He told me how he and others had looked upon me (from hearsay information), as a "made or manufactured man, having had a certain impress of opinion stamped on me which I could only reproduce; and what a change took place in his feelings when he found, in the discussion on Wordsworth and Byron, that Wordsworth, and all which that name implies, "belonged to me as much as to him and his friends. . . . He and I started from intellectual points almost as wide apart as the poles, but the distance between us was always diminishing: if I made steps towards some of his opinions, he, during his short life, was constantly approximating more and more to several of mine: and if he had lived, and had health and vigour to prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture, there is no knowing how much further this spontaneous assimilation might have proceeded.'

Sterling was at that time a fervent Christian; he was by temperament, as he himself expressed it, theopathic. He had recently held rather Evangelical opinions, and he was preparing himself to receive ordination--a step which he afterwards took and repented of. Maurice remained to the last a faithful minister of the Church of England, to whom Mill himself ascribes powers of generalisation and thought surpassing those of Coleridge himself; and certainly no man has in our time done more to reconcile the highest results of philosophical inquiry with the truths of Christianity and the tenets of the Churcha result which Mill, oddly enough, attributes to timidity of conscience and sensitiveness of temperament. To this it may be added, that at this period of his life Mill was deriving much from Coleridge, from Goethe and other German writers; and upon Carlyle's coming up to London in 1832, he was one of those who felt the influence of that remarkable person, who was regarded by the Benthamites as a mystic. We remember, as if it were yesterday, a curious scene which occurred in John Austin's drawing-room not long after Carlyle's arrival in London. The conversation turned, as was not unusual among these philosophers, on the want of evidence of a superintending Deity and Providence in the affairs of the world. Carlyle listened in silence for some time, and at length rolled forth in his broad Doric dialect: That would be to reduce the infinite 'creative music of the Universe to the monotonous clatter of 'an enormous mill, swung by the stream of chance and floating upon it a mill without a builder or a miller, grinding itself with a perpetual motion.' The tones of the seer sounded like the voice of doom. And though it was discovered the next day that the whole passage is not original but may be found in the works of Novalis, one admired the spirit which hurled this defiance at the unbelievers. John Mill might well say of

Carlyle, 'I knew that I could not see round him, and could never be certain that I saw over him, until he was interpreted to me by one greatly superior to us both-who was more a poet than he and more a thinker than I-whose own mind and nature included his and infinitely more' (p. 176).

Who then was this extraordinary being? That we shall presently discover, but as yet we are speaking of mortals.

The influence of the society we have described was certainly not unfelt by Mill. Indeed, he acknowledges that the current of European, that is to say, continental thought, and especially that of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, was now streaming in upon him, and he thus enunciates the conclusions to which it led him :

That the human mind has a certain order of possible progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an unlimited extent that all questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have, different institutions: that government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: that any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of history.'

John Austin, too, had recently returned from Bonn, where he had been preparing his own lectures on Roman Law for the London University, and he came back very much changed by what he had read of German literature and what he had seen of German society. His personal disposition was much softened; he was less militant and polemic; his tastes had begun to turn themselves towards the poetic and contemplative. Nor can we omit to note, although it has escaped Mr. John Mill's memory, that the accomplished wife of John Austin, no unworthy companion of those strong intelligences, had, from Mill's early years, been to him as a mother and a friend (he always addressed her by the affectionate term of mutter')—that she had continually lavished upon him that touching regard which plays the noblest part in education-and that he owed to her the culture of the most amiable part of his character. With the Austins, Mill had at this time, as he states, most points of agreement. As Austin advanced in life 'He cultivated more and more a kind of German religion, a religion of poetry and feeling with little, if anything, of positive dogma; while, in politics (and here it was that I most differed with him) he acquired an indifference, bordering on contempt, for the progress of popular

institutions. . . . He professed great disrespect for what he called "the universal principles of human nature of the political economists," and insisted on the evidence which history and daily experience afford of the "extraordinary pliability of human nature" (a phrase which I have somewhere borrowed from him); nor did he think it possible to set any positive bounds to the moral capabilities which might unfold themselves in mankind, under an enlightened direction of social and educational influences.'

Austin said, not very long before he died, I think, if I live 'long enough, I too shall be a Christian,' and the progress of his meditations tended steadily in the direction of larger toleration and a more definite faith. There is something touching in the efforts of these men to rise above the narrow conceptions of their earlier disbelief into a clearer atmosphere, and in several of them it was made with success. Indeed, so far was Benthamism from founding a school, that it perished with its first disciples: no such being as a Benthamite of the second generation is known to exist, and even the survivors of the original sect no longer belong to it. Yet these were the men who had started in life with a theory, which was to rally to it all educated minds and regenerate the world. Fifty years have passed, and where is their theory now? It did not last them half their own lives. John Mill himself had slipped out of the pale. The elder Mill remained steadfast in unbelief, denouncing with savage vehemence the deserters from his standard. Had John Mill followed the free and uncontrolled bent of his philosophical growth from this point in his life, or had he fallen into hands other than those which subsequently enchained him, we think that he might have arrived at far higher and more sound results in moral and metaphysical science than he ever attained to.

For it may here be remarked, that one of the distinctive peculiarities of John Mill was what, for want of a simpler term, we must call his receptivity. Seldom has so powerful a thinker been so subject to the unconscious influence of others: but in him sympathy was more powerful than individuality-he had more of the feminine principle that receives, than the masculine power which imparts, an impression. Hence through life, whenever his sympathies and affections were excited, his opinions followed. Originally a Benthamite among all Benthamites (for he knew no other society), we have seen him modified, by the touch of poetry and friendship, into something not far remote from Sterling and Maurice, So he passed successively under the influence of the St. Simonians, the Positivists, and the Socialists, each of whom might be iden

tified with some individual acquaintance, and from each of whom, with sceptical impartiality, he took something and rejected the remainder of their opinions. He was ever prone to form an exaggerated estimate of those he liked: his own intense self-consciousness and self-confidence were flattered and soothed by those who reflected his own doctrines; and he would, in perfect good faith, describe as men of the highest eminence persons of very secondary merit (it would be invidious to name them), who had in truth no better recommendation than that of being his own acolytes. Of the persons most nearly connected with himself, his father and his wife, he speaks in the language of extravagant panegyric. His father left no equal among men, and but one among women,' and so on. A man must have a very imperfect view of society and mankind to be so imposed upon by the magnitude of objects, because they are near him. The world abounds with people of considerable force of character and ability; but we distrust the transcendent genius men discover in their nearest connexions. The same amiable tendency was fatal to his judicial impartiality as a critic. Most of his literary criticisms were suggested by the desire to make known the merits of a friend, and his personal predilections are manifest in all of them; much more manifest, we hasten to add, than his antipathies, for he was singularly free from malice, and in controversy he was a noble and generous opponent.

It is the old story-the struggle to decipher the enigmas of life, written in a character you have not learned to read-the effort to open a lock with a key that does not fit it. From the dawn of philosophy-from the sophists of Greece down to the magician of the middle ages-whether truth was sought behind the veil of Isis or in the schools of Oxford-the result has been the same on the mind of the disappointed seeker, who turns, like Faust, from these phantoms of the brain, to the worship of nature, or by a sensual impulse to coarser indulgences. The great Poet of Germany has traced with a mas-. ter's hand the cycle of this eternal drama, which might be compared, scene by scene, with the pages and incidents of Mill's Autobiography. There is the same weariness of accumulated knowledge, the same visionary glow of sympathy with the future destinies of mankind-sinking at last into what might be called a vulgar passion, were it not that such a passion has an incredible power of glorifying the object of it. Mephistopheles exclaims when he sees his victim launched in pursuit of the butterfly, which is to perish in his grasp, that

a man in such a condition of mind thinks every woman a Helen:

'Du siehst mit diesem Trank im Leibe
Bald Helenen in jedem Weibe.'

Mill was, we believe, the subject of a similar hallucination: but it lasted for the remainder of his life; forty years did not exhaust it, marriage did not abate it, death did not interrupt it, and he has left behind him in these pages a memorial of her in whom his affections were concentrated, of which we shall only venture to say, that, if true, it would place her above all the men and women who have ever existed on the earth. Henceforth his life is a romance, and fiction itself would hardly venture upon so bold a creation of the brain.

6

It is not our duty to pass sentence upon this singular connexion of Mill with a lady, who was, when first he knew her, married to another man-a man described as upright, brave, ' and honourable, but without the intellectual or artistic tastes 'which would have made him a companion to her.' He was, we believe, a druggist in one of the suburbs of London. At that time Mill was five-and-twenty, the lady two years younger. The opinion of these persons on the obligations of morality differed widely from those which are based on Christian principles, and commonly received in Christian' society. Of his father, Mill says, 'In ethics, his moral feel'ings were energetic and rigid on all points which he deemed 'important to human well-being, while he was supremely indif'ferent in opinion (though his indifference did not show itself in personal conduct) to all those doctrines of common morality which he thought had no foundation but in asceticism and 'priestcraft' (p. 107). The views of the lady herself on these delicate subjects are thus described by him:

'She had a burning indignation at everything brutal or tyrannical, faithless or dishonourable in conduct and character, while making the broadest distinction between mala in se and mere mala prohibitabetween acts giving evidence of intrinsic badness in feeling and character, and those which are only violations of conventions either good or bad, violations which whether in themselves right or wrong, are capable of being committed by persons in every other respect loveable or admirable.'

These being the principles of his father and of the lady who (after the death of her first husband) became his wife, conformable as they were to the Utilitarian standard, it is natural to suppose that Mill saw no obstacle to the very intimate ties which united him to this being. When the prophet Mahomet found himself in a moral difficulty, he informed his followers