other, to edit the indigesta moles' of his own work on Judicial Evidence, which was brought into the world by John Mill in six octavo volumes-a most extraordinary literary exploit.* About the same time he began to write in the Morning Chronicle,' the Examiner,' and other periodicals; he formed societies for the discussion of philosophical and political questions, with the young men who dangled about Mr. Bentham; and he entered upon the life of a man of letters, which he continued for forty years to lead.

At this point it may be interesting to consider what his education had really been and to what it had led him. We have already related what he had learned and read; let us add what he had not learned, and what he did not acquire. In the first place, there is throughout this volume no mention whatever of his mother, and only a passing allusion to his brother and his sisters. His father was exclusively his master and his guide, one dares scarcely say, his friend. Mrs. Mill, his mother, was, as we remember her, a homely woman, a house-wife in the true sense of the term, without any pretensions to social refinement or high culture. James Mill, who always denounced early marriage and large families as a heinous offence against society and morals, had certainly not practised his own doctrine in this particular, and until he got his appointment in the India House-an appointment equally creditable to the East India Company and to himself he had a hard struggle for existence. Certain it is that (as may be inferred from his own silence about her) Mrs. Mill exercised none of the influence of maternal tact and tenderness over her eldest son she lived in absolute subjection to her husband, and when John Mill wrote in after years on the slavery of marriage, perhaps his opinions were affected by some of the

* In the review of this work published in this Journal (vol. xlviii. p. 462) the writer, who was a man of great wit and learning, commented with extreme severity on the slovenly and careless confidence with which this office of editor was performed. The cannon's roar in the text was, throughout, ludicrously accompanied by a discharge of the editor's pocket-pistol in the notes. There is a long reproachful howl, which reminds one of nothing philosophical and scholastic -except possibly it may be the accompaniment with which a litter of young cynics used to attend the lectures at Diogenes' Tub.' Time has softened us, and we no longer aim at quite so much asperity and sharpness. But we still think that Mr. Bentham made a very unfortunate choice of the editor of his furious attack on the legal profession and the law of England, for John Mill at the age of eighteen certainly knew nothing about either one or the other.

scenes of his childhood. But, in fact, he was not surrounded by kindly or genial family influences, and he was made to play the schoolmaster to the younger children. He had never known anything of the true charm of domestic life, which is the home of the affections.

Nor was the solitude of his early life broken by the cheerful intercourse of school. He was carefully kept apart from all his contemporaries, lest he should be corrupted by their prejudices or their example, insomuch that he was not himself aware that his own education and acquirements were not those of any other boy of his age. From this education, by Mr. Mill's system, everything was excluded which touched the imagination or the heart. Pope's Homer appears to have been the first English poem to which his son had access-this he read with avidity, but more for the versification than for the poetry. To this, somewhat later, was added a part of Thomson's Sea'sons.' It will not have escaped the reader that the one book, which was most carefully excluded, is that which has exercised the most powerful influence on the civilised nations of the world. The fervent piety of the Hebrew poets, the splendid imagery of the prophets, the narrative of Jewish history, the morality and example of Christ, and the philosophy of St. Paul-all based on the clearest idea of the Divine Majesty which it has entered into the heart of man to conceive-were closed to him. He was equally unacquainted with, and untouched by, the great lessons of Art. The power of the Arts, as the visible expression of ideal beauty and truth, was utterly unknown to the author of the Analysis of the Human Mind.' He had hardly a conception of the faculties to which they address themselves. The figure he had built up, out of the five senses, and called Man, was entirely devoid of the best gifts of human nature. Even Shakspeare was unintelligible to Mr. Mill, though he admired Milton, probably for the subtlety and sophistry of Satan and his angels. But Art was to his son a sealed book. Young Mill therefore at sixteen presented the singular and unattractive example of a youth without humour, ideality, or imagination;* with few, if any, domestic or social ties; with feelings absolutely crushed and compressed by a rigorous mental discipline; and with an entire absence of religion. But lest we be accused of exaggeration we must present the picture of this arid state of mind in his own language.

He mentions, however, that at thirteen, Campbell's poems, 'Lochiel,' 'Hohenlinden,' &c., gave him sensations he had never before experienced.

James Mill had in early life been a believer of Christianity, and, as we have already observed, he studied in Edinburgh for the Scottish ministry. The form of belief thus presented to his mind was therefore Calvinistic. It seems, however, from an inquiry which has been made in the University Library of Edinburgh, that the books he was most given to read there were of a sceptical character. The argument which destroyed his faith was a very succinct one. He was of the opinion of that King of Arragon who said that if he had had the making of the world, he could have produced a much better one. He could not reconcile the existence of evil with the omnipotence of a just and benevolent Creator; and as he could not unravel this inscrutable mystery, he yielded to the conviction that concerning the origin of things nothing whatever can be known (p. 39).

'His intellect spurned the subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open contradiction. The Sabaan, or Manichæan theory of a Good and an Evil Principle, struggling against each other for the government of the universe, he would not have equally condemned; and I have heard him express surprise, that no one revived it in our time. He would have regarded it as a mere hypothesis; but he would have ascribed to it no depraving influence. As it was, his aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up fictitious excellences,-belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human-kind,—and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful. I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression, that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. This ne plus ultra of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.'

It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Mill to inquire whether what was presented as the creed of Christianity by the Kirk of Scotland and its divines, really was the only lesson to be learned from the religion of the Gospel and the idea of God. But holding this entirely negative belief, he based the education of his son upon it.

'It would have been wholly inconsistent with my father's ideas of

duty, to allow me to acquire impressions contrary to his convictions and feelings respecting religion: and he impressed upon me from the first, that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known that the question, "Who made "me?" cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself, "Who made God?" He, at the same time, took care that I should be acquainted with what had been thought by mankind on these impenetrable problems. I have mentioned at how early an age he made me a reader of ecclesiastical history; and he taught me to take the strongest interest in the Reformation, as the great and decisive contest against priestly tyranny for liberty of thought. I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it: I grew up in a negative state with regard to it. I looked upon the modern exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned me. It did not seem to me more strange that English people should believe what I did not, than that the men I read of in Herodotus should have done so.'

The description which Mr. John Mill goes on to give of his father's character and opinions is so striking and instructive that we must extract another passage. It shows that having absolutely rejected the idea of revelation and condemned the whole fabric of Christianity, these philosophers would have moved the hands on the dial of time backwards for two thousand years, and restored a genuine paganism, borrowed from the tub of Diogenes and the sty of Epicurus.

'In his views of life he partook of the character of the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the modern but the ancient sense of the word. In his personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian, taking as the exclusive test of right and wrong, the tendency of actions to produce pleasure or pain. But he had (and this was the Cynic element) scarcely any belief in pleasure; at least in his later years, of which alone, on this point, I can speak confidently. He was not in-. sensible to pleasures; but he deemed very few of them worth the price which, at least in the present state of society, must be paid for them. The greater number of miscarriages in life, he considered to be attributable to the over-valuing of pleasures. Accordingly, temperance, in the large sense intended by the Greek philosophers stopping short at the point of moderation in all indulgences-was with him, as with them, almost the central point of educational precept. His inculcations of this virtue fill a large place in my childish remembrances. He thought human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by. This was a topic on which he did not often speak, especially, it may be supposed, in the presence

of young persons: but when he did, it was with an air of settled and profound conviction. He would sometimes say, that if life were made what it might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth having; but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility. He never varied in rating intellectual enjoyments above all others, even in value as pleasures, independently of their ulterior benefits. The pleasures of the benevolent affections he placed high in the scale; and used to say, that he had never known a happy old man, except those who were able to live over again in the pleasures of the young. For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct-of acts and omissions; there being no feeling which may not lead, and does not frequently lead, either to good or to bad actions: conscience itself, the very desire to act right, often leading people to act wrong.'

He thought life a poor thing.' Reduce human nature to its sensuous impressions, make man the child and creature of circumstances and associations, obliterate the feelings of the heart, degrade the objects of affection, deny the authority of conscience, extinguish all that is ideal in our nature, efface all that is divine, live in studied insensibility to the grace of Art and the tenderness of sympathy, despise pleasures, even the most pure; suffer no intensity of feeling, except that which you indulge in against all nobler natures than your own, substitute hatred for love as the mainspring of society, and when you have converted the world into this hideous dungeon, shut out from it the very idea of a benevolent Creator and a better existence, and you will perhaps agree with Mr. Mill that life on such terms is a poor thing, when youth is exhausted and curiosity satisfied.

'Das ist deine Welt. Ist das eine Welt?'

It is just as reasonable to despise life, because you have stripped it of everything that adorns it, as to reject the idea of a benevolent God, because God has not banished evil from the Universe. Well might Macaulay exclaim, as he did, after dissecting to the roots the system of Mr. Mill::

'And such is this Philosophy, for which the experience of three thousand years is to be discarded: this philosophy, the professors of which speak as if it had guided the world to the knowledge of navigation and alphabetical writing; as if, before its dawn, the inhabitants