 Once Bentham’s ideas began to take hold in the early nineteenth century, critics were not hard to find. In his Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (1810), Benjamin Constant, who admired Bentham’s originality and praised his contributions to political economy and penal law, questioned the vagueness of the concept of utility, which he thought susceptible to many different definitions and pregnant with danger as a principle of policy. Constant preferred the prescriptions of natural law as the philosophical basis for government. William Hazlitt, who was for a time Bentham’s tenant, satirised him as a venerable anchorite in the quiet of his cell reducing law to a system and the mind of man to a machine, divorced from the life of spirit, imagination, passion and sentiments of love, a philosophy “fit neither for man nor beast” (1826, 184). Thomas Carlyle summed up the general perception of the crassness of “Benthamee utility” as the “pig-philosophy”, nothing more than “virtue by Profit and Loss” (1840, 65). Other critics, like the Whig reformers James Mackintosh and T.B. Macaulay, ready to follow Bentham’s lead in law reform, were also dismayed by the diminished view of human nature that underpinned his philosophy and attacked the radical proposals for political reform that emanated from the utilitarian camp (Lively and Rees 1978). The Anglican divine John Colls, for a time Bentham’s secretary before he took holy orders, published an intemperate exposé of his former employer as a selfish and bigoted subversive in Utilitarianism Unmasked (1844), a work which proved popular among his fellow clergymen.