place, I am pretty sure you cannot think of any other person whose whole life will be devoted to the propagation of the system.”  “There was during the last few years of Bentham’s life,” said James Mill’s son, “less frequency and cordiality of intercourse than in former years, chiefly because Bentham had acquired newer, and to him more agreeable intimacies, but Mr. Mill’s feeling never altered towards him, nor did he ever fail, publicly or privately, in giving due honor to Bentham’s name and acknowledgment of the intellectual debt he owed to him.”

Those extracts are made, not only in justice to the memory of James Mill, but as a help towards understanding the influences by which his son was surrounded from his earliest years.  James Mill was living in a house at Pentonville when this son was born, and partly because of the peculiar abilities that the boy displayed from the first, partly because he could not afford to procure for him elsewhere such teaching as he was able himself to give him, he took his education entirely into his own hands.  With what interest—­even jealous interest, it would seem—­Bentham watched that education, appears from a pleasant little letter addressed to him by the elder Mill in 1812.  “I am not going to die,” he wrote, “notwithstanding your zeal to come in for a legacy.  However, if I were to die any time before this poor boy is a man, one of the things that would pinch me most sorely would be the being obliged to leave his mind unmade to the degree of excellence of which I hope to make it.  But another thing is, that the only prospect which would lessen that pain would be the leaving him in your hands.  I therefore take your offer quite seriously, and stipulate merely that it shall be made as soon as possible; and then we may perhaps leave him a successor worthy of both of us.”  It was a bold hope, but one destined to be fully realized.  At the time of its utterance, the “poor boy” was barely more than six years old.  The intellectual powers of which he gave such early proof were carefully, but apparently not excessively, cultivated.  Mrs. Grote, in her lately-published “Personal Life of George Grote,” has described him as he appeared in 1817, the year in which her husband made the acquaintance of his father.  “John Stuart Mill, then a boy of about twelve years old,”—­he was really only eleven,—­“was studying, with his father as sole preceptor, under the paternal roof.  Unquestionably forward for his years, and already possessed of a competent knowledge of Greek and Latin, as well as of some subordinate though solid attainments, John was, as a boy, somewhat repressed by the elder Mill, and seldom took any share in the conversation carried on by the society frequenting the house.”  It is perhaps not strange that a boy of eleven, at any rate a boy who was to become so modest a man, should not take much part in general conversation; and Mr. Mill himself never, in referring to his father, led his hearers to suppose that he had, as a child, been in any way unduly repressed by him.  The tender affection with which he always cherished his father’s memory in no way sanctions the belief that he was at any time subjected to unreasonable discipline.  By him his father was only revered as the best and kindest of teachers.