Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/332

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312
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

at intervals in the India House, but he had changed his residence, and was not available for four-o'clock walks. He could almost always allow a visitor fifteen or twenty minutes in the course of his official day, and this was the only way he could be seen. He never went into any society except the monthly meetings of the Political Economy Club. On some few occasions a little while after his marriage, Grote and he and I walked together between the India House and his railway station.

Only three of his reprinted articles belong to the period I am now referring to; but he must have written for the "Westminster Review" at least one or two that were not reprinted. I can not help thinking that the failure of his energy was one chief cause of his comparative inaction. As an instance, I remember, when he first read Ferrier's "Institutes," he said he felt that he could have dashed off an article upon it in the way he did with Bailey's book on "Vision"; and I can not give any reason why he did not.

He wrote for the "Westminster," in 1849, a vindication of the French Revolution of February, 1848, in reply to Lord Brougham and others. In French politics he was thoroughly at home, and up to the fatality of December, 1851, he had a sanguine belief in the political future of France, This article, like his "Armand Carrel," is a piece of French political history, and the replies to Brougham are scathing. I remember well, in his excitement at the Revolution, his saying that the one thought that haunted him was—"Oh, that Carrel were still alive!"

It was for the "Westminster" of October, 1852, that he wrote the article on Whewell's "Moral Philosophy." What effect it had upon Whewell himself I can not say; he took notice of it blandly in a subsequent edition of his "Elements of Morality," in reviewing objectors generally, omitting names. John Grote thought that, in this and in the "Sedgwick" article. Mill indulged in a severity that was unusual in his treatment of opponents, I could not, for my own part, discover the difference. Yet it is no wonder, as he told me once, that he avoided meeting Whewell in person, although he had had opportunities of being introduced to him (I suppose through his old friend Mr, Marshall, of Leeds, whose sister Whewell married).

In 1853 he wrote his final article on Grote's "Greece," in which he enters with enthusiasm into Grote's vindication of the Athenians and their democratic constitution. He was, quite as much as Grote, a Greece-intoxicated man. Twice in his life he traversed the country from end to end. I remember, when I met him at the India House after his first tour, he challenged me to name any historical locality that he had not explored.

In 1854 he had an illness so serious that he mentions it in the "Autobiography." It was an attack in the chest, ending in the partial destruction of one lung. He took the usual remedy of a long