My father, notwithstanding his abhorrence of the chaos of barbarism called English Law, had turned his thoughts towards the bar as on the whole less ineligible for me than any other profession: and these readings with Mr.Austin, who had made Bentham's best ideas his own, and added much to them from other sources and from his own mind, were not only a valuable introduction to legal studies, but an important portion of general education.

With Mr.Austin I read Heineccius on the Institutes, his _Roman Antiquities_, and part of his exposition of the Pandects; to which was added a considerable portion of Blackstone.

It was at the commencement of these studies that my father, as a needful accompaniment to them, put into my hands Bentham's principal speculations, as interpreted to the Continent, and indeed to all the world, by Dumont, in the _Traite de Legislation_.
The reading of this book was an epoch in my life; one of the turning points in my mental history.
My previous education had been, in a certain sense, already a course of Benthamism.

The Benthamic standard of "the greatest happiness" was that which I had always been taught to apply; I was even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on Government, written by my father on the Platonic model.

Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me with all the force of novelty.