afterward to attain such eminence, were studied by him in the early mornings, under the guidance of his father, before going down to pass his days in the India Office. During the summer evenings, and on such holidays as he could get, he began those pedestrian exploits for which he afterward became famous, and in which his main pleasure appears to have consisted in collecting plants and flowers in aid of the botanical studies that were his favorite pastime, and something more, all through his life. That he worked early and with wonderful ability in at least one very deep line appears from the fact that, while he was still only a lad, Jeremy Bentham intrusted to him the preparation for the press, and the supplementary annotation, of his "Rationale of Judicial Evidence." That work, for which he was highly commended by its author, published in 1827, contains the first publicly-acknowledged literary work of John Stuart Mill. While he was producing that result of laborious study in a special and intricate subject, his education in all sorts of other ways was continued.
A writer in the Times remarks: "He was, by all accounts, an extraordinary child; and it is within our personal knowledge that he was an extraordinary youth when, in 1824, he took the lead at the London Debating Club in one of the most remarkable collections of 'spirits of the age' that ever congregated for intellectual gladiatorship, he being by two or three years the junior of the clique. The rivalry was rather in knowledge and reasoning than in eloquence; mere declamation was discouraged; and subjects of paramount importance were conscientiously thought out."
Having retired from the India House in 1858, Mr. Mill went to spend the winter in Avignon, in the hope of improving the broken health of the wife to whom he was devotedly attached. He had not been married many years, but Mrs. Mill had been his friend since 1835. During more than twenty years he had been aided by her talents and encouraged by her sympathy in all the work he had undertaken, and to her rare merits he afterward paid more than one tribute in terms that have no equal for the intensity of their language and the depth of affection contained in them. Mrs. Mill's weak state of health seems to have hardly repressed her powers of intellect. By her was written the celebrated essay on "The Enfranchisement of Women" contributed to the Westminster Review, and afterward reprinted in the "Dissertations and Discussions," with a preface avowing that by her Mr. Mill had been greatly assisted in all that he had written for some time previous. But the assistance was to end now. Mrs. Mill died at Avignon, November 3, 1858, and over her grave was placed one of the most pathetic and eloquent epitaphs that have been ever penned. "Her great and loving heart, her noble soul, her clear, powerful, original, and comprehensive intellect," it was there written, "made her the guide and support, the instructor in wisdom, and the example in goodness, as she was the sole earthly delight, of those who
