February 1747-48 (o.s.) The only other child who grew up was Samuel,
afterwards Sir Samuel Bentham, born 11th January 1757. When eighty years
old, Jeremy gave anecdotes of his infancy to his biographer, Bowring,
who says that their accuracy was confirmed by contemporary documents,
and proved his memory to be as wonderful as his precocity. Although the
child was physically puny, his intellectual development was amazing.
Before he was two he burst into tears at the sight of his mother's
chagrin upon his refusal of some offered dainty. Before he was
'breeched,' an event which happened when he was three and a quarter, he
ran home from a dull walk, ordered a footman to bring lights and place a
folio _Rapin_ upon the table, and was found plunged in historical
studies when his parents returned to the house. In his fourth year he
was imbibing the Latin grammar, and at the age of five years nine months
and nineteen days, as his father notes, he wrote a scrap of Latin,
carefully pasted among the parental memoranda. The child was not always
immured in London. His parents spent their Sundays with the grandfather
Bentham at Barking, and made occasional excursions to the house of Mrs.
Bentham's mother at Browning Hill, near Reading. Bentham remembered the
last as a 'paradise,' and a love of flowers and gardens became one of
his permanent passions.

Jeremy cherished the memory of his mother's tenderness. The father,
though less sympathetic, was proud of his son's precocity, and
apparently injudicious in stimulating the unformed intellect. The boy
was almost a dwarf in size. When sixteen he grew ahead,[202] and was so
feeble that he could scarcely drag himself upstairs. Attempts to teach
him dancing failed from the extreme weakness of his knees.[203] He
showed a taste for music, and could scrape a minuet on the fiddle at six
years of age. He read all such books as came in his way. His parents
objected to light literature, and he was crammed with such solid works
as _Rapin_, Burnet's _Theory of the Earth_, and Cave's _Lives of the
Apostles_. Various accidents, however, furnished him with better food
for the imagination. He wept for hours over _Clarissa Harlowe_, studied
_Gulliver's Travels_ as an authentic document, and dipped into a variety
of such books as then drifted into middle-class libraries. A French
teacher introduced him to some remarkable books. He read _Telemaque_,
which deeply impressed him, and, as he thought, implanted in