15. DILLON: INFLUENCE OF BENTHAM 495 garded the existing system, might suppose that the work of amendment would readily follow when the defects were pointed out. But Bentham's voice for nearly fifty years, so far as England was concerned, was like that of one crying in the wilderness. Parliament did not heed it; the bar did not heed it ; nobody heeded it. For quite twenty-five years he seems to have had no following beyond Mill, senior, and a few other personal friends. Happily for him he had a competence and was able to give his days and nights to the work to which he had resolved to consecrate his life. Hap- pily, perhaps, also, he had no domestic cares or distractions, being without wife or children. Bowring preserves an af- fecting letter from which it appears that at one time in his earher life a lady had engaged his affections and rejected his proposals. In a letter written long, long years after- wards to the lady herself, the Recluse says : " I am alive,
- more than two months advanced in my eightieth year, —
- aaore lively than when you presented me in ceremony
- with the flower in Green Lane. Since that day not a
- single one has passed in which you have not engrossed
" more of my thoughts than I could have wished." He concludes : " I have a ring with some snow-white hair in " it and my profile, which everybody says is like ; at my " death you will have such another ; " and then playfully, perhaps pathetically, adds, " Should you come to want, it " will be worth a good sovereign to you." There is in this a genuine touch of nature! Alike in peasant, prince, poet, and philosopher, the human heart, once truly touched by love, becomes thence like the ocean, — rest- less and insurgent evermore. Amid all his engrossing pur- suits, in which he wholly shut himself out from society, and indeed from every person but a few friends whom he would occasionally meet when the toil of the day was over, the vision and the memory of the giver of the flower in Green Lane, pushing aside for the while Codes, Panopticons, Chrestomathias, Pannomions, and all such, were, he con- fesses, present to him every day. But although " along the
- plains, where Passionate Discord rears eternal Babel, the
- holy stream of wedded happiness glides on," it glided
