Then come his sister and his village friend,
And he will now the sweetest moments spend
Life has to yield: no, never will he find
Again on earth such pleasure in his mind :
He goes through shrubby walks these friends among,
Love in their looks and honour on the tongue;
Nay, there's a charm beyond what nature shews,
The bloom is softer, and more sweetly glows;
Pierced by no crime, and urged by no desire
For more than true and honest hearts require,
They feel the calm delight, and thus proceed
Through the green lane, then linger in the mead,
Stray o'er the heath in all its purple bloom,
And pluck the blossom where the wild-bees hum;
Then through the broomy bound with ease they pass,
And press the sandy sheep-walk's slender grass,
Where dwarfish flowers among the gorse are spread,
And the lamb browses by the linnet's bed;
Then 'cross the bounding brook they make their way
O'er its rough bridge, and there behold the bay;
The ocean smiling to the fervid sun,
The waves that faintly fall, and slowly run,
The ships at distance, and the boats at hand;
And now they walk upon the seaside sand,
Counting the number, and what kind they be,
Ships softly sinking in the sleepy sea;
Now arm in arm, now parted, they behold
The glittering waters on the shingles rolled :
The timid girls, half dreading their design,
Dip the small foot in the retarded brine,

And search for crimson weeds, which spreading flow,
Or lie like pictures on the sand below;
With all those bright red pebbles that the sun
Through the small waves so softly shines upon;
And those live lucid jellies which the eye
Delights to trace as they swim glittering by;
Pearl shells and rubied star-fish they admire,
And will arrange above the parlour fire.
Tokens of bliss! Oh, horrible! a wave
Roars as it rises-save me, Edward, save!'
She cries. Alas! the watchman on his way,
Calls, and lets in-truth, terror, and the day!
(From The Borough.)

Gipsies.

On either side

Is level fen, a prospect wild and wide,
With dikes on either hand by ocean's self supplied:
Far on the right the distant sea is seen,

And salt the springs that feed the marsh between ;
Beneath an ancient bridge the straitened flood
Rolls through its sloping banks of slimy mud;
Near it a sunken boat resists the tide,
That frets and hurries to th' opposing side;
The rushes sharp, that on the borders grow,
Bend their brown flow'rets to the stream below,
Impure in all its course, in all its progress slow:
Here a grave Flora scarcely deigns to bloom,
Nor wears a rosy blush, nor sheds perfume:
The few dull flowers that o'er the place are spread
Partake the nature of their fenny bed;
Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom,
Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume;
Here the dwarf sallows creep, the septfoil harsh,
And the soft slimy mallow of the marsh;
Low on the ear the distant billows sound,
And just in view appears their stony bound;

No hedge nor tree conceals the glowing sun;
Birds, save a wat'ry tribe, the district shun,
Nor chirp among the reeds where bitter waters run....
Again, the country was enclosed, a wide

And sandy road has banks on either side;
Where, lo! a hollow on the left appeared,
And there a gipsy tribe their tent had reared;
'Twas open spread, to catch the morning sun,
And they had now their early meal begun,
When two brown boys just left their grassy seat,
The early traveller with their prayers to greet:
While yet Orlando held his pence in hand,
He saw their sister on her duty stand;
Some twelve years old, demure, affected, sly,
Prepared the force of early powers to try;
Sudden a look of languor he descries,
And well-feigned apprehension in her eyes;
Trained but yet savage, in her speaking face
He marked the features of her vagrant race;
When a light laugh and roguish leer expressed
The vice implanted in her youthful breast:
Forth from the tent her elder brother came,
Who seemed offended, yet forbore to blame
The young designer, but could only trace
The looks of pity in the traveller's face:
Within, the father, who from fences nigh
Had brought the fuel for the fire's supply,
Watched now the feeble blaze, and stood dejected by.
On ragged rug, just borrowed from the bed,
And by the hand of coarse indulgence fed,
In dirty patchwork negligently dressed,
Reclined the wife, an infant at her breast;
In her wild face some touch of grace remained,
Of vigour palsied and of beauty stained;
Her bloodshot eyes on her unheeding mate
Were wrathful turned, and seemed her wants to state,
Cursing his tardy aid-her mother there
With gipsy-state engrossed the only chair;
Solemn and dull her look; with such she stands,
And reads the milk-maid's fortune in her hands,
Tracing the lines of life; assumed through years,
Each feature now the steady falsehood wears:
With hard and savage eye she views the food,
And grudging pinches their intruding brood;
Last in the group, the worn-out grandsire sits
Neglected, lost, and living but by fits:
Useless, despised, his worthless labours done,
And half protected by the vicious son,
Who half supports him; he with heavy glance
Views the young ruffians who around him dance;
And, by the sadness in his face, appears
To trace the progress of their future years:
Through what strange course of misery, vice, deceit,
Must wildly wander each unpractised cheat!
What shame and grief, what punishment and pain,
Sport of fierce passions, must each child sustain-
Ere they like him approach their latter end,
Without a hope, a comfort, or a friend!

(From Tales-Lover's Journey.")

Approaching Age.

Six years had passed, and forty ere the six,
When Time began to play his usual tricks :
The locks once comely in a virgin's sight,
Locks of pure brown, displayed th' encroaching
white;

The blood once fervid now to cool began,
And Time's strong pressure to subdue the man :
I rode or walked as I was wont before,
But now the bounding spirit was no more;
A moderate pace would now my body heat,
A walk of moderate length distress my feet.
I showed my stranger-guest those hills sublime,
But said, 'The view is poor, we need not climb.'
At a friend's mansion I began to dread

The cold neat parlour, and the gay glazed bed;
At home I felt a more decided taste,
And must have all things in my order placed;
I ceased to hunt, my horses pleased me less,
My dinner more; I learned to play at chess;
I took my dog and gun, but saw the brute
Was disappointed that I did not shoot;

My morning walks I now could bear to lose,

And blessed the shower that gave me not to choose: In fact, I felt a languor stealing on;

The active arm, the agile hand were gone;

Small daily actions into habits grew,

And new dislike to forms and fashion new;

I loved my trees in order to dispose,

I numbered peaches, looked how stocks arose, Told the same story oft-in short, began to prose. (From The Tales of the Hall.)

The Crazed Maiden's Song. Let me not have this gloomy view About my room, around my bed; But morning roses, wet with dew,

To cool my burning brows instead. As flow'rs that once in Eden grew, Let them their fragrant spirits shed, And every day the sweets renew,

Till I, a fading flower, am dead.

Oh! let the herbs I loved to rear

Give to my sense their perfumed breath;

Let them be placed about my bier,

And grace the gloomy house of death.
I'll have my grave beneath a hill,

Where, only Lucy's self shall know;
Where runs the pure pellucid rill
Upon its gravelly bed below;
There violets on the borders blow,

And insects their soft light display,
Till, as the morning sunbeams glow,
The cold phosphoric fires decay.
That is the grave to Lucy shown,

The soil a pure and silver sand,
The green cold moss above it grown,
Unplucked of all but maiden hand:
In virgin earth, till then unturned,

There let my maiden form be laid,
Nor let my changed clay be spurned,
Nor for new guest that bed be made.
There will the lark-the lamb, in sport,
In air-on earth-securely play,
And Lucy to my grave resort,

As innocent, but not so gay.

I will not have the churchyard ground
With bones all black and ugly grown,

To press my shivering body round,

Or on my wasted limbs be thrown.

With ribs and skulls I will not sleep,

In clammy beds of cold blue clay,
Through which the ringed earth-worms creep,
And on the shrouded bosom prey;

I will not have the bell proclaim
When those sad marriage rites begin,
And boys, without regard or shame,
Press the vile mouldering masses in.

Say not, it is beneath my care;

I cannot these cold truths allow; These thoughts may not afflict me there, But, O! they vex and tease me now. Raise not a turf, nor set a stone,

That man a maiden's grave may trace, But thou, my Lucy, come alone,

And let affection find the place.

Oh! take me from a world I hate,

Men cruel, selfish, sensual, cold;
And, in some pure and blessed state,
Let me my sister minds behold:
From gross and sordid views refined,
Our heaven of spotless love to share,
For only generous souls designed,
And not a man to meet us there.

(From The Tales of the Hall.)

Sketches of Autumn.

It was a fair and mild autumnal sky,
And earth's ripe treasures met th' admiring eye,
As a rich beauty, when her bloom is lost,
Appears with more magnificence and cost:
The wet and heavy grass, where feet had strayed,
Not yet erect, the wanderer's way betrayed;
Showers of the night had swelled the deepening rill,
The morning breeze had urged the quickening mill;
Assembled rooks had winged their seaward flight,
By the same passage to return at night,
While proudly o'er them hung the steady kite,
Then turned him back, and left the noisy throng,
Nor deigned to know them as he sailed along.

Long yellow leaves, from osiers, strewed around,
Choked the small stream, and hushed the feeble sound;
While the dead foliage dropped from loftier trees,
Our squire beheld not with his wonted ease;

But to his own reflections made reply,

And said aloud, Yes! doubtless we must die.'

'We must,' said Richard; and we would not live

To feel what dotage and decay will give;
But we yet taste whatever we behold,
The morn is lovely, though the air is cold:
There is delicious quiet in this scene,
At once so rich, so varied, so serene;
Sounds to delight us-each discordant tone
Thus mingled please, that fail to please alone;
This hollow wind, this rustling of the brook,
The farm-yard noise, the woodman at yon oak-
See, the axe falls !-now listen to the stroke!
That gun itself, that murders all this peace,
Adds to the charm, because it soon must cease.'
(From The Tales of the Hall.)

Cold grew the foggy morn, the day was brief,
Loose on the cherry hung the crimson leaf;
The dew dwelt ever on the herb; the woods
Roared with strong blasts, with mighty showers the floods :

All green was vanished, save of pine and yew,
That still displayed their melancholy hue;
Save the green holly with its berries red,
And the green moss that o'er the gravel spread.
(From Tales-'The Patron.')

It is hardly unfair to compare Crabbe's

Better to love amiss than nothing to have loved, from The Struggles of Conscience, with Tennyson's 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

It was Crabbe who opined, not without reason, that he 'who often reads, will sometimes wish to write.' It is in The Widow's Tale that we read of

A tender, timid maid! who knew not how
To pass a pig-sty, or to face a cow,

and who was aggrieved

When the coarse cloth she saw, with many a stain
Soiled by rude hinds who cut and come again.

An admirable Life of the poet by his son, the Rev. George Crabbe (1785-1857), for twenty-three years vicar of Bredfield, Suffolk, was prefixed to the edition of the works published in eight volumes in 1834. See also Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library (2nd series, 1876), E. FitzGerald's Readings in Tales of the Hall' (1882), and Kebbel's Crabbe (1888).

FRANCIS HINDES GROOME.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), for more than half a century conspicuous as an author on jurisprudence and ethics, lived in intimate correspondence with the leading men of several generations and of various countries, and was unceasingly active in the propagation of utilitarianism and in insisting on reform in law. The son of a pushing and prosperous London attorney, he was educated at Westminster School and Queen's College, Oxford. He was little over twelve when he went to Oxford, but even then he was, from his precocity, not unjustly known by the name of 'the philosopher;' and though he never liked Oxford methods of study or of life, he took his degree of B.A. in 1763, and after studying law at Lincoln's Inn, was called to the Bar. He had a strong dislike to the legal profession, and never but once pleaded in public. His first publication was an acute but hypercritical examination of a passage in Blackstone's Commentaries, and was called A Fragment on Government (1776). The critique was prompted, no doubt, by a passion for improvement in those shapes in which the lot of mankind is meliorated by it,' but also by a profound contempt for Blackstone. He was stimulated by Priestley's writings. 'In the phrase, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number," I then saw delineated,' says Bentham, 'for the first time, a plain as well as a true standard for whatever is right or wrong, useful, useless, or mischievous in human conduct, whether in the field of morals or of politics.' The famous phrase was used first by Hutcheson (1726), then in Italian by Beccaria, and was found by Priestley in a translation of Beccaria's Crimes and Punishments

6

(1766); but unhappily Priestley, Bentham, and the rest have none of them given a final and universal definition of human happiness. To ensure it, Bentham considered it necessary to reconstruct the laws and government—to have annual parliaments and universal suffrage, secret voting, and a return to the ancient practice of paying wages to parliamentary representatives. In all his political, sociological, and juridical writings this doctrine of utility, so understood, is the leading and pervading principle. In 1778 he published a pamphlet on The Hard Labour Bill, recommending an improvement in the mode of criminal punishment; amongst those that followed were Letters on Usury (1787), Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Politics (1789), Discourses on Civil and Penal Legislation (1802), Punishments and Rewards (1811), A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1813), Codification and Public Instruction (1817), and The Book of Fallacies (1824). The article in the National Dictionary of Biography quotes a classified list of seventy-four publications. By the death of his father in 1792, Bentham succeeded to property in London and to farms in Essex yielding from £500 to £600 a year. He lived frugally, but with elegance, in one of his London houses, kept young men as secretaries, corresponded and wrote daily, and by a life of temperance and industry, with great self-complacency and the society of a few devoted friends, the eccentric philosopher attained to the age of eighty-four. He left his body to be dissected, and his skeleton, clothed in his usual attire, is preserved in University College, London.

His works were collected and edited by Bowring and Hill Burton, and published in eleven volumes. But as some of the works were rearranged, abridged, and altered by Bowring and others, it is sometimes doubtful how far the statements perfectly represent Bentham's own words or ideas. Originally Bentham's style was natural, clear, and even brilliant. In his later works he adopted a peculiar uncouth style and nomenclature, which deter ordinary readers, and indeed have rendered many of his works a dead-letter. The substance of his published works and MSS. was rearranged and translated into excellent French by M. Dumont, a Genevese disciple, and there were Spanish and Portuguese translations. James Mill made known his principles at home; Sir Samuel Romilly discussed and criticised them in the Edinburgk Review, and Sir James Mackintosh in his Ethical Dissertation. Of his new coined words it should be noted that some-such as codify, minimise, international-have been found useful, and have become an essential and permanent part of the English language. In the science of legislation Bentham exhibited profound capacity and extensive knowledge; but he is chargeable with not sufficiently 'weighing the various circumstances which require his rules to be modified in different countries and times, in order to render them either more useful, more easily introduced, more generally respected,

or more certainly executed.' J. S. Mill declared : 'There is hardly anything in Bentham's philosophy which is not true. The bad part of his writings is his resolute denial of all that he does not see, of all truths but those which he recognises.' This does not fully indicate the fact that he was both dogmatic and intolerant, holding that those who deliberately differed from him were either fools or knaves. He greatly furthered the improvement of the lamentable poor-laws; like so many of the older Radicals, he held that both for England and France, colonies are disadvantageous to the mother-country, and should be emancipated. Many of his schemes have been realised; many more are in course of realisation. The end and object of them all was the general welfare, and his chief error lay in conceiving that organic changes are possible by manifesto and enactment, or otherwise than through the growth and modification of popular needs, ideas, and institutions. In Mill's words, he found the philosophy of law a chaos, and left it a science;' and he was the philosophic pioneer of Liberalism and of Radicalism.

From the 'Defence of Usury.'

The business of a money-lender, though only among Christians and in Christian times a proscribed profession, has nowhere, nor at any time, been a popular one. Those who have the resolution to sacrifice the present to the future, are natural objects of envy to those who have sacrificed the future to the present. The children who have eaten their cake are the natural enemies of the children who have theirs. While the money is hoped for, and for a short time after it has been received, he who lends it is a friend and benefactor: by the time the money is spent, and the evil hour of reckoning is come, the benefactor is found to have changed his nature, and to have put on the tyrant and the oppressor. It is an oppression for a man to reclaim his own money; it is none to keep it from him. Among the inconsiderate -that is, among the great mass of mankind-selfish affections conspire with the social in treasuring up all favour for the man of dissipation, and in refusing justice to the man of thrift who has supplied him. In some shape or other, that favour attends the chosen object of it through every stage of his career. But in no stage of his career can the man of thrift come in for any share of it. It is the general interest of those with whom a man lives, that his expense should be at least as great as his circumstances will bear; because there are few expenses which a man can launch into but what the benefit of them is shared, in some proportion or other, by those with whom he lives. In that circle originates a standing law forbidding every man, on pain of infamy, to confine his expenses within what is adjudged to be the measure of his means, saving always the power of exceeding that limit as much as he thinks proper; and the means assigned him by that law may be ever so much beyond his real means, but are sure never to fall short of them. So close is the combination thus formed between the idea of merit and the idea of expenditure, that a disposition to spend finds favour in the eyes even of those who know that a man's circumstances do not entitle him to the means: and an upstart, whose chief

recommendation is this disposition, shall find himself to have purchased a permanent fund of respect, to the prejudice of the very persons at whose expense he has been gratifying his appetites and his pride. The lustre which the display of borrowed wealth has diffused over his character awes men during the season of his prosperity into a submission to his insolence, and when the hand of adversity has overtaken him at last, the recollection of the height from which he has fallen throws the veil of compassion over his injustice.

His

The condition of the man of thrift is the reverse. lasting opulence procures him a share, at least, of the same envy that attends the prodigal's transient display: but the use he makes of it procures him no part of the favour which attends the prodigal. In the satisfactions he derives from that use-the pleasure of possession, and the idea of enjoying at some distant period, which may never arrive-nobody comes in for any share. In the midst of his opulence he is regarded as a kind of insolvent, who refuses to honour the bills which their rapacity would draw upon him, and who is by so much the more criminal than other insolvents, as not having the plea of inability for an excuse.

Could there be any doubt of the disfavour which attends the cause of the money-lender in his competition with the borrower, and of the disposition of the public judgment to sacrifice the interest of the former to that of the latter, the stage would afford a compendious but a pretty conclusive proof of it. It is the business of the dramatist to study, and to conform to, the humours and passions of those on the pleasing of whom he depends for his success; it is the course which reflection must suggest to every man, and which a man would naturally fall into, though he were not to think about it. He may, and very frequently does, make magnificent pretences of giving the law to them: but woe be to him that attempts to give to them any other law than what they are disposed already to receive! If he would attempt to lead them one inch, it must be with great caution, and not without suffering himself to be led by them at least a dozen. Now I question whether, among all the instances in which a borrower and a lender of money have been brought together upon the stage, from the days of Thespis to the present, there ever was one in which the former was not recommended to favour in some shape or other-either to admiration, or to love, or to pity, or to all three-and the other, the man of thrift, consigned to infamy.

From Bentham's 'Commonplace Book.'

'O Locke first master of intellectual truth! without whom those who have taught me would have been as nothing! let thy blest spirit, if now it looketh down upon the affairs of men, acknowledge my obedience to the first great lesson of thy life, in the assertion of independence, and make its report in my favour to the Throne, the Judgment-seat above. Priestley was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth:-That the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation. Johnson is the pompous vamper of commonplace morality-of phrases often trite without being true. . . . When the truths in a man's book, though many and important, are fewer than the errors; when his ideas, though the means of producing clear ones in other men, are found to be themselves not clear,