LAW REFORM.
299
was once brought to light—making it bear new and often unexpected fruit, by their own culture—and thus acting rather the part of coadjutors and allies, than of mere pioneers to the march of discovery. Among this class, M. Dumont may well be reckoned the first; and he possessed all that didactic power by which it is so eminently distinguished. Of extraordinary industry, of great acuteness, enthusiastically devoted to the object of his elucidations, gifted with a rare power of illustration, no less able to methodise than to abridge—he not only thoroughly mastered all the views and all the details connected with his subject, but could at once perceive all its more remote connections, and all the capabilities which it possessed of leading to results often new to the original investigator. Whoever should suppose that the process by which Mr. Bentham’s greatest works were given to the world in their present state, consisted merely in his manuscripts being entrusted to M. Dumont, and their contents by him abstracted or drawn out into the form of printed treatises, would commit a very great mistake. It was much more that the latter learnt the subject from the notes of the former, and composed the treatises as he would have done had he been the discoverer of the matter, or as Mr. Bentham would have done had he possessed the same talent for explaining the results of his inquiries as for pursuing those investigations. It is perhaps more accurate to say that Mr. Bentham had abandoned, than that he never possessed this power of explaining; for his earliest works plainly show that he had the gift when he thought fit to cultivate it. Of late years, however, to he never could stoop to make his speculations level