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Subject Area: Political Theory
Subject Area: Law

Bentham to Lord Lansdowne. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 10 (Memoirs Part I and Correspondence) [1843]

Edition used:

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 10.

Part of: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols.

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Bentham to Lord Lansdowne.

“The Comparative Estimate is, after all, not Porter’s, but a Dr Ewart’s, a physician, a brother of the diplomatic Ewart. Porter is the ‘commercial friend’ therein spoken of, as having furnished the materials. Porter is a Scotchman. He and the Ewarts were school-fellows. Porter was a schoolmaster, somewhere in Great Britain—then a language-master in Petersburg; then crept by degrees there into a commercial house.

“Nothing can exceed the contempt with which the Russians treat Pitt’s skill in foreign politics. W. told a certain person, P. had been making proposals to the emperor, silly beyond expression, which he would not mention then, but would in six weeks’ time.

“What concerns C. J. Fox, was probably misconceived.

“My brother without me, possibly; I, not without him certainly; with him, possibly, now that I have got a license. I wonder whose idea it was that he and I were like Castor and Pollux; or like Lord and Lady Pembroke; or like the ci-devant Marquis and Marquise de tel ou de tel, de tel lieu, not liking to be at the same place:

“I wonder what ladies there are at Bowood; and whether there be any part of the summer when a man would stand a chance of seeing them all three. I worship but at one altar: but that, as everybody knows, has three sides to it. As to comparisons between that and another sex, whoever makes them, none have ever been made by me. Comparisons, where there is competition, are, according to the proverb, odious: when there is none, incongruous.

“The passage about ‘lodging principles’ is Arabic to me. I have sent it to the decipherer’s.

“While they smile—if, peradventure, they continue to smile—I will console myself as well as I can under other mortifications: not as being indifferent to them, nor conscious of having deserved them, but because I cannot help it. Those who meet with mishap, look around them for consolation, which, wherever they happen to meet with it, ought not to be grudged. I hope this will not be mistaken.

“Having said thus much, should I ever find myself again in a place where, to confess the truth but plainly with myself, I have no great business, I shall obey injunctions, and neither say, nor look, nor think anything about old kindnesses: while on one part, they cannot be too thoroughly forgotten; on the other, what is past is past, and not to be recalled.”

“Hendon,
Wednesday,June 29, 1791.

“Poor Louis! he has done himself up at a fine rate! To get upon a perch, and cackle out, ‘I have been, not only a coward, but a hypocrite, for these two years! and that before he was out of the cage! Rare sport for the Paynes and the Robespierres. I wonder how Mr Burke’s little flirtation with Antoinette stands at present. As to the proclamation, it was not by her, but by one of her necessary women. But the loss of Mirabeau is sadly felt in the insipid, undignified, ill-reasoned answer.”

Sir R. P. Carew writes from Antony House, near Plymouth Dock, June 14, 1791:—