370 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



afterward 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 afterward became famous, and in which his main pleasure ap- 

 pears to have consisted in collecting plants and flowers in aid of the 

 botanical studies that were his favorite pastime, and something more, 

 all through his life. 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 re- 

 sult of laborious study in a special and intricate subject, his education 

 in all sorts of other ways was continued. 



A writer in the Times remarks : " He was, by all accounts, an 

 extraordinary child ; and it is within our personal knowledge 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 decla- 

 mation was discouraged ; and subjects of paramount importance were 

 conscientiously thought out." 



Having retired from the India House in 1858, Mr. Mill went to 

 spend the winter in Avignon, in the hope of improving the broken 

 health of the wife to whom he was devotedly attached. He had not 

 been married many years, but Mrs. Mill had been his friend since 

 1835. During more than twenty years he had been aided by her 

 talents and encouraged by her sympathy in all the work he had 

 undertaken, and to her rare merits he afterward paid more than one 

 tribute in terms that have no equal for the intensity of their language 

 and the depth of affection contained in them. Mrs. Mill's weak state 

 of health seems to have hardly repressed her powers of intellect. By 

 her was written the celebrated essay on " The Enfranchisement of 

 Women " contributed to the Westminster Eeview, and afterward re- 

 printed in the " Dissertations and Discussions," with a preface avowing 

 that by her Mr. Mill had been greatly assisted in all that he had written 

 for some time previous. But the assistance was to end now. Mrs. 

 Mill died at Avignon, November 3, 1858, and over her grave was 

 placed one of the most pathetic and eloquent epitaphs that have been 

 ever penned. " Her great and loving heart, her noble soul, her clear, 

 powerful, original, and comprehensive intellect," it was there written, 

 " made her the guide and support, the instructor in wisdom, and the 

 example in goodness, as she was the sole earthly delight, of those who 



