John Stuart Mill | Page 3

attainments, John was, as a boy, somewhat
repressed by the elder Mill, and seldom took any share in the
conversation carried on by the society frequenting the house." It is
perhaps not strange that a boy of eleven, at any rate a boy who was to
become so modest a man, should not take much part in general
conversation; and Mr. Mill himself never, in referring to his father, led
his hearers to suppose that he had, as a child, been in any way unduly
repressed by him. The tender affection with which he always cherished
his father's memory in no way sanctions the belief that he was at any
time subjected to unreasonable discipline. By him his father was only
revered as the best and kindest of teachers.
There was a break in the home teaching in 1820. James Mill, after
bearing bravely with his early difficulties, had acquired so much
renown by his famous "History of India," that, in spite of its adverse
criticisms of the East-India Company, the directors of the Company in
1817 honorably bestowed upon him a post in the India House, where he
steadily and rapidly rose to a position which enabled him to pass the
later years of his life in more comfort than had hitherto been within his
reach. The new employment, however, interfered with his other
occupation as instructor to his boy; and for this reason, as well
probably as for others tending to his advancement, the lad was, in the
summer of 1820, sent to France for a year and a half. For several

months he lived in Paris, in the house of Jean Baptiste Say, the political
economist. The rest of his time was passed in the company of Sir
Samuel Bentham, Jeremy Bentham's brother. Early in 1822, before he
was eighteen, he returned to London, soon to enter the India Office as a
clerk in the department of which his father was chief. In that office he
remained for five and thirty years, acquitting himself with great ability,
and gradually rising to the most responsible position that could be there
held by a subordinate.
But, though he was thus early started in life as a city clerk, his
self-training and his education by his father were by no means
abandoned. The ancient and modern languages, as well as the various
branches of philosophy and philosophical thought in which he was
afterwards to attain such eminence, were studied by him in the early
mornings, under the guidance of his father, before going down to pass
his days in the India Office. During the summer evenings, and on such
holidays as he could get, he began those pedestrian exploits for which
he afterwards became famous, and in which his main pleasure appears
to have consisted in collecting plants and flowers in aid of the botanical
studies that were his favorite pastime, and something more than a
pastime, all through his life. His first printed writings are said to have
been on botany, in the shape of some articles contributed to a scientific
journal while he was still in his teens, and it is probable, that, could
they now be detected, we should find in other periodicals traces of his
work, at nearly if not quite as early a period in other lines of study.
That he worked early and with wonderful ability in at least one very
deep line, appears from the fact that while he was still only a lad,
Jeremy Bentham intrusted to him the preparation for the press, and the
supplementary annotation, of his "Rationale of Judicial Evidence." That
work, for which he was highly commended by its author, published in
1827, contains the first publicly acknowledged literary work of John
Stuart Mill.
While he was producing that result of laborious study in a special and
intricate subject, his education in all sorts of other ways was continued.
In evidence of the versatility of his pursuits, the veteran author of a
short and ungenerous memoir that was published in "The Times" of
May the 10th contributes one interesting note. "It is within our personal
knowledge," he says, "that he was an extraordinary youth when, in

1824, he took the lead at the London Debating Club in one of the most
remarkable collections of 'spirits of the age' that ever congregated for
intellectual gladiatorship, he being by two or three years the junior of
the clique. The rivalry was rather in knowledge and reasoning than in
eloquence, mere declamation was discouraged; and subjects of
paramount importance were conscientiously thought out." In evidence
of his more general studies, we may here repeat a few sentences from
an account, by an intimate friend of both these great men, of the life of
Mr. Grote, which was published in our columns two years