whether asleep or awake, by a watch lying on the table. But
then he _always_ breakfasted between twelve and three, or a little later
on special occasions, and always dined at half past six, or thereabouts,
taking two cups of strong coffee in bed every morning, though he never
allowed himself but one, and died in the belief that he had never broken
the pledge.

And yet, notwithstanding all this, he maintained that there is no
getting along in this world--or the other--without "regularity," or what
he called "system." And that "system" he carried into all the business
of life, as well as into legislation and government; going back, after
years of uninterrupted labor and the severest analysis, to invent a
panopticon, a self-sustaining penitentiary, or rather to apply that
invention of his brother, General Sir Samuel Bentham, to the bettering
of our prison-houses and to the re