and that he was himself educated without any religious belief, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. It follows from this premiss that every moral notion we have must be recast, and if it survive at all, must survive on different grounds. When Lord Bolingbroke's sceptical works were published after his death in 1754, by Daniel Mallet, to the great offence of what Boswell calls all 'well-principled men,' Dr. Johnson exclaimed, 'Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging 'a blunderbuss against religion and morality; and a coward 'because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger 'after his death.' These expressions, which were intemperate and offensive as regards Lord Bolingbroke, would be still less applicable to John Stuart Mill and to the volume before us. We feel rather grateful to him, than otherwise, for the mute deference he paid during life to a religion which he did not believe we know that one of his great objects in life was to raise a new standard of morality; and by the full disclosure of his real views after his death, he has enabled us to understand and to show the true cause of his disappointments, his shortcomings, and his failure-for failure it was, in a philosophical sense, to end by proving to himself that nothing could be known. The end of all other philosophies, deserving the name of philosophy, has been to explore and reflect the divine and the infinite in nature and in man. But the Utilitarian philosophy began and ended by excluding and denying the very existence of all that the senses fail to apprehend. That harsh lesson, branded upon him from infancy, was the doom of Mill. But let us trace the steps by which he learned it-the effects it had on his character-the efforts he made to escape from its ultimate consequences-and the state of mind into which he finally relapsed, under another powerful influence.

The Admirable Crichton was in the seventeenth year of his age when he challenged the whole University of Paris at the College of Navarre to dispute with him de omni scibili in twelve languages, and carried off the prizes of the schools as easily as he had won those of the tilt-yard. The attainments of young Mill were not so multifarious, for he had none of the gifts and graces of active life and his education was concentrated entirely on the drill of the understanding; but to this object the acquisition of the dead languages and the perpetual exercise of the argumentative faculties were judged by his father to be indispensable. At the earliest dawn of childhood he began to learn Greek, and his first recollection in life was the task of committing to memory Greek words. By

the time he was eight years old he had read Herodotus, Xenophon, part of Lucian and Isocrates. More marvellous than all, he had read, at seven years of age, six dialogues of Plato, including the Theætetus, which last, he observes with considerable naïveté, had better have been omitted as it was totally impossible he should understand it. But what of the others? Had he mastered them? Mill the elder, who was the sole tutor or task-master of his son, was perpetually exacting from him, not only the utmost he could do, but much more than was possible. He resembled the father of Frederic the Great and the father of Mirabeau-the old ami des hommes. We remember to have heard him say that nothing interested him so much as to watch the efforts of the childish intelligence, even in infants; and it would seem that, in enforcing this extraordinary system of education on his son, he was trying an experiment for the gratification of his own love of theory and love of power. It so happened that he had under his hand a child of remarkable intellect and endurance; but James Mill himself held the doctrine of Helvetius, that all men are born with equal faculties, and that their mental power or weakness is the mere result of education and circumstances.

The English course of reading prescribed to this prodigious boy was not less uncommon than the Greek. Before he was ten the young philosopher had read Robertson, Hume, Gibbon, Watson's Philip the Second, Hooke's Rome, Plutarch, Burnet, about forty volumes of the Annual Register, Mosheim, numerous books of travels, and a fair share of works of fiction. To these were added, before he was twelve, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Sallust, some plays of Terence, part of Lucretius and Cicero, the Iliad and Odyssey, all Thucydides, Demosthenes, Æschines and Lysias, several books of Polybius and Aristotle's Rhetoric, which he threw into the form of synoptic tables. This was independent of what he calls his private reading; and when he entered upon his eleventh or twelfth year he began to compile from Livy and Dion a history of the Roman Government, on which he wrote the matter of an octavo volume, extending to the epoch of the Licinian laws, intended, with characteristic prescience, to vindicate the policy of the Agrarian Laws and uphold the democratic party in Rome. Science, and especially chemistry, was not neglected, and he devoured whole treatises upon it before he had ever seen an experiment. At twelve his course of study became more severe. He plunged into the Logic of Aristotle, began with the Organon, read it to the Analytics inclusive, but profited little (he admits) by the Posterior Analytics, which does not

surprise us. As a condiment to this food he was indulged by his father with several Latin treatises on the scholastic Logic, and his recreation consisted in a daily walk with this awful and irritable parent, during which the scholar was expected to answer a perpetual fire of minute questions and to comprehend the utility of these gymnastics of the understanding.

We have transcribed shortly, from the volume before us, these astonishing statements, which would be literally incredible, if they did not rest on the assurance of a man of the purest veracity. They take away our breath. We still find it hard to believe that the mind of any child of ten or twelve derived nourishment from this strong meat; though we have no doubt that the prosecution of these studies did give to John Mill those habits of intense application, correct reasoning, and exact language which were of so much value to him throughout life.

Great as the tension of his mind was, and great as was his fear of his father's severity, he still speaks of his childhood as a happy one; and he observes with truth that boys are not to be induced to apply themselves with vigour and perseverance to dry and irksome studies by the sole force and persuasion of soft words. The more modern system of education is infinitely less brutal and tyrannical; but it is training up a race of men who will be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them. There is no true strength without discipline; and we attribute the apparent decline of the highest order of intellect in the liberal professions, which is really very striking at the present time, not to the nature or range of things taught, for that is extended and improved, but to the degree of application prescribed by the teacher and required of the scholar.

It is positively a relief to find that in 1817 the boy escaped occasionally from this ergastulum, to the pleasant grounds and picturesque halls of Ford Abbey, then occupied by Bentham; and in 1820 he enjoyed the fuller and still more grateful relaxation of a twelvemonth's residence in the south of France, with the family of General Sir Samuel Bentham. This visit gave him the command of the French language and a strong taste and affection for France and the French people, which survived till he sank into his own grave at Avignon. He also followed courses of lectures at Montpellier, and this year of his life was one of the few occasions he enjoyed of mixing in general society. The impression it made on him was not, however, a just one. Of English life he was indeed totally ignorant, but he had imbibed from his father the notion, afterwards confirmed by himself, that the moral tone of English society

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is essentially low, that our conduct is directed towards mean and petty objects, and that we are distinguished in this country by the absence of high feelings and lofty principles of action. Whereas in France, he says, "sentiments, which by comparison at least may be called elevated, are the current coin of human intercourse, and though often evaporating in professions, are kept alive in the nation at large by 'constant exercise;' for he thinks that the habitual exercise ' of the feelings leads to the general culture of the understanding down to the most uneducated classes of several countries on the continent, in a degree not equalled in England among the so-called educated-for the ordinary English, considered as spiritual beings, are reduced to a kind of negative 'existence. All this is singular language, for feelings' and 'spiritual beings' are hardly terms of the Benthamite vocabulary; and this reflection is not given as the result of young Mill's observation in 1820, but of his subsequent experience. We can supply a simpler and more direct explanation of the preference given by Mill to the moral tone of French society over that of England. In England, when high principles of action exist-and we think they do exist here, perbaps as much as in any other country-they are habitually based on religious convictions: in France they are mainly based on a lofty conception of personal importance and social obligations. The social law of one country is called duty: that of the other honour: but duty in the sense of obedience to the rules of religious authority and conscience has no place in the Utilitarian philosophy. Moreover, in France he saw a highly democratised society, just emerging from a revolution: in England he saw nothing but a society which he would willingly have consigned to the same dissolution.

This excursion to France undoubtedly breathed a new life into Mill. It was indeed the first glimpse which had been vouchsafed to him of the true life of the world: hitherto he had inhabited a solitary cell with hard labour. The climate of southern France, the aspect of the Pyrenean crests and the Mediterranean waves, the society of amiable women (for Lady Bentham and her daughters were accomplished persons), the enjoyment of natural scenery, and the love of botany, awakened in him feelings to which he was as yet a stranger, but which existed within him with great intensity. For it is one of the singularities of Mill's nature that he had in him a stream of sentiment and even romance, held in check by the severe discipline of his education, and his existence might be described as an effort to reach a more ideal state of being, though

chained down to the harshest form of reality. Our own personal acquaintance with him dates from his return from France in 1821; for we remember to have walked in that year with John Mill and his sisters up Constitution Hill to see Queen Caroline drive along Piccadilly with Alderman Wood at her side. Mill was then fifteen, and in spite of the astonishing acquirements of his age, there was about him nothing of a pedant, but many marks of an amiable and affectionate disposition. He was singularly kind to children younger than himself. We have a dim recollection of a little drama written for their amusement, and only the other day we saw amongst some old family papers a playful account of a child's performance out of Evenings at Home' (written in a very boyish hand), by Don Molino,' who had acted as prompter on the occasion. The autumn of the following year was spent with him on the coast of Norfolk, chiefly in collecting and arranging seaweeds, to which Mill gave their scientific names, for he was already employed in forming the great herbarium, which he has bequeathed, we understand, to the Botanical Museum at Kew. The pursuit of a rare plant was a passion with him, cost what it might of labour and fatigue, and the accomplishment of his search a moment of rapture. Both his father and himself were enormous and indefatigable walkers. They literally walked to extinction, and took no other form of exercise. About that time, indeed, gymnastics came into fashion, and Mr. Bentham converted his coach-house into a gymnasium. Nothing could be more ludicrous than to see the stern vigour of John Austin balancing on the bars, the agile Colls (Mr. Bentham's amanuensis), scrambling on the trapèze, and the younger Mill, who was delicate and almost effeminate in appearance, swinging from the beam.

These relaxations, however, were but momentary interruptions in that great course of study and mental labour which was to regenerate mankind. That was the rule of his order, and no monk ever adhered with more ascetic severity to the discipline of a monastery than did these Benthamites to the one purpose of their lives. Young Mill says in this very volume that he never doubted that his mission was to reformn the world, and accordingly he added to his former studies a complete course of political economy under his father and Ricardo, his father's friend-he read Roman Law with John Austin, with some faint notion that his calling in life might take him to the bar, though he had been taught to abhor and despise that farrago of nonsense the law of England-and when he was eighteen, Mr. Bentham selected this lad, and on