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MIL

fellow-pupils was the late Joseph Hume, his staunch friend and fellow-worker in after years. His father's landlord, Sir John Stuart of Fettercairn, attracted by young Mill's intellect and character, sent him to the university of Edinburgh with the view of studying for the ministry of the Scotch kirk. At Edinburgh he distinguished himself by his proficiency in Greek scholarship, under Professor Dalzel, becoming an ardent student of Plato; and he was also much influenced by the ethical and metaphysical lectures of Dugald Stewart. He was licensed as a preacher about the close of the century, and became tutor to the marquis of Tweeddale. Abandoning his intention, however, of entering the kirk, he accompanied his early patron, Sir John Stuart, to London in 1800; and settling in the metropolis, where he married, he embarked in the career of authorship. He edited the Literary Journal, which failed; and he wrote for periodicals, among them the Edinburgh Review, to which he contributed articles chiefly on legislation, jurisprudence, and political economy. So early as 1804 we find him publishing an "Essay on the impoiicy of a country in the exportation of grain;" and in 1805 a translation, with copious notes, of Villers' once well-known Essay on the spirit and influence of Luther's Reformation. Freedom of thought and of trade were thus among the earliest subjects which occupied him, and with his natural tendencies and liberal Edinburgh training, he had all the qualifications for becoming a disciple of Jeremy Bentham. The opulent and proselytizing Bentham at once "took" to the grave, ardent, young Scotchman, in whom he saw the very man to diffuse and popularize his ideas. "I brought him," says Bentham of Mill, in a passage quoted in Bowring's memoirs, "I brought him and his family hither from Pentonville. I put them into Milton's house, where his family were all at ease. Afterwards I gave him the lease of the house he holds, and put it into repair for him. He and his family lived with me a half of every year, from 1808 to 1817 inclusive. When I took up Mill he was in great distress, and at the point of emigrating to Caen." Under these circumstances it was perhaps excusable if the older and wealthier of the two philosophers proved a little exacting. Mr. Mill wearied of the social shackles imposed upon him, and in the year 1819 addressed a letter to Bentham, published in Bowring's memoirs, in which professing great respect for the sage, and an unalterable attachment to his doctrines, he proposed that they should no longer live together. Bentham doubtless assented, but their personal and spiritual intimacy remained unimpaired. It was in 1817-18 that was published Mill's first and greatest book, his "History of British India," a work of very high, though of not very attractive merit. Clear, exact, laborious, impartial, it lacks the human interest and the picturesqueness of style that we are now accustomed to look for in history; and after such writing as Lord Macaulay's essays on Clive and Hastings, Mr. Mill's narrative of the same events appears frigid and lifeless in the extreme. But as a work of reference it is invaluable, from its precision and accuracy; and continued as it has been by the late Horace Hayman Wilson, it may wait long before it is superseded. Politically, it marks an era in the history of British India; for Mr. Mill applied in it his utilitarian theories to Indian government, and was thus a pioneer of Indian reform. In spite of this the East India Company at the suggestion, Mr. Mill himself thought, of Mr. Canning, in 1819 offered him a situation in the India house—the second in the examiner's office, and which gave him the control of the correspondence connected with the administration of the revenue. He afterwards became by seniority chief-examiner—an office perhaps equivalent to that of under-secretary of state for Indian affairs. In the midst of his new employments he did not abandon the literary promulgation of the theories to which he was attached. In 1821-22 he published his "Elements of Political Economy," embodying the views of Ricardo and Malthus; clear in its style and rigid in its treatment, but, as usual with Mill, discarding all notice of the accessory considerations which remove the relations between man and man from the exclusive domain of abstract science. In 1823 the Westminster Review was founded as an organ of Benthamite radicalism, and to it Mr. Mill was from the first a copious contributor. Before, too, he was appointed to the India-house, he had commenced contributing to the Supplement of the Encyclopædia Britannica his well-known articles on Government, Education, Jurisprudence, Law of Nations, Liberty of the Press, Colonies, and Prison Discipline, &c. The least useful, but the most notorious of these, was the Essay on Government, long the text-book of philosophical radicalism, and in which, with an air of purely scientific demonstration, a system of ultra-democracy was deduced from one or two well-known principles of human nature. The disregard of anything but naked theory evinced in this essay was made the theme of an article in the Edinburgh Review for March, 1829, by Lord Macaulay, founding on a collection of Mill's contributions to the Encyclopædia Britannica printed for private circulation. The Westminster replied, and Lord Macaulay rejoined in the same tone of semi-argument, semi-banter; but from a respect for the character of Mill, Macaulay excluded these from the collective editions of his essays published during his lifetime. In 1829 appeared Mr. Mill's "Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind," a laborious attempt to resolve all mental phenomena into their origin in pure sensation—a work which would have delighted Condillac, but which belongs to a vanished school of metaphysical speculation. His last publication was in 1835, and anonymous—a trenchant criticism on the Dissertation on the History of Ethical Philosophy, contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica by Sir James Mackintosh, to whom, as a decided whig in politics and somewhat of an eclectic in philosophy, the stern Benthamite bore no good will. A cough of several winters deepened into pulmonary consumption, by which he was carried off on the 23rd June, 1836, at Kensington, where he had lived for five years previously. He was a remarkable man in his day and generation; and for a thorough-going prosecution of his premises to their results, none of the philosophical radicals can compete with James Mill. Jeremy Bentham said of him—"Mill argues against oppression less because he loves the oppressed many, than because he hates the oppressing few;" and Bentham's biographer describes him as overbearing in conversation. But in an article in the Morning Chronicle, which appeared just after his death, from the pen of one who knew him well, he is pourtrayed as a man who "allowed no opportunity of doing good to escape. He had constantly present to his mind the idea that the moment a man comes to be occupied only with himself, he sinks nearly to the level of a brute; and his life was an effort to ameliorate the condition of his species, to diffuse knowledge and virtue, and contribute to swell the amount of human happiness. Whenever he came in contact with a young man of good dispositions and abilities, he exerted himself to place him in a situation in which he might have a sphere of usefulness suited to his character and qualifications. . . . High as were the intellectual qualities of Mr. Mill, he was still higher in his moral capacity. He was an utter stranger to the selfishness which, whether coarse or coated over with a polish, enters so largely into the character of too many English gentlemen, and communicates such apathy and indifference to it." According to this view, Mr. Mill endeavoured to realize in practice the favourite "greatest happiness principle" of his Benthamite creed.—F. E.

MILL, John, a learned critic, was born at Shap in Westmoreland, in 1645. He entered Queen's college, Oxford, as a servitor in 1661, and became A.M. in 1669. He was afterwards elected fellow and tutor, and on taking orders was regarded as a ready and gifted preacher. His first preferment was to be chaplain to Lamplugh, bishop of Exeter, who made him also a minor canon in his cathedral. In 1680 his college presented him to the living of Bletchingdon in Oxfordshire, and on his becoming D.D. he was appointed a royal chaplain. In 1685 he was elected principal of St. Edmund's hall, and he held this office till his death. Mill's great work is his edition of the Greek Testament, "Novum Testamentum Græcum cum lectionibus variantibus," &c. folio. Bernard the Savilian professor, had first drawn Mill's attention to the study of textual criticism, and he undertook the work about 1677, cheered by the patronage of Bishop Fell. Through the kindness of Archbishop Sharp of York he also obtained, in 1704, a stall of Canterbury, and the printing of his Testament was thus secured. Thirty years of his life were laboriously given to the preparation of his edition, and he survived its publication only a fortnight, being struck with apoplexy June 23, 1707. The prolegomena treat on the canon, the history of the text, and the plan of his own work. His text is that of Robert Stephens' folio edition of 1550, the various readings being placed below. Dr. Mill collected various MSS. himself, and studiously made use of previous collections of various readings, and of lists sent to him. He accorded high authority to the Vulgate, and he was often misled by being obliged to trust the Latin versions of