265 
of Edinburgh, Session 1873 - 74 . 
1828, was an important event in Mr Mill’s life. Beauty in nature 
had a power over him then that was a foundation for his taking plea- 
sure in Wordsworth’s poetry. He became a Wordsworthian, and 
contended on this side against Koebuck in a Debating Society. His 
sympathies were carrying him more and more away from Ben- 
thamism, and towards a deeper and truer philosophy of life. 
He was brought into friendly companionship with Frederick 
Maurice, and John Sterling, and other admirers of Coleridge. He 
became one of Coleridge’s occasional visitors at Highgate, to whom 
I have heard that he was introduced by Sir Henry Taylor. After 
1829 he withdrew from the Debating Society, and pursued his 
studies and meditations in private, endeavouring thus to adjust 
the relation of his new ideas and sympathies to his old opinions. 
Indeed, after this he seems to have lost his early fondness for 
Societies for discussion : a few years ago he declined to connect 
himself with the lately-founded Metaphysical Society of London, 
having the opinion that valuable results in subjects of abstract 
philosophy are best attained in solitary dialectic, or with a single 
interlocutor. 
In the Society from which he withdrew, logical questions had 
been often discussed. About 1830 he began to put on paper 
thoughts on the theory of logic, and especially on the relations of 
induction to syllogism. Thus his own system of logic began to 
take shape. In political philosophy, too, he began to see that the 
truth was something more complex and many-sided than his early 
instruction had presupposed. This tendency was encouraged by a 
sympathetic study of the writings of the St Simonian school in 
France, and of the early works of Auguste Comte. Thomas 
Carlyle, too, had an effect upon him. He felt himself at an 
increasing distance from his father’s whole tone of thought and 
feeling. 
The year 1830, above all, was the commencement of what he 
considered the most valuable friendship of his life — that of Mrs 
Taylor, who, twenty years afterwards, became his wife, and whose 
influence over him, for good or evil, marked the whole remainder 
of his course. 
About 1832 and the two or three following years of political 
excitement, he published writings in the “Examiner” and other 
