JOHN STUART MILL. 711 



he gave up the evening to his hardest subjects. Of course this interval 

 should have been devoted to out-of-doors recreation. It is quite true 

 that both father and son were alive to the necessity of walking, and 

 practiced it even to excess ; in fact, counted too much upon it as a 

 means of renewing the forces of the braiu : their walks were merely a 

 part of their working-day— a hearing and giving of lessons. 



What with his own recital in the " Autobiography " and the minuter 

 details in the letter to Sir S. Bentham, and the diary, we have a com- 

 plete account of his reading and study in every form. The amount is, 

 of course, stupendous for a child. The choice and the sequence of 

 books and subjects suggest various reflections. His beginning Greek 

 at so early an age was no doubt due to his father's strong predilec- 

 tion for the language. What we wonder at most is the order of his 

 reading. Before his eighth year, he had read not merely the easier 

 writers, but six dialogues of Plato (the Thesetetus he admits he did not 

 understand). He was only eight when he first read Thucydides, as 

 well as a number of plays. At nine he read parts of Demosthenes ; at 

 eleven he read Thucydides the second time. What his reading of 

 Thacydides could be at eight, we may dimly imagine : it could be 

 nothing but an exercise in the Greek language ; and the same re- 

 mark must be applicable to the great mass of his early reading both 

 in Greek and Latin. At Toulouse we find him still reading Virgil, 

 of although five years before he had read the Bucolics and six books 

 the -^neid. Moreover, at Toulouse, his Greek reading was Lucian, 

 a very easy writer whom he had begun before he was eight ; the 

 noticeable fact being that he is now taking an interest in the writer's 

 thoughts and able to criticise him. It is apparent enough that his 

 vast early reading was too rapid, and as a consequence superficial. It 

 is noticeable how rare is his avowal of interest in the subjects of the 

 classical books ; Lucian is an exception ; Quintilian is another. He 

 was set by his father to make an analysis of Aristotle's Rhetoric and 

 Organon, and doubtless his mind was cast for Logic from the first. His 

 inaptitude for the matter of the Greek and Latin poets is unambiguously 

 shown ; he read Homer in Greek, but his interest was awakened only by 

 Pope's translation. His readings in the English poets for the most 

 part made no impression upon him whatever. He had a boyish delight 

 in action, battles, heroism, and energy ; and, seeing that whatever he 

 felt, he felt intensely, his devotion to that kind of literature was very 

 ardent. But whether from early habits, or from native peculiarity, he 

 had all his life an extraordinary power of rereading books. His first 

 reading merely skimmed the subject ; if a book pleased him, and he 

 wished to study it, he read it two or three times, not after an interval, 

 but immediately. I can not but think that in this practice there is a 

 waste of power. 



It was impossible for his father to test the adequacy of his study of 

 Greek and Latin works, except in select cases ; and hence it must have 



