270 j BURNHAM BEECHES. 
resulting from this state of things, at last induced the 
Grotes to leave the district in which they had spent 
twenty years. “The oft-recurring vexations incident to 
the position I occupied,” Mrs. Grote says, “namely that of 
a lady residing in the centre of a population dominated 
by a young servant, armed with the authority of the 
owner of all the Jand, manorial privileges, and cottages 
(nearly all) in my district, from whose arbitrary control 
no appeal could be made on account of Lady Grenville’s 
advanced age; these oft-recurring vexations made me 
She felt there was no redress. 
» 
feel very uncomfortable. 
Mr. Grote was not prepared apparently to take up 
the cudgels against Lady Grenville in the Law Courts. 
They left the district in consequence, in 1858, some 
years before the revived interest in Commons, and 
before the decisions in the Law Courts which might 
have fortified their position against Lady Grenville. 
The incident of Mrs. Grote’s connection with 
Burnham Common is the more important from the fact, 
as she told me later, a short time before her death, that 
she had been the cause of a change of opinion in John 
Stuart Mill on the subject of Commons. Mill, like 
the earlier economists, had been strongly in favour of 
inclosing them, with a view to the greater production 
of the soil; but she was able to point out to him, from 
her personal experience, the importance of common 
rights to the labouring people; her narrative of what 
occurred in Burnham completely turned the current of 
his views on the subject, and was the cause of the 
active support which he gave to the preservation 
