th sufficient
individual talent, it is fortunately unnecessary for us to attempt to
determine in this place and at this time.

Among the dead writers of the century who are known wholly or mainly for
the cultivation of philosophical studies, Bentham, Mackintosh, John
Stuart Mill (to whom some would add his father James), Sir William
Hamilton, Dean Mansel, are likely to hold a place in history, while at
present many might be disposed to add the name of Mr. T. H. Green, a
tutor of Balliol College, who between 1870 and his death propagated in
Oxford a sort of neo-Hegelianism much tinctured with political and
social Liberalism, and obtained a remarkable personal position. It is
however as yet too early to assign a distinct historical place to one
whose philosophy was in no sense original, though it was somewhat
originally combined and applied, and who exhibited very small literary
skill in setting forth. The others are already set "in the firm
perspective of the past," and, with yet others who, still living, escape
our grasp, have their names clearly marked for a place in an adequate
history.

Jeremy Bentham, a curious person who reminds one of a Hobbes without the
literary genius, was born in London, near Houndsditch, as far back as
5th February 1748. He was the son of a solicitor who was very well off,
and wished his son to take to the superior branch of the law. Jeremy was
sent to Westminster, and thence to Queen's College, Oxford, in his
thirteenth year. He was a Master of Arts at eighteen, and was called to
the Bar six years later; but he never practised. He must have been very
early drawn to the study of the French _philosophes_; much indeed of the
doctrine which afterwards made him famous was either taken from, or
incidentally anticipated by, Turgot and others of them, and it was a
common remark, half in earnest half in gibe, that Bentham's views had
made the tour of Europe in the French versions of Dumont before they
attained to any attention in England. In 1776 he wrote a _Fragment on
Government_, a kind of critique of Blackstone, which is distinguished by
acute one-sided deduction from Whig principles; and he became a sort of
prophet of the Whigs, who sometimes plagiarised and popularised,
sometimes neglected, his opinions. He never married, though he would
have liked to do so; and lived on his means till 1832, when he died in
the eighty-fifth year of his age. His chief books after the _Fragment_
had been his _T