s,--those literary
Gibeonites, born to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the higher
intellectual castes. Possessed of talents and acquirements which made
him great, he wished only to be useful. In the prime of manhood, at the
very time of life at which ambitious men are most ambitious, he was not
solicitous to proclaim that he furnished information, arguments, and
eloquence to Mirabeau. In his later years he was perfectly willing that
his renown should merge in that of Mr Bentham.

The services which M. Dumont has rendered to society can be fully
appreciated only by those who have studied Mr Bentham's works, both in
their rude and in their finished state. The difference both for show and
for use is as great as the difference between a lump of golden ore and a
rouleau of sovereigns fresh from the mint. Of Mr Bentham we would at all
times speak with the reverence which is due to a great original
thinker, and to a sincere and ardent friend of the human race. If a
few weaknesses were mingled with his eminent virtues,--if a few
errors insinuated themselves among the many valuable truths which he
taught,--this is assuredly no time for noticing those weaknesses or
those errors in an unkind or sarcastic spirit. A great man has gone from
among us, full of years, of good works, and of deserved honours. In some
of the highest departments in which the human intellect can exert
itself he has not left his equal or his second behind him. From his
contemporaries he has had, according to the usual lot, more or less than
justice. He has had blind flatterers and blind detractors--flatterers
who could see nothing but perfection in his style, detractors who
could see nothing but nonsense in his matter. He will now have judges.
Posterity will pronounce its calm and impartial decision; and that
decision will, we firmly believe, place in the same rank with Galileo,
and with Locke, the man who found jurisprudence a gibberish and left it
a science. Never was there a literary partnership so fortunate as that
of Mr Bentham and M. Dumont. The raw material which Mr Bentham furnished
was most precious; but it was unmarketable. He was, assuredly, at once a
great logician and a great rhetorician. But the effect of his logic was
injured by a vicious arrangement, and the effect of his rhetoric by a
vicious style. His mind was vigorous, comprehensive, subtile, fertile of
arguments, fertile of illustrations. But he spoke in an unknown tongue;
and,