JEREMY, was born in Red-Lion Street, Houndsditch, London, on the 15th of February 1748. He received his boyish education at Westminster school, and entered Queen's College, Oxford, in the summer of 1760, when he was little more than twelve years old. It was ever a consolation to him, when he had formed the great leading opinions of his life, that he had been exempted, by his tender age, from the subscription of the Thirty-nine Articles. He had a precocious capacity for acquiring knowledge; and paternal vanity subjected him to a degree of educational forcing, accompanied by occasional displays of the acquisitions of the accomplished youth, which would not, according to ordinary anticipations, have been favourable to the progress of so original and self-constituted a mind as his became. The father, a sagacious attorney, who had realized a considerable sum by practice, brought up his promising son to the bar, as a sphere in which the fortunes of the family might in such hands rise to great state and eminence. There was, however, little permanent geniality between them, for the son turned into a course entirely his own, and disappointed all the glittering hopes of the ambitious father. In his own work, the Chrestomathia, Bentham has given a sketch, quite unconsciously, of that paternal ambition which he did not realize. "Of the apothecary," he says, "the ambition is to see his child a physician of the highest eminence; of the attorney, to behold in his son a lord chancellor; of the parish clergyman, to behold in his archbishop. The Lord Chancellor More makes his reverence and begs a blessing, as in the great hall of Westminster he passes by his father, then sitting in the Common Pleas; but the puisne judge, and not the lord high chancellor, is the great object of envy to a paternal breast."

That the son should turn out a philosopher and a law reformer, instead of realizing his father's practical anticipations, was perhaps the more mortifying, as the attorney, after the death of Jeremy's mother, married, in 1765, the widow of Dr John Abbot and the mother of Charles Abbot, afterwards Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord Colchester. The step-brothers were matched against each other; and as young Abbot went straight onwards through a course of practical advancement, the erratic self-will of his own son, destined by the father's ambitious anticipations for the woolsack, became the more mortifying.

With the exception of some trifling youthful efforts, Bentham's earliest publication was his Fragment on Government, which appeared in 1776. As of many of his subsequent works, the title contained nothing to lead men to a notion of its object, which in this instance was a political criticism on the fundamental principles of Blackstone's popular commentary on the law of England. Bentham was peculiar in almost everything; and though he was not deficient in an egotism and vanity of his own kind, yet his first publication, so far from being that nervous ordeal which it generally proves to other authors, was a matter of trivial and fugitive thought to him, for he was occupied, when he printed it, in elaborating his great work on the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Before it was completed he had been brought into a social circle which offered to him wider views and more genial immediate elements than the dusty ins of court or the money-making cronies who dined with his father. Lord Lansdowne, with the instinctive appreciation of high eminence which has been remarkable in his family, sought out the author of the Fragment on Government, and received him as a guest at Bowood. Bentham evidently relished the life he led there; he had the first society of his day to converse with, and could retire to write on ethics and jurisprudence when he pleased. The one romance of his life, indeed, centred in Bowood. Among the young ladies whom he met there, one, who must have been little more than a child when he approached middle age, made so deep an impression on his heart, that, more than twenty years afterwards, and when he had entered his fifty-fourth year, he made her a formal offer of marriage. The lady's answer—a refusal—has been preserved in the memoir of Bentham by Dr Bowring (Works, x. 419.) The rejection was conceived in a tone honourable both to the head and heart of the writer; and since death has removed all who were connected with this little incident in the life of a great man, it need, perhaps, no longer be concealed, that Miss Caroline Fox, Lord Holland's sister, was the person on whom Bentham had bestowed his affections.

Almost all the other events of Bentham's life are embodied in the preparation and publication of his books. With the exception of a tour in Russia which he undertook in 1785, and a subsequent visit to France, he lived the life of a hermit, admitting some chosen friends or pupils only to his table and study in Queen Square, Westminster, and generally labouring through all available hours unnecessary for rest and refreshment, at his varied works. He died on the 6th of June 1832.

It has not been deemed necessary to make this article a critical history of his works, since they are amply noticed under various heads of the Encyclopedia. There is especially a full critical history of the fundamental principles of his ethical philosophy in the Introductory Dissertation by Sir James Mackintosh (p. 393 et seq.) It is there mentioned, that Bentham's writings on jurisprudence do not come within the scope of the dissertation. These works, which he began with systematic inquiries into the principles of the science, were in his latter years a continuous elaborate application of these fundamental principles to the existing state of the law in Britain, or, in practical language, they were works on law reform. They have had a singular literary fate, of which the Rationale of Judicial Evidence—published in five octavo volumes in 1826—may be taken as a type. The object of this work was to show how much more rational it is for the tribunal which examines evidence to decide what is to be believed and what discredited, than for the legislature to separate credible from incredible evidence, and, permitting the tribunals to listen only to the former, exclude the latter class as tainted. His opinions, elaborately maintained, were in his day deemed so paradoxical that very few people would undergo the task of reading what he said. Through the exertions of these few readers, however, opinion has now been so entirely revolutionized, that, by the abolition of disqualifications, the principles of the *Rationale of Evidence* have been established by statute, and have become so familiar, as the only true and sound principles, that the book in which they are set forth is deemed unreadable, as a string of truisms. The same history attaches to many of his practical suggestions; and it would occupy considerable space to describe those projects first suggested from his utilitarian hermitage, which are now in legal force. He advocated a uniform system of poor-laws under central inspection and superintendence, and an organization for the protection of the public health by sanitary purification. He pleaded for the adoption of local courts, for the cheap conveyance of letters, for a register of merchant seamen, for the protection of savings-banks and friendly societies as the depositories of the savings of working people, and for many other projects with the realization of which we are now familiar. Bentham's works were chiefly known through the French abridged translation of Dumont, of which a collected edition was published at Brussels in 1829 in three large octavo volumes. A complete edition of his works in English was commenced in 1838, under the superintendence of his literary executor Dr Bowring, and completed in 1842, in eleven volumes, royal octavo.

Thomas, bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, was born at Sherborne, in Yorkshire, in 1513, and educated in Magdalen College, Oxford. On Edward VI.'s accession to the crown, he threw off the mask of popery, which, during the equivocal reign of Henry VIII., he had worn with reluctance. On the accession of Mary he was deprived of his fellowship, and retired to Basle in Switzerland, where for some time he expounded the Scriptures to the English exiles in that city, but returned before the death of the queen, and was appointed superintendent of a private congregation in London. In the second year of Elizabeth, Bentham was consecrated bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. He died in 1578. He had the character of a pious and zealous reformer, and was particularly celebrated for his knowledge of the Hebrew language.