Note 33 — Last Words of Distinguished Men and Women. (continued 3)

Jeremy Bentham, when he firmly believed that he was near his last hour, said to one of his disciples, who was watching over him:—"I now feel that I am dying. Our care must be to minimize the pain. Do not let any of the servants come into the room, and keep away the youths. It will be distressing to them, and they can be of no service. Yet I must not be alone, and you will remain with me, and you only, and then we shall have reduced the pain to the least possible amount."

Bentham dreaded the silence and darkness of the grave, and wished to remain even after his death in a world of living men. He left his body to Dr. Southwood Smith who was to perform certain experiments to ascertain that no life remained. After these experiments the following disposition was to be made of his remains: "The skeleton Dr. Smith shall cause to be put together in such manner that the whole figure may be seated in a chair usually occupied by me when living, in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought in the course of the time employed in writing. I direct that the body, thus prepared, shall be transferred to my executor, and that he shall cause the skeleton to be clothed in one of the suits of black usually worn by me. The body so clothed, together with the chair and the staff in my later years borne by me, he shall take charge of, and for containing the whole apparatus he shall cause to be prepared an appropriate box or case, and shall cause to be engraved in conspicuous characters on a plate to be affixed thereon, and also in the glass case in which the preparations of the soft parts of my body shall be contained, as, for example, in the manner used in the case of wine decanters; my name at length with the letters ob: followed by the day of my decease. If it should so happen that my personal friends and other disciples should be disposed to meet together on some day, or days of the year for the purpose of commemorating the founder of the Greatest Happiness System of Morals and Legislation, my executor shall cause to be conveyed into the room in which they meet the case with its contents."

Humphry Repton, author of a delightful book on "Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture," requested that his remains might be deposited in a "garden of roses." He selected a small enclosure by the church of Aylsham, in Norfolk, one of the most lovely spots in all England, where were a number of roses and vines, as his last resting place. On the monument over his grave, after his name and age, are these lines written by himself:—