reform, on the codification of laws, on special legislative measures, on a vast variety of subjects.  His style, at first simple and direct, became turgid, involved, and obscure.  He was in the habit of beginning the same work independently many times, and usually drove several horses abreast.  He was very severe in his strictures upon persons in authority, and upon current notions; and was constantly being warned that if he should publish such or such a work he would surely be prosecuted.  Numerous books were therefore not published until many years after they were written.  His literary style became so prolix and unintelligible that his disciples—­Dumont, Mill, and others—­came to his rescue, and disentangled and prepared for the press his innumerable pamphlets, full of suggestiveness and teeming with projects of reform more or less completely realized since.  His publications include more than seventy titles, and he left a vast accumulation of manuscript, much of which has never been read.

He had a wide circle of acquaintances, by whom he was held in high honor, and his correspondence with the leading men of his time was constant and important.  In his later years he was a pugnacious writer, but he was on intimate and jovial terms with his friends.  In 1814 he removed to Ford Abbey, near Chard, and there wrote ‘Chrestomathea,’ a collection of papers on the principles of education, in which he laid stress upon the value of instruction in science, as against the excessive predominance of Greek and Latin.  In 1823, in conjunction with James Mill and others, he established the Westminster Review, but he did not himself contribute largely to it.  He continued, however, to the end of his life to write on his favorite topics.

Robert Dale Owen, in his autobiography, gives the following description of a visit to Bentham during the philosopher’s later years:—­

“I preserve a most agreeable recollection of that grand old face, beaming with benignity and intelligence, and occasionally with a touch of humor which I did not expect....  I do not remember to have met any one of his age [seventy-eight] who seemed to have more complete possession of his faculties, bodily and mental; and this surprised me the more because I knew that in his childhood he had been a feeble-limbed, frail boy....  I found him, having overpassed by nearly a decade the allotted threescore years and ten, with step as active and eye as bright and conversation as vivacious as one expects in a hale man of fifty....

“I shall never forget my surprise when we were ushered by the venerable philosopher into his dining-room.  An apartment of good size, it was occupied by a platform about two feet high, and which filled the whole room, except a passageway some three or four feet wide, which had been left so that one could pass all round it.  Upon this platform stood the dinner-table and chairs, with room enough for the servants to wait upon us.  Around the head of the table was a huge screen, to protect the old man, I suppose, against the draught from the doors....

     “When another half-hour had passed, he touched the bell
     again.  This time his order to the servant startled me:—­