his stay in France, is by far the most satisfactory record that is now to be had of his youthful studies.[1]
We have his reading and all his other occupations recorded day by day, together with occasional reflections and discussions that attest his thinking power at that age. The diary was regularly transmitted to his father. At first he writes in English; but, as one of the purposes of his visiting France was to learn the language, he soon changes to French. Printed in full it would be nearly as long as this article. I shall endeavor to select some of the more illustrative details.
He left London on May 15, 1820, five days before completing his fourteenth year. He traveled in company with Mr. Ensor, an Irish gentleman, a friend of his father's. The diary recounts all the incidents of the journey—the coach to Dover, the passage across, the thirty-three hours in the diligence to Paris. He goes first to a hotel, but, on presenting an introduction by his father to M. Say, he is invited to the house of that distinguished political economist. The family of the Says—an eldest son, Horace Say, a daughter at home, the youngest son, Alfred, at school en pension, but coming home on Saturday and Sunday, and their mother—devote themselves to taking him about Paris. He gives his father an account of all the sights, but without much criticism. His moral indignation bursts forth in his account of the Palais Royal, an "immense building belonging to the profligate Due d'Orleans, who, having ruined himself with debauchery, resolved to let the arcades of his palace to various tradesmen." The Sunday after his arrival (May 21) is so hot that he did not go out, but played at battledore and shuttlecock with Alfred Say. He delivers various messages from his father and Bentham, and contracts new acquaintances, from whom he receives further attentions. The most notable was the Count Berthollet, to whom he took a paper from Bentham. Madame Berthollet showed him her very beautiful garden, and desired him to call on his return; he learned afterward that he was to meet Laplace. On the 27th, after nine days' stay in Paris, he bids good-by to Mr. Ensor and the Says, and proceeds on his way to join the Bentham family, then at a chateau belonging to the Marquis de Pompi-
- ↑ Sir Samuel Bentham, the brother of Jeremy Bentham, was himself a remarkable man. His first service was in the Russian Army, where his soldiering was intermingled with suggestions for improvements of all sorts, and especially mechanical inventions, for which he had a pronounced genius. One of his proposals to the Russian government was the Panopticon prison, of which he was the originator. He came over to England in 1795, and received from our Government the appointment of Superintendent of the Dockyard at Portsmouth, where his talent for invention had scope in the improvement of the navy. He married the daughter of an early friend of his brother. Dr. John Fordyce, a physician in London, called by Bentham "one of the coldest of the cold Scotch"; this lady had the domestic supervision of Mill for more than a year. On retiring from the Dockyard, Sir Samuel bought an estate in the South of France for the sake of a residence there; and this led to his inviting Mill to reside with him, first at Toulouse, and afterward at Montpellier. The family consisted of one son, Mr. George Bentham, the well-known botanist, and three daughters—all older than Mill.
