The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• The Autobiography
• Literary Essays
• Appendices
• Textual Principles and Methods
• Acknowledgments
• Autobiography and Literary Essays
• Autobiography Parallel Reading Texts of the Early Draft and the Columbia Ms
• Editors’ Note
• [early Draft]
• [yale Fragment]
• Chapter I: Childhood, and Early Education
• Chapter II: Moral Influences In Early Youth. My Father’s Character and Opinions
• Chapter III: Last Stage of Education, and First of Self-education
• Chapter IV: Youthful Propagandism. the Westminster Review
• Chapter V: A Crisis In My Mental History. One Stage Onward
• Chapter VI: Commencement of the Most Valuable Friendship of My Life. My Father’s Death. Writings and Other Proceedings Up to 1840
• Chapter VII: General View of the Remainder of My Life
• Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review 1824
• Editors’ Note
• Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review
• On Genius 1832
• Editors’ Note
• On Genius
• Thoughts On Poetry and Its Varieties 1833
• Editors’ Note
• Thoughts On Poetry and Its Varieties
• Writings of Junius Redivivus [i] 1833
• Editors’ Note
• Writings of Junius Redivivus [i]
• Writings of Junius Redivivus [ii] 1833
• Editors’ Note
• Writings of Junius Redivivus [ii]
• Views of the Pyrenees 1833
• Editors’ Note
• Views of the Pyrenees
• Tennyson’s Poems 1835
• Editors’ Note
• Tennyson’s Poems
• Aphorisms: Thoughts In the Cloister and the Crowd 1837
• Editors’ Note
• Aphorisms: Thoughts In the Cloister and the Crowd
• Ware’s Letters From Palmyra 1838
• Editors’ Note
• Ware’s Letters From Palmyra
• Writings of Alfred De Vigny 1838
• Editors’ Note
• Writings of Alfred De Vigny
• Milnes’s Poems 1838
• Editors’ Note
• Milnes’s Poems
• Milnes’s Poetry For the People 1840
• Editors’ Note
• Milnes’s Poetry For the People
• Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome 1843
• Editors’ Note
• Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome
• Letter to the Editor of the Edinburgh Review, On James Mill 1844
• Editors’ Note
• Letter to the Editor of the Edinburgh Review, On James Mill[*]
• Appendices
• Appendix A: Juvenilia
• The History of Rome By John Stuart Mill Aged 6½ Yrs
• Appendix B: Mill’s Early Reading, 1809-22
• Appendix C: Mill’s Early Writing, 1811?-22
• Appendix D: A Few Observations On Mr. Mill (1833)
• Appendix E: Browning’s Pauline (1833)
• Appendix F: Editorial Notes In the London and Westminster Review
• Appendix H: Helen Taylor’s Continuation of the Autobiography
• Appendix I: Bibliographic Index of Persons and Works Cited, With Variants and Notes

Appendix F

Editorial Notes in the London and Westminster Review

1.

LR, II (L&WR, XXXI), No. 3 (Oct., 1835), 194n.

This signature should also have been appended to the article in the last number of the Review, headed “Government and People of Austria,” which was inadvertently published without a signature.

[This note, unsigned, is attached to the signature, “Z.” (J. H. Garnier), at the end of the article, “Character and Manners of the German Students” (pp. 159-94). The earlier article by Garnier appeared in LR, I (L&WR, XXX), No. 2 (July, 1835), 487-512.]

2.

LR, II (L&WR, XXXI), No. 3 (Oct., 1835), 228n.

As this article is not, with respect to the question of ecclesiastical establishments, conceived in exactly the same spirit with the article in the second Number of the London Review, entitled “The Church and its Reform,” it may be well to remind the reader, that for neither article are the contributors to the Review collectively responsible. Both writers agree in their abhorrence of a dominant and sectarian church; but the one would establish a church non-sectarian, the other would endow impartially all sects. The former remedy may be the most desirable; and yet the latter, under some combinations of circumstances, the most practicable.

[This note, signed “Ed.,” and enclosed in square brackets, was appended to the title of “The Irish Church Question” (pp. 228-69), by “C.C.” (George Cornewall Lewis). The earlier article, Vol. I, No. 2 (July, 1835), 257-95, was by “P.Q.” (James Mill). See also no. 8 below.]

3.

LR, II (L&WR, XXXI), No. 4 (Jan., 1836), 389n-90n.

The following article is the first of a series of papers on contemporary French literature, with which we have been favoured by one of the first writers and critics in France. We state this, partly because the reader may be aided in understanding the article itself, if the fact of its French origin be previously known to him; and partly because, it being one of our objects to place before our readers a true picture of the present state of the French mind, this object is promoted by apprising them that the present article is itself a specimen, as well as in some degree a description, of that state.

One of the most palpable deficiencies in the principal English Reviews (a deficiency by no means supplied by those which call themselves Foreign) is the absence of any systematic attention either to the philosophy, the literature, or the politics of foreign countries—though the two former at least are in a state of far greater activity in several other nations than among ourselves. We intend to deviate from the example of our predecessors, by touching on these subjects, as with greater frequency, so with more modesty; for they, we observe, when, at long intervals, they condescend to bestow some portion of their notice upon the literature of any other country, never for an instant doubt their own perfect capacity to decide en souverains upon the merits of it; while we freely confess, that although the philosophy of a foreign country may be correctly appreciated by any person capable of estimating that of his own, in characterising the finer parts of its literature we often find it indispensable to call in foreign assistance. We have no fear that this admixture should increase the difficulty of maintaining throughout this work as much unity of tone as our plan requires, or as is in fact maintained by any other Review. Co-operation can be carried on between persons of similar principles in different countries, as well as in the same country; and the judgment of the editors will be exercised in all cases equally, to exclude whatever is not in harmony with the general spirit in which this Review is conducted.

We are, in like manner, enabled to promise a succession of articles on Society and Civilization in France, from a hand perhaps the most competent in Europe to the task; which series, together with the present, will, we believe, exhibit a juster and completer view of France as it exists in our times, than the English reader has ever yet had an opportunity of obtaining.

[This note, signed “Ed.,” is appended to the bibliographic details of the heading of “Victor Hugo” (pp. 389-417), by “D.N.” (Jean Marie Napoléon Désiré Nisard), who contributed two further articles, “Early French Literature,” L&WR, III & XXV (July, 1836), 514-58 (see no. 9 below), and “Lamartine,” L&WR, IV & XXVI (Jan., 1837), 501-41. The reference in the concluding paragraph is to Alexis de Tocqueville, who, in the event, contributed only one article; see no. 5 below.]

4.

L&WR, III & XXV, No. 1 (Apr., 1836), 28n.

It seems desirable, at the beginning of this article, to inform the reader that the plural pronoun is employed in conformity with established custom; and that, as it will be readily perceived, in regard to certain statements, both matters of fact and expressions of sentiment have a direct reference to the personal knowledge and individual feelings of the writer.

[This note, unsigned, is appended to “We”, the first word of “Godoy, Prince of Peace” (pp. 28-60), signed “W.” (Joseph Blanco White). Since the note bears upon policy (cf. nos. 2, 13, 15, 22), and cannot have been the author’s, it seems reasonable to assign it to Mill.]

5.

L&WR, III & XXV, No. 1 (Apr., 1836), 137n.

See note prefixed to the article on Victor Hugo, in the fourth number of the London Review.

[This note, unsigned, is appended to the title, “Political and Social Condition of France: First Article” (pp. 137-69), signed “Δ.” (Alexis de Tocqueville). There were no further articles by him. See no. 3 above.]

6.

L&WR, III & XXV, No. 1 (Apr., 1836), 220n.

Tests, or declarations, as well as oaths, are equally prohibited in the statute which Lord Kenyon was desirous to evade.

[This note, signed “Ed.,” is appended to the remark by George Kenyon, 2nd Baron Kenyon, “we decidedly take no oath,” in a letter concerning Orange Society ceremonies to Colonel Fairman, given in an appendix (consisting of correspondence pertaining to the article) to “Orange Conspiracy” (pp. 181-201), by “W.M.” (William Molesworth). This appendix (pp. 201-23) is unsigned, but was clearly supplied by Molesworth. The footnote may be presumed to be Mill’s; Molesworth (who might be considered to be the “editor” of this correspondence) supplied other footnotes, unsigned, and it appears that Mill wished to call attention to what Molesworth had explicitly affirmed in a footnote (pp. 484n-5n) to his earlier article, “Orange Societies,” LR, II (Jan., 1836), 480-513, that Kenyon was trying to evade 57 Geo. III, c. 19, “An Act for the More Effectually Preventing Seditious Meetings and Assemblies” (31 Mar., 1817), §25, which cites 37 Geo. III, c. 123, and 52 Geo. III, c. 104.]

7.

L&WR, III & XXV, No. 1 (Apr., 1836), 278n.

In an article on a work of Colonel Charles Napier on the Ionian Islands, in the first volume of the London Review, p. 316, it is stated, “that without any personal interest, and with no great similarity of political sentiment, Colonel Napier, at the request of several intended settlers, applied for the government of the new colony of South Australia;” and it was added, “that disagreements had subsequently taken place which had prevented Colonel Napier from being intrusted with the task.” There are some errors in these passages which may mislead the reader respecting the conduct of Colonel Napier. 1. No application for the office of governor was made by Colonel Napier; he, upon the contrary, having distinctly refused to apply for it. 2. The office was refused by Colonel Napier on account of the Government having declined to comply with certain conditions, made by him, upon public grounds, preliminary to the execution of its duties. 3. If Colonel Napier had chosen to have consulted his own private advantage, his interest was sufficiently powerful to have enabled him to have done so. He, however, though most anxious to have accepted the appointment offered to him, never even asked the amount of the salary connected with it. The character of the remarks on Colonel Napier’s work on the Ionian Islands will sufficiently show that these errors were perfectly accidental, and their correction, it is to be hoped, will destroy every inference prejudicial to the person whom they may possibly affect.

[This note, headed “Note,” and signed “Editor of the l. and w.r.,” appeared at the bottom of the final printed page of the number. The quotations are from the concluding paragraph of “Θ.” (Charles Buller), “Napier on the Ionian Islands,” LR, 1 (July, 1835), 295-316, reviewing Charles James Napier, The Colonies: Treating of Their Value Generally—Of the Ionian Islands in Particular (London: Boone, 1833).]

8.

L&WR, III & XXV, No. 2 (July, 1836), 333n.

Mr. Lewis has appended to his work a Paper on the Irish Church Question, which was first published in the London Review, No. III. It gives us much pleasure to have this opportunity of making our public acknowledgments to him for that valuable contribution to our journal.

[This note, unsigned, is appended to “G.” (George John Graham), “Poor-Laws in Ireland” (pp. 332-65), at the place where Graham begins his description of George Cornewall Lewis’s On Local Disturbances in Ireland; and on the Irish Church Question (London: Fellowes, 1836), which includes Lewis’s “The Irish Church Question,” reprinted from LR, II (Oct., 1835), 228-69. See no. 2 above.]

9.

L&WR, III & XXV, No. 2 (July, 1836), 514n.

The accomplished author of the article on “Victor Hugo” in the fourth number of the London Review, (M. Nisard, well known by his Etudes sur les Poètes Latins de la Décadence, and other critical writings of great merit,) has allowed us the privilege of being the first to publish what will hereafter constitute one of the most interesting chapters in a history of French literature, which he is preparing for the Dictionnaire de la Conversation et de la Lecture, a popular Encyclopædia greatly esteemed in France, and conducted, as the name imports, on a plan suggested by that of the celebrated German Conversations-Lexicon.

[This note, signed “Ed.,” is appended to the title of “D.N.” (Nisard), “Early French Literature” (pp. 514-58). (For his “Victor Hugo,” see no. 3 above.) Nisard, whose Etudes de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence appeared (Paris: Gosselin) in 1834, used “Early French Literature” in his “Histoire de la littérature ancienne et moderne,” s.v. France, §IV, in Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture, 68 vols. (London and Paris: Bossange, 1833-51), Vol. XXVIII, pp. 211-88. It is not clear which of the German encyclopaedias of similar title Mill had in mind as the model for the Dictionnaire, but a likely one is the Allgemeine deutsche Real-Encyclopädie für die gebildeten Stände. (Conversations-Lexicon.), 10 vols. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1819-20).]

10.

L&WR, IV & XXVI, No. 1 (Oct., 1836), 205n.

There is greater excuse for the conduct of the members referred to than the writer regards. During the first reformed Parliament the Whigs relied so entirely upon their majorities, that it was most difficult for any of those who opposed them, who were not leaders among the Tories, to gain the slightest attention to any proposition, however sound or excellent it might be.

[This note, signed “Ed. l. and w.r.,” is appended to “D.S.” (Thomas Southwood Smith), “The Factories” (pp. 174-215), at the point where Smith is arguing that Members of Parliament were at fault in not taking an active part in forwarding the recommendations of the report of the Central Board to improve the education (as well as the physical condition) of the factory operatives.]

11.

L&WR, IV & XXVI, No. 2 (Jan., 1837), 390n-1n.

The respect due to the excellent collaborateur and expounder of Bentham compels the Editor of this Review not to assist in giving currency to the remarks in the text, without recording his dissent from such portion of them as seems to impute to M. Dumont a conceited assumption of merits not his own. That M. Dumont did not thoroughly comprehend Mirabeau is possible, and, considering the dissimilar characters of the two men, not improbable: but howsoever he may have misjudged him, he would have done just the same if any one else instead of himself had been the party concerned. That he was biassed by vanity will not be the opinion of any one who considers how he comported himself in his relation to Mr. Bentham, a man whom he was far better qualified thoroughly to comprehend; between whom and the public he constituted himself an interpreter, with the completest abnegation of even such claims to originality as he might legitimately have preferred, and of all pretension to praise for himself as distinguished from his author. And after all, the theory respecting Mirabeau, which is held up to well-merited ridicule in the text, was made, as the writer himself admits, not by M. Dumont, but for him, by foolish reviewers, very partially borne out by the authority of M. Dumont himself.

[This note, signed “Ed.,” is appended to this sentence (p. 390): “It is true, the whim he had of looking at the great Mirabeau as a thing set in motion mainly by him (M. Dumont) and such as he, was one of the most wonderful to be met with in psychology.” In the article, “Memoirs of Mirabeau” (pp. 382-439), “C.” (Carlyle) reviewed Souvenirs sur Mirabeau (London: Bell, 1832), by Pierre Etienne Dumont, whose translated editions of Bentham’s major works had greatly influenced the young Mill (see pp. 67-9 above). Carlyle, having said that Dumont’s book “was hailed by a universal choral blast from all manner of reviewers and periodical literatures” throughout Europe, goes on, as Mill indicates, to say, “M. Dumont was less to blame here than his reviewers were” (pp. 390, 391).]

12.

L&WR, IV & XXVI, No. 2 (Jan., 1837), 542.

A defence by Colonel Napier of the History of the Peninsular War, in reply to an Article in the last number of the Quarterly Review, is advertised to appear in this number of the London and Westminster Review; but the non-arrival of part of the MS., in consequence of the severity of the weather, prevents its issue with all the copies of the Review; it may, however, be obtained upon application at the Publishers.—Dec. 27, 1836.

[This note, which begins, “Note.—” and is unsigned, appears on the unnumbered final page of the issue in some copies only; in others William Napier’s signed “Reply to the third article in the Quarterly Review on Colonel Napier’s History of the Peninsular War” appeared on pp. 541-81. George Murray (assisted by J. W. Croker) was the author of all three reviews of Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France, 6 vols. (London: Murray, 1828-40) in the Quarterly Review, LVI (Apr., and July, 1836), 131-219, and 437-89, and LVII (Dec., 1836), 492-542. The publisher of the L&WR at this time was John Macrone, St. James’s Square.]

13.

L&WR, V & XXVII, No. 9 & 52 (Apr., 1837), 246n.

The opinions of this review on the French Revolution not having yet been expressed, the conductors feel it incumbent on them to enter a caveat against any presumption respecting those opinions which may be founded on the Newgate Calendar character of the above extracts. Some attempt at a judgment of that great historical event, with its good and its evil, will probably be attempted in the next number.

[This note, unsigned and in square brackets, is appended to the antepenultimate paragraph of “C.” (Carlyle), “Parliamentary History of the French Revolution” (pp. 233-47). Many “Newgate Calendars” appeared, the best known contemporary one was by Andrew Knapp and William Baldwin, The Newgate Calendar; Comprising Interesting Memoirs of the Most Notorious Characters Who Have Been Convicted of Outrages on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (London: Robins, 1824-28). The concluding reference is to the account in Mill’s review of Carlyle’s French Revolution, which appeared in the next number (L&WR, V & XXVII, No. 10 & 53 [July, 1837], 17-53).]

14.

L&WR, VI & XXVIII, No. 11 & 54 (Oct., 1837), 131n.

We cannot omit noticing here how much more truly Mr. Bulwer has drawn the character of Templeton, an Evangelical layman, in Ernest Maltravers—a novel of a higher order of art than any he has hitherto attempted, and which will add a still higher kind of applauses to the already extensive and varied reputation of its author throughout Europe:—a reputation which could not have been raised so high by a man still young, without a rare union of the qualities which merit, with the qualities which obtain, success.

[This note, signed “Ed.,” is appended to the sentence, “The destruction of slavery is, so far as it has been destroyed, owing to the moral zeal and disinterestedness of the ‘saints,’ whose representative our authoress would give us in Mr. Stephen Corbold”; the review, by “R.O.D.” (Henry Fothergill Chorley), is “Works of Mrs. Trollope” (pp. 112-31). The reference is to Edward George Lytton Bulwer, Ernest Maltravers, 3 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), esp. Vol. II, pp. 44-9 (Bk. IV, Chap. v).]

15.

L&WR, VI & XXVIII, No. 12 & 55 (Jan., 1838), 367n.

The following article is, by agreement, to be considered as the expression of the writer’s sentiments, without involving the opinions of the Review. Who the writer is, may easily be discovered by the style, the sentiments, and the initials.

[This note, signed “Ed.,” is appended to the heading of “W.F.P.N.” (William Francis Patrick Napier), “The Duke of Wellington” (pp. 367-436).]

16.

L&WR, VII & XXIX, No. 2 (Aug., 1838), 507 (512 in 2nd ed. of no.).

Note to Article VI, p. 477, of the Number for January, 1838.

We have had some correspondence with Mr. A. Hayward respecting a passage in this article, in which his name occurs; and therefore take an opportunity here of repeating what we have stated to him—that neither against him nor against any of the other persons named was any distinct and personal charge made, because we were not in possession of proofs on which our charges could have been made distinct and personal.

[This note, unsigned, appears at the end of the number (which was expanded in its 2nd ed. by the addition of Mill’s “Lord Durham and His Assailants”). The reference is to “H.W.” (John Robertson), “Miss Martineau’s Western Travel,” L&WR, VI & XXVIII (Jan., 1838), 470-502, where the offending passage reads: “To destroy the causes of such things [poverty, hunger, crime] is our radicalism. . . . We would make our constitution loved. The defence of the causes of these things is Conservatism. The state of things which has borne such deadly fruits is that to whose service are devoted the labours of men—none of whom have a legitimate drop of aristocratic blood in them—most of whom have themselves struggled with poverty, and almost all of whom are sprung from the ranks of the oppressed;—men, such as Lockhart, Wilson, Barnes, Jerdan, Maginn, Mahoney, Palgrave, Sulivan, Banks, D’Israeli, Theodore Hook, Crofton Croker, and Abraham Hayward,—several of them Jews, and most of them Irishmen, who, if they were not ashamed of their fathers, would be on the side of the oppressed—the champions of their own order, in their places as sons of the unprivileged classes—instead of exhibiting the melancholy spectacle of the gifted kissing the feet of the dunces, the feet, which were for ages on the necks of their fathers,—instead of doing the base work of the aristocracy, fighting for them, writing for them, joking for them, blackguardising for them, and (it may be said of not a few) lying for them, against men of their own class, of their own schools and colleges, whose only end is to make, without change when possible, but by change when needful, England, Scotland, and Ireland, not what America is, but like America, ‘a fine country for poor people.’ ” (Pp. 477-8.) Abraham Hayward, who had met Mill at the London Debating Society, became an increasingly virulent opponent, finally writing the unfriendly obituary of Mill in The Times. For another comment by Mill on this affair, see EL, CW, Vol. XIII, p. 367, to Robertson.]

17.

L&WR, VII & XXIX, No. 2 (Aug., 1838), 507 (512 in 2nd ed. of this no.).

Note to Article VII of the Number for April, 1838.

We have been requested to state that Lord Melbourne is not the author of the Fashionable Friends, which we mentioned as having been ascribed to him.

[This note, unsigned, appears immediately below the preceding one. The reference is to “P.B.” (probably John Robertson), “Poets of the Melbourne Ministry,” L&WR, VII & XXIX (Apr., 1838), 193-224, where the author says, “The Fashionable Friends has always been ascribed to Lord Melbourne, and there is an epilogue by the Hon. William Lamb, which is, from internal evidence, the production of the pen which produced the piece” (p. 216). (On this assumption, the right-hand running head of the article, pp. 217-23, is “Lord Melbourne.”) The Fashionable Friends. A Comedy (London: Ridgway, 1802) is ascribed in the British Library Catalogue to Mary Berry. The Wellesley Index, Vol. III, suggests that, if Robertson wrote the original article, he (being sub-editor at the time) also wrote this note; however it seems equally likely that it is by Mill (to whom The Wellesley Index gives the preceding note, also dealing with a misdemeanour of Robertson’s).]

18.

L&WR, XXXII, No. 1 (Dec., 1838), 202n.

The following lines, by a valued contributor, express feelings more congenial to the character of Heloïse than to that which we have been compelled to ascribe to Abelard; but as embodying the sentiments which might be conceived to have been interchanged between them at this period of their lives, they may be interesting to our readers:

[This note, unsigned, is appended to the last sentence on this page of “G.F.” (George Fletcher), “Heloïse and Abelard” (pp. 146-219, with the exception of p. 203). The note (which concludes with a colon) introduces “Abelard to Heloïse,” signed “£.” (John Sterling), which fills the whole of p. 203. Sterling, whose “Simonides” appeared in this number (pp. 99-136), had earlier contributed “Montaigne and His Writings,” L&WR, VII & XXIX (Aug., 1838), 321-52, and was later to contribute “Carlyle’s Works” (see no. 22 below).]

19.

L&WR, XXXII, No. 2 (Apr., 1839), 404n.

But what will the Hanoverians say? Have they no feelings of nationality to be consulted? We have inserted these speculations by a distinguished contributor, who has had better means of gaining information than have fallen to the share of any other man in this country, not because we wished to identify ourselves with them in any way, but because he gives them as dreams—but curious and instructive dreams, which may be fulfilled.

[This note, signed “Ed.,” is appended to the concluding paragraph of a discussion by “G.N.” (Thomas Colley Grattan), in his “Leopold and the Belgians” (pp. 357-405), in which he is arguing that the territory of Belgium should be enlarged, in part by areas under the rule of Prussia and Holland, and that Hanover should be, as compensation, divided between Prussia and Holland.]

20.

L&WR, XXXII, No. 2 (Apr., 1839), 416n.

We should feel it our duty to say more concerning the writings of this lady; but that we purpose, ere long, to review them, as well as the productions of several others of the Irish writers mentioned in our catalogue, separately and at length. Her works not only possess merit of a high order, but they are calculated to have a very beneficial effect upon the Irish character.

[This note, signed “Ed.,” is appended to the sentence, “Mrs. S.C. Hall has obtained considerable popularity as a depicter of Irish life,” in the unsigned article (probably by John Robertson), “Irish Humour and Pathos” (pp. 415-25). Anna Maria Hall’s The Juvenile Budget (London: Chapman and Hall, and Newman, 1840 [1839]) was mentioned in “F.B.” (Mary Margaret Busk), “Literature of Childhood,” L&WR, XXXIII (Oct., 1839), 137-62 (Mrs. Hall herself contributed the next article in that number, “Heads of the People”); otherwise Mill’s promise was not fulfilled during his editorship.]

21.

L&WR, XXXIII (1839-40), verso of the title page.

It should have been explained in a preceding volume, that to avoid the double numbering of the London Review and the Westminster Review, the numbers of each Review were added together, whereby Vol. VII and XXIX became Vol. XXXI of the united series.

[This note, in square brackets and unsigned, is a belated explanation of the solution—still plaguing scholars—of the problem caused by the publication independently of two volumes (four numbers) of the London Review while the Westminster Review continued (also for four numbers), before amalgamation in the London and Westminster. For a fuller explanation, with other complications, see pp. xxxviii n-xxxix n above.]

22.

L&WR, XXXIII, No. 1 (Oct., 1839), 68n.

In giving our readers the benefit of this attempt by one of our most valued contributors (we believe the first attempt yet made) at a calm and comprehensive estimate of a man, for whom our admiration has already been unreservedly expressed, and whose genius and worth have shed some rays of their brightness on our own pages; the occasion peculiarly calls upon us to declare what is already implied in the avowed plan of this Review—that its conductors are in no respect identified with the opinions delivered in the present criticism, either when the writer concurs with, or when he differs from those of Mr. Carlyle.

While we hope never to relax in maintaining that systematic consistency in our own opinions, without which there can be no clear and firmly-grounded judgment and therefore no hearty appreciation of the merits of others; we open our pages without restriction to those who, though differing from us on some fundamental points of philosophy, stand within a certain circle of relationship to the general spirit of our practical views, and in whom we recognize that title to a free stage for the promulgation of what they deem true and useful, which belongs to all who unite noble feelings with great and fruitful thoughts.

[This note, signed “A.,” is appended to the conclusion of “£.” (John Sterling), “Carlyle’s Works” (pp. 1-68). For Sterling’s contributions to the L&WR, see no. 18 above. Carlyle contributed four articles in all, “Memoirs of Mirabeau” (see no. 11 above), “Parliamentary History of the French Revolution” (see no. 13 above), “Memoirs of the Life of Scott,” L&WR, VI & XXVIII (Jan., 1838), 293-345, and “Varnhagen von Ense’s Memoirs,” L&WR, XXXII (Dec., 1838), 60-84. For the admiration of Carlyle, “unreservedly expressed,” see Mill’s article cited in the note to no. 13 above.]

Appendix G

Rejected Leaves of the Early Draft of the Autobiography

R23-5, 24²-25², 19/20

R23-5 contain the first version of the present Early Draft text at 36.14-40.12 (“and that many people . . . as he said, a”). In an intermediate stage of revision Mill rewrote R24 and part of R25 on two new leaves, R24² and 25², and finally reduced the entire sequence (R23, 24²-25², and part of R25v) to a single new leaf, the final text of the span referred to above. The two paragraphs given here, from R23v-25v, originally followed the paragraph ending at 36.31. In addition to the usual information concerning deleted text and HTM’s alterations, four of the notes to this extract provide variants from the leaves of the intermediate version, R24²-25² (see notes e-e, k-k, l-l, p-p below). Variants from the paragraphs preceding and following the extract are given in textual notes on pp. 36, 37, and 40.

My father thus took effectual precautions against some, and those very serious dangers, to which his plan of education was liable. There were others to which he was either not so much alive, or against which he did not guard with equal success.

Not, I am persuaded, by any ^anecessity inherent^a in my education, but ^bcertainly by some omission in it^b , I grew up with ^cgreat inaptness in^c the common affairs of every day life.^d I was far longer than children generally are before I could put on my clothes. I know not how many years passed before I could tie a knot. My articulation was long imperfect; one letter, r, I could not pronounce until I was nearly sixteen. ^eI never could, nor can I now, do anything requiring the smallest manual dexterity, but^fI never put even a common share of the exercise of understanding into practical things^f . I was continually acquiring odd ^gor disagreeable^g tricks which I very slowly and imperfectly got rid of. I was, besides, ^hutterly^h inobservant: I was, as my father continually told me, like a person who had not the organs of sense: my eyes and ears seemed of no use to me, so little did I see or hear what was before me, and so little, even of what I did see or hear, did I observe and remember^e. My father was the extreme opposite in all these particulars: his senses and his mental faculties were always on the alert; he carried decision and energy of character in his whole manner and into every action of life: and this, as much as his talents, contributed to the great impression which he always made upon those with whom he came in personal contact. The education he gave me was, however, considered in itself, much more fitted for training me to know than to do. Not that he was unaware of my defects; both as a boy and as a youth I was incessantly smarting under his severe admonitions on the subject. He could not endure stupidity, nor feeble and lax habits, in whatever manner displayed, and I was perpetually exciting his anger by manifestations of them. From the earliest time I can remember he used to reproach me, and most truly, with a general habit of inattention; owing to which, he said, I was constantly acquiring bad habits, and never breaking myself of them; was constantly forgetting what I ought to remember, and judging and acting like a person devoid of common sense; and which would make me, he said, grow up ⁱa mereⁱ oddity, looked down upon by everybody, and unfit for all the common purposes of life. It was not, therefore, from any insensibility or tolerance on his part towards such faults, that my education, considered in this particular, must be regarded as a failure. ^jNeither do I see any necessary tendency in his plan of education to produce those defects.^j No doubt, they may have had some connexion with the fact, ^kotherwise most salutary, of my being educated at home, and not in a school, among other boys, and having no encouragement to practise bodily exercises, from which boys in general derive their earliest lessons of practical skill and contrivance.^k It must not however be supposed that play, or time for it, was refused me. Though no holidays were allowed, lest the habit of work should be broken, and taste for idleness acquired, I had abundant leisure in every day to amuse myself: but ^lmy amusements being solitary or with children younger than myself, gave^mlittle^m stimulus to either bodily or mental activity. ⁿThereⁿ were wanting, in addition to the book-lessons which were the staple of my instruction, well devised practical lessons, exercising the hands, and the head in directing the hands, and necessitating careful observation, and adaptation of means to ends^l. ^oI had also^o the great misfortune of having, in domestic matters, everything done for me. Circumstanced as I was, nothing but being thrown as much as possible, in daily matters, upon my own powers of contriving and of executing could have given ^pme the proper use of my faculties for the occasions of life. This discipline, I presume my father did not see the necessity of; and it would never have occurred to my mother, who without misgivings of any sort worked from morning till night for her children^p .

>Folio R24r (see p. 609) of the Early Draft MS

University of Illinois

R19/20, a leaf headed “between 19 and 20,” is a rewritten, expanded version of the present Early Draft text at 32.19-32 (“The experiment . . . good it effected.”). After Mill drafted the passage on manual dexterity in R23-5, revised and condensed it in R24²-25², and finally omitted it altogether in the Early Draft text at 36.14-40.12 (see the preceding headnote), he inserted parts of it into an earlier summary paragraph by rewriting the present 32.19-32 as R19/20. Possibly the new version did not meet HTM’s approval, for Mill set it aside and returned to the text that he had had in the first place. (After her death he introduced into his later draft in the Columbia MS the passage ending Chapter i—37.36-39.39 in the present volume—which, of the three versions in the rejected leaves, is closest in wording to that of R24²-25².) The extract included here represents text that was to have been inserted after the sentence ending at 32.27. Two other variants from R19/20 are given in textual notes on pp. 32-3.

Indeed, my deficiency in these qualities caused the results of my education to appear, in some respects, less advantageous than they really were, since it made my acquisition of those active and practical capacities which my father’s discipline did not in the same degree provide for, slow and imperfect. The education he gave me was, considered in itself, much more fitted for training me to know than to do. Most boys acquire whatever they do acquire of bodily dexterity or practical skill and contrivance, by their own spontaneous activity when left to themselves, or by competition and conflict with other boys. It was a main point with my father to save me from the contagion of boys’ society; and though I had ample leisure in every day to amuse myself, my voluntary amusements were almost all of a quiet, and generally of a bookish turn, and gave little stimulus to any kind of even mental activity other than that which was already called forth by my studies. Whatever deficiencies these causes had a tendency to produce, would in the case of a naturally quick, or a naturally energetic youth, have rapidly disappeared on the first contact with the world. But with me, the discipline of life in this respect was long and severe, and even at last, was but imperfectly effectual. This, however, was not owing to the mode of my education but to natural slowness and to a certain mental and moral indolence which, but for the immense amount of mental cultivation which my father gave me, would probably have prevented me from either being or doing anything worthy of note.

R31-7

R31-7 contain the first version of the present Early Draft text at 50.22-58.15 (“as if the agents . . . by the beautiful”). Of the extract given here, from R31v-34r, the first three paragraphs were condensed into the single paragraph beginning at 52.14, and the remaining sentences (which do not constitute a complete paragraph) were replaced by the first two sentences of the paragraph beginning at 54.11. Following the extract, the text of R34r continues as at 54.20, “I was a more frequent visitor . . . .” Other variants from R31.34-7 are given in textual notes on pp. 50-2 and 54-8.

Personally I believe my father to have had much greater capacities of feeling than were ever developed in him. He resembled almost all Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and by the absence of demonstration, starving the feelings themselves. In an atmosphere of tenderness and affection he would have been tender and affectionate; but his ill assorted marriage and his asperities of temper disabled him from making such an atmosphere. I once heard him say, that there was always the greatest sympathy between him and his children until the time of lessons began, but that the lessons always destroyed it. Certainly his children till six or seven years old always liked him and were happy in his presence, and he liked them and had pleasure in talking to them and in interesting and amusing them; and it is equally true that after the lessons began, ^afear of his severity sooner or later swallowed up all other feelings towards him.^a This is true only of the elder children: with the ^byounger^b he followed an entirely different system, to the great comfort of the later years of his life. But in respect to what I am here concerned with, the moral agencies which acted on myself, it must be mentioned as a most baneful one, that my father’s ^cchildren neither loved him, nor, with any warmth of affection, any one else.^c I do not mean that things were worse in this respect than they are in most English families; in which genuine affection is altogether exceptional; what is usually found being more or less of an attachment of mere habit, like that to inanimate objects, and a few conventional proprieties of phrase and demonstration. I believe there ^dis less personal affection in England than in any other country of which I know anything, and I give my father’s family not as peculiar in this respect but only as a too faithful exemplification of the ordinary fact. That rarity in England, a really warm hearted mother, would in the first place have made my father a totally different being, and in the second would have made the children grow up loving and being loved. But my mother, with the very best intentions, only knew how to pass her life in drudging for them. Whatever she could do for them she did, and they liked her, because she was kind to them, but to make herself loved, looked up to, or even obeyed, required qualities which she unfortunately did not possess.

I thus grew up in the absence of love and in the presence of fear: and many and indelible are the effects of this bringing-up, in the stunting of my moral growth.^d One of these, which it would have required a quick sensibility and impulsiveness of natural temperament to counteract, was habitual reserve. Without knowing or believing that I was reserved, I grew up with an instinct of closeness. ^eI had no one to whom I desired to express everything which I felt; and^e the only person I was in communication with, to whom I looked up, I had too much fear of, to make the communication to him of any act or feeling ever a matter of frank impulse or spontaneous inclination. Instead of a character whose instinct and habit are openness, but who can command reserve when duty or prudence require it, my circumstances tended to form a character, close and reserved from habit and want of impulse, not from will, and therefore, while destitute of the frank communicativeness which wins and deserves sympathy, yet continually failing in retinence where it is suitable and desirable.

Another evil I shared with many of the sons of energetic fathers. ^fTo have been, through childhood, under the constant rule of a strong will, certainly is not favourable to strength of will.^f I was so much accustomed to expect to be told what to do, either in the form of direct command or of rebuke for not doing it, that I acquired a habit of leaving my responsibility as a moral agent to rest on my father, my conscience never speaking to me except by his voice. The things I ought not to do were mostly provided for by his precepts, rigorously enforced whenever violated, but the ^gthings which I ought to do I hardly ever did of my own mere motion, but waited till he told me to do them; and if he forbore or forgot to tell me, they were generally left undone. I thus acquired a habit of backwardness, of waiting to follow the lead of others, an absence of moral spontaneity, an inactivity of the moral sense and even to a large extent, of the intellect, unless roused by the appeal of some one else,—for which a^hlarge^h abatement must be made from the benefits, either moral or intellectual, which flowed from any other part of my education.^g

Before taking leave of this first period of my life it may seem that something ought to be said of the persons with whom my father habitually associated and to some of whom, it may be supposed, I was not a stranger. ⁱBut I cannot trace to them any other influence on my development,ⁱ than what was due to such of my father’s conversations with them as I had an opportunity of listening to. ^jMy father’s narrow income, previous to his appointment from the East India Company, and his unwillingness to invite any persons to his house whom he could not, as he said, make as comfortable as they were at home, caused the habitual frequenters of his house to be^j limited to a very few persons, mostly little known, but whom personal worth, and more or less of congeniality with his opinions (then not so frequently to be met with as since) disposed him to cultivate. ^kHis other friends he saw at their own houses; saving an occasional call which as they knew how important his time was to him they rarely made^k except for some special purpose.^l Such occasional calls (from my being a habitual inmate of my father’s study) made me acquainted with the most intimate and congenial of his friends, David Ricardo, who by his benevolent countenance and kindliness of manner was very attractive to ^myoung persons^m , and who after I became a student of political economy sometimes had me to breakfast and walk with him in order to discuss ⁿor (as a more correct description of the relation which could exist between him and me) to examine me inⁿ political economy.

R105-6

R105-6 contain the first version of the present Early Draft text at 170.13-174.24 (“length; but I . . . progress in my”), which, with text given and described in the note on p. 168, originally followed the paragraph ending at 168.5. In expanding and rearranging the materials of these two leaves, Mill first inserted additional leaves before and after them, and then discarded R105-6 altogether, rewriting what remained of their text in a new leaf containing the present 172.10-30 (“the theological . . . replaced by others.”). The extract given here, all but the first word (“length.”) and the last five lines of R105-6, is a continuation of the new paragraph described at p. 168n. The cancelled last five lines of R106v contain most of the first sentence of the paragraph beginning at 174.22.

But I was struck with the ability, knowledge and large views of the men. I was kept au courant of their progress by one of their most enthusiastic disciples, Gustave d’Eichthal, who about that time passed a considerable period in England: and from this time forward I read nearly everything they wrote. The scheme gradually unfolded by them, the management of the labour and capital of the community for the national account, classing all persons according to their capacity and rewarding them according to their works, appeared to me a far superior kind of Socialism to Owen’s: their aim seemed to me perfectly rational, and though the machinery for attaining it could not possibly be worked, the proclamation (I thought) of such an ideal of human society could not but be calculated to give a very beneficial direction to the efforts of others for the improvement of society as already constituted. I honoured them above all for the boldness and freedom from prejudice with which they proclaimed the perfect equality of men and women and ^aan entirely new order of things^a in regard to the relations between the sexes: a merit which the other great French socialist Fourier possesses in a still greater degree.

This however is an anticipation. At the time of which I am now speaking, the only very strong impression which I received from anything connected with St. Simonism was derived from an early writing of Auguste Comte, who then called himself in the title page an élève of Saint Simon. In this tract M. Comte announced the doctrine which he has since so copiously illustrated of the natural succession of three states in every branch of knowledge, first, the theological, second, the metaphysical, and third, the positive stage; and contended that social science must be subject to the same law; that the feudal and Catholic system was the last phasis of the theological state of the social science, Protestantism the commencement and the doctrines of the French Revolution the consummation of its metaphysical, and that its positive state was yet to come. This doctrine harmonized very well with my existing notions; I already regarded the methods of physical science as the proper models for political: but one important point in the parallelism much insisted on by M. Comte, had not before occurred to me. In mathematics and physics what is called the liberty of conscience, or the right of private judgment, is merely nominal: though in no way restrained by law, the liberty is not exercised: those who have studied the subject are all of the same opinion; if any one rejected what has been proved by demonstration or experiment, he would be thought to be asserting no right but the right of being a fool: those who have not studied these sciences take their conclusions on trust from those who have, and the practical world goes on incessantly applying laws of nature and conclusions of reasoning which it receives on the faith not of its own reason but of the authority of the instructed. Hitherto it had not occurred to me that the case would be the same in the moral, social, and political branches of speculation if they were equally advanced with the physical. ^bI had always identified deference to authority with mental slavery and the repression of individual thought. I now perceived that these indeed are the means by which adherence is enforced to opinions from which at least a minority of thinking and instructed persons dissent; but that when all such persons are as nearly unanimous, as they are in the more advanced of the physical Sciences, their authority will have an ascendancy which will be increased, not diminished, by the intellectual and scientific cultivation of the multitude, who, after learning all which their circumstances permit, can do nothing wiser than rely for all beyond on the knowledge of the more highly instructed. I did not become one atom less zealous for increasing the knowledge and improving the understanding of the mass; but I no longer believed that the fate of mankind depended on the possibility of making all of them competent judges of questions of government and legislation. From this time my hopes of improvement rested less on the reason of the multitude, than on the possibility of effecting such an improvement in the methods of political and social philosophy, as should enable all thinking and instructed persons who have no sinister interest to be so nearly of one mind on these subjects, as to carry the multitude with them by their united authority^b . This was a view of matters which, as it seemed to me, had been overlooked, or its importance not seen, by my first instructors: and it served still further to widen the distance between my present mode of thinking, and that which I had learnt from Bentham and my father.

R113, 109

R113 contains the first version of the present Early Draft text at 182.7-29 (“the manuscript . . . infinitely more.”), and originally provided the text between 182.7 and the new paragraph beginning at 188.1. In a subsequent rearrangement of materials, in which the paragraph on doctrinal differences with his father (p. 188) was moved from its original position before the two paragraphs on the Austins (pp. 184, 186) to its present position after them, Mill rewrote only this one leaf—in R109 (a fair copy that he then further revised and recopied as the present 182.7ff.)—making the rest of the alteration by reordering leaves and deleting parts of the text on some pages and recopying them at left on others. Variants from R113, 109 are given in textual notes on pp. 182-3.

R119-21

After the paragraph ending at 190.28, Mill wrote, mainly in R119-21, what were originally the last three paragraphs of Part I of the draft. In rearranging the materials of Part II (see the next headnote), he moved the first two of these paragraphs and part of the third to a later position in the text, and recopied them as the present 202.1-206.25. Variants from R119-20 are given in textual notes on pp. 202, 204, and 206. The original conclusion of Part I, which followed the sentence ending at 206.25, is transcribed here.

From this time to 1840, first in association with Molesworth, afterwards by myself, I was the conductor of a political review. But this new phasis in my literary existence belongs to a different period in my personal history, for which all that preceded was of no value except as a preparation—that in which I enjoyed the friendship and was under the ennobling influence of one to whom I owe all that is best, either in me or in what I have written, and compared with whom I am in myself scarcely worthy of a passing thought.

RII.1-8, 20, 24

“Part II” originally consisted of twenty-four separately numbered leaves—the present RII.1-8, the eleven Early Draft leaves containing the text of 206.28-234.3 (plus text now deleted), RII.20, the three Early Draft leaves containing 236.36-242.29, and RII.24. In revising (to an extent following HTM’s directions), Mill compressed RII.1-8—sixteen MS pages on his relationship with his wife—into the seven MS pages containing the present 192.1-198.14, rewrote and repositioned some of the remaining material, including the paragraphs from R119-21 mentioned in the preceding headnote, and wrote three new leaves (the text of 242.29-246.25) to replace the original abrupt conclusion on RII.24. Even though about a third of it is repeated verbatim in the final version of the Early Draft, we print here the complete text of RII.1-8 (all but the last eight lines, which begin a new paragraph substantially the same as the present text at 206.25, “In the years between 1834 and 1840 . . .”). Variants from RII.20, 24 are given in textual notes on pp. 234-7 and 242.

Part II

My first introduction to the lady whose ^afriendship has been the honour and blessing of my existence, and who after many years of confidential intimacy, deigned to be^a my wife, dates from ^bas early as 1830^b . ^cIts origin or rather occasion was the accident of a common acquaintance; but I have always been convinced that sooner or later, and rather sooner than later, we should have found each other out: for^c both of us were at this time ardent seekers for persons of similar opinions and of any intellectual gifts. Had our acquaintance commenced later; had her judgment of me been first formed in maturer years, it would, probably, have been far less favourable; but I, at whatever period of life I had known her, must always have felt her to be the most admirable person I had ever known, ^dand must have made her approbation the guiding light and her sympathy the chief object of my life, though to appreciate the greatness^d and variety of her preeminence could only have been possible after long and intimate knowledge, ^eto any one not on the same exalted level as herself. To me, so inferior in nature and so widely different in all previous discipline, a complete or adequate appreciation of her is impossible, and such approach to it as I have made has only been the effect of the long course of education derived from the knowledge and contemplation of her.^e

It is not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at the age at which I first saw her, could be all that she afterwards became. Least of all could this be true of her, with whom self-improvement, progress in the highest and in all senses, was a law of her nature; a necessity equally from the ardour with which she sought it, and from the spontaneous tendency of faculties which could not receive an impression or an experience without making it the source or the occasion of an accession of wisdom. Up to the time when I knew her, her rich and powerful nature had chiefly unfolded itself according to the received type of feminine genius. To her outer circle she was a beauty, and a wit, ^fwith an air of natural distinction, felt by all who approached her^f : to the inner, a woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and intuitive intelligence, and of a most meditative and poetic nature. ^gMorally she was already so perfect that even she could not add anything to her type of perfection in after life.^g Every noble and beautiful quality seemed in its turn to be her leading characteristic so long as only that side of her character was looked at. The passion of justice might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, but for her boundless generosity and a lovingness ever ready to pour itself forth upon any or all human beings however unlike herself, if they did but shew a capacity of making the smallest return of feeling or even a wish to have feeling bestowed on them. Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others, and even, imaginatively investing others with an intensity of feeling equal to its own, often took great suffering upon itself to save others from pain which would have been comparatively small. She was by nature one of those who would have had most excuse for thinking first of themselves, for her impulses were tenfold stronger, her pleasures and pains tenfold more intense than those of common persons: yet to receive all pleasure and all good from the love of others would to her have been the only congenial state, and when she took concern for herself or asserted any claims of her own, ^hevery one^h felt that the impersonal love of justice was speaking in her neither more nor less than it would have spoken in behalf of a stranger or an enemy. All the rest of her moral characteristics were those which naturally accompany these qualities of mind and heart. The most genuine modesty combined with the loftiest pride; a simplicity and sincerity which was absolute, towards all who were fit to receive it; the utmost scorn of everything mean or cowardly, and indignation at everything brutal or tyrannical, faithless or dishonourable in conduct or character; while making the broadest distinction between mala in se and mere mala prohibita, between acts giving evidence of intrinsic badness of feeling and character, and those which are mere violations of conventions either good or bad, and which whether in themselves right or wrong, may be done by persons otherwise loveable or admirable.

Such a woman could not, except by the rarest destiny, be otherwise than alone in the world, especially in a world like England. Married at ⁱa veryⁱ early age, to a most upright, brave, and honorable man, of liberal opinions ^jand good education, but not of the intellectual or artistic tastes which would have made him^j a companion for her, though a steady and affectionate friend, for whom she had true esteem and ^kthe strongest^k affection through life and whom she most deeply lamented when dead; shut out by the social disabilities of women from any adequate exercise of her higher faculties in action on the world without, her life was one of inward meditation varied by familiar intercourse with a small circle of friends, of whom one only ^l(a woman)^l was a person of genius, or of capacities of feeling or intellect kindred with her own, but all had more or less of alliance with her in sentiments and opinions. Into this circle I had the good fortune to be admitted, though it was ^mmany^m years before I could be said to be at all intimate with her. ⁿBut from the time when I could really call her my friend I wished for no other.ⁿ All other persons whom I had known either had not the opinions or had not the feelings which were necessary to make them permanently valuable to me. In her^o complete emancipation from every kind of superstition, and an earnest protest both against society as at present constituted, and against the pretended perfection of the order of nature and the universe, resulted not from the hard intellect but from strength of noble and elevated feeling, and coexisted with ^pa^p reverential nature. In general spiritual characteristics as well as in temperament and organization I have often compared her, as she was at this time, to Shelley: but in thought and intellect Shelley, so far as his powers were developed in his short life, was but a child to her. I have never known any intellect in man or woman which, taken for all in all, could be compared to hers. ^qAll other intellects when looked at beside hers^q seem to be but special talents,—a peculiar knack acquired by study and practice of dealing with some one particular thing. On all subjects on which she thinks, that is, on all great subjects of speculation and on all near subjects of important practice, she goes quite down to the very heart and marrow of the matter, severing and putting aside all irrelevancies and non-essentials, cleaving through at one stroke all entanglements of verbal sophistry and haze of confused conceptions. Alike in the highest regions of philosophy and in the smallest practical concerns of daily life, her mind is always the same perfect instrument; always seizing the essential idea or principle, the cause on which the effect depends, the precise end, and the precise obstacle to its attainment. The same exactness and rapidity of operation pervading all her senses as well as her mental faculties, would with her gifts of feeling and imagination have made her a consummate artist ^rin any department in which she had had the requisite mechanical instruction^r ; as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence ^swould have made her a great orator, and her coup d’œil and power of practical combination might have made her a great general, if either carrière^s had been accessible to women. But if I were to say in what above all she is preeminent, it is in her profound knowledge of human nature. To know all its depths and all its elevations she had only to study herself: her knowledge of its varieties she owes to an observation which overlooks nothing, and an activity of mind which converts everything into knowledge. Hence while she sees farther ^tthan, as it appears to me, any one else has done into the possibilities and capabilities of the future^t , the thoroughness of her insight into and comprehension of human beings as they are preserves her from all miscalculations or illusions. Those who are dissatisfied with human life as it is and whose feelings are wholly identified with its radical amendment (as all the wisest and best of mankind are) have two main regions of thought, ^uin both of which her intellect is supreme and her judgment infallible:^u One is the region of ultimate aims, the constituents of the highest realizable ideal of human life; the other is that of the immediately useful and practically attainable. ^vIn both of these ever since I knew her well, I have been entirely and in the fullest sense her pupil.^v And to say truth, it is in these two extremes that the only real certainty resides. My own strength, ^wsuch as it was (apart from the capacity of appreciating and partly understanding things better and greater than myself, by which alone I was or am in any degree worthy of her),^w lay wholly in the uncertain and slippery intermediate region, that of theory, or so-called moral and political science: respecting the conclusions of which in any of the forms in which I have received or originated them, whether as political economy, analytic psychology, logic, philosophy of history, or anything else, it is not the least of my intellectual obligations to her that I have derived from her a wise scepticism; which, while it has not prevented me from following out the honest exercise of my thinking faculties to whatever conclusions might result from it, has prevented me, I hope, from holding or announcing those conclusions with a confidence which the nature of such speculations does not warrant, and has kept my mind always open to admit clearer perceptions and better evidence. ^xEverything in my later writings to which any serious value can be attached, everything either far reaching in speculation or genial in tone and feeling and sympathetic with humanity, everything to which the Political Economy in particular owes its reputation and which is thought to distinguish it^yto its advantage^y from other treatises under the same name, is in all essentials not my writing but hers: and still more will this be the case with what remains to be written in order to bring our opinions fully before the world.^x

It is^z less obvious what even in the immaturity of her powers and of her experience, could attract her to me, than me to her; or what, peculiarly valuable to her, she could find in such a type of character as mine^a; but a thorough agreement in opinion is to any one, especially to a young person opposed to the reigning opinions,^a always a support, especially when the concurring minds have been very differently formed and trained and have arrived at their conclusions by very different paths. To her who had reached her opinions by the moral intuition of a character of strong feeling, there was doubtless help as well as encouragement to be derived from one who had arrived at many of the same results by study and reasoning. It was also a strong link between us that we felt alike on that most vital question, the social position of women: whose subordination, by law and custom, to men, we regarded as the last remaining form of primeval tyranny and serfage, and whose equal admissibility to all occupations and equal participation in all rights, we deemed not only to be the clear dictate of justice, but to be an essential condition of any great improvement in mankind either individually or socially. It would give a totally false idea of her character if I were not to say, that her strong feeling on this^b point was the effect of principle, and not of any desire on her own part to mingle in the turmoil and strife of the occupations which the dominant sex has hitherto reserved to itself. ^cThough her education had been masculine, her personal habits and tastes were all^c peculiarly feminine; her feelings and inclinations all pointed to a life not of self-help or self-assertion but of loving reliance on the love and care of others. ^dThe importance she attached to the social independence and equal rights of women, arose from two of the principal features of her character, her love of justice and her sense of dignity. How indeed can either of these feelings, when a genuine outgrowth of the individual nature, and not a matter of arbitrary convention as much as any of the rules of deportment, tolerate that a human being should be marked out from birth to be the mere appendage of some other? Those most capable of the abnegation of any separate self, and merging of the entire being with that of another, which is the characteristic of strong passion^eor rather, which strong passion in its most passionate moments strives to realize^e . are precisely those who would disdain to be the objects of this self-annihilating feeling unless ^fthe renunciation of any separate existence is equally complete on both sides^f and unless it comes from the spontaneous impulse of individual feeling and not from social ordinances prescribing that one half of all human character shall develope itself in this way or have no developement at all. But men have first decreed that women shall have no passions except personal passions, and have then erected one of the natural promptings of strong personal passion into the ideal standard of womanly perfection, from which they endeavour to reap a double advantage: first, the pleasure, the convenience and the vanity of being all in all to their nearest companion without her being all in all to them; and next that in the pursuit of their other objects they not only have not to contend with women as competitors but can exploiter their enthusiasm and their quick practical sagacity for the interests of their own success. And then because the feelings of women being denied any other outlet, flow into the channel dug for them with a force proportioned to the capacity of strong feeling with which they are naturally endowed, the inference is drawn that this is the channel demanded by their own nature and that a woman who claims admission to any other, does so because she has not the feelings which, by this kind of practical petitio principiï, have been decided to be womanly.^d If the commonest laws of human nature did not prove it, my wife is a sufficient proof by example that whoever has the greatest and fullest measure of the feelings that produce self devotion to another or others, is also the best qualified for any other field of action, great or small, and must ever protest inwardly (unless her nature itself is bowed to the yoke of her circumstances) against the stupid and selfish social arrangements which compel her, if she acts at all, however the planning and originating mind and the commanding faculties may be on her side, to act solely through another.

The influence of this most precious friendship upon my own mental developement was of a twofold nature. The first, ^gand that of which I earliest reaped the full benefit,^g was her effect on my ideal standard of character. My conception of the highest worth of a human being, was immeasurably enlarged and exalted, ^hwhile at the same time this larger ideal was filled and satisfied by herⁱ in a manner in which no one had ever before satisfied even the far inferior ideal which I had conceived previously. This first kind of influence was not so properly her influence, as^h the effect on my own thoughts and feelings of new experience and new ^jsubjects of contemplation^j . The second was the direct operation of her intellect and character upon mine, and this^k came to its full height only gradually, with the increasing maturity of her own thoughts and powers^l . But at a very early period of my knowledge of her she became to me a living type of the most admirable kind of human being. I had always wished for a friend whom I could admire wholly, without reservation and restriction, and I had now found one. To render this possible, it was necessary that the ^mobject of my admiration^m should be of a type very different from my own; should be a character preeminently of feeling, combined however as I had not in any other instance known it to be, with a vigorous and bold speculative intellect. Hers was not only ⁿall this but the perfection ofⁿ a poetic and artistic nature. ^oWith how eminent a practical capacity these endowments were combined, I only understood by degrees; but the rest was enough without this to make me feel that in any true classification of human beings, such as I are only fit to be the^psubjects^p and ^qministers^q of such as her; and that the best thing I, in particular, could do for the world, would be to serve as a sort of prose interpreter of her poetry, giving a logical exposition to those who have more understanding than feeling, of the reasonableness of that which she either knew by the experience or divined by the intuition of ^rone of the richest and strongest of natures guided by the most unselfish and highminded of characters^r .^o

Accordingly the first years of ^smy friendship with her^s were, in respect of my own development, mainly years of poetic culture. It is hardly necessary to say that I am not now speaking of written poetry, either metrical or otherwise; though I did cultivate this taste as well as a taste for paintings and sculptures, and did read with enthusiasm her favorite poets, especially the one whom she ^tplaced far above^t all others, Shelley. But this was merely accessary. The real poetic culture was, that my faculties, ^usuch as they were,^u became more and more attuned to the beautiful and elevated, in all kinds, and especially in human feeling and character ^vand more capable of vibrating in unison with it^v . ^wIn the same proportion, and by a natural consequence, I became less excitable by anything else. All^w society and personal intercourse became burthensome to me except with those in whom I recognized, along with more or less sympathy of opinion, at least a strong taste for elevated and poetic feeling, if not the feeling itself. ^xI gradually withdrew myself from much of the society which I had frequented;^x though I ^ystill retained unabated^y interest in radical politics and kept up my connexion with such of the rising or promising politicians on the radical side, as I had ever been intimate with. I even became more involved in political and literary relations than I had ever been before, through the foundation, as I have already mentioned, by Sir William Molesworth of a new radical review, to be entirely under my direction.

[a-a][Earlier version:] inherent defect [marked with an exclamation mark in the margin by HTM]

[b-b][Earlier version:] by some effect resulting jointly from my education and circumstances

[c-c][Earlier version:] extraordinary inaptness and even incapacity in all [altered to final form (except for the deletion of “all”) first by HTM, who marked the next seven sentences (through “personal contact.”) for deletion and rewrote Mill’s text to read. I grew up with great inaptness for everything requiring manual dexterity. The education he gave me . . . . Subsequently she cancelled the rest of the paragraph as well.]

[d][Cancelled text:] I had hardly any use of my hands

[e-e][Intermediate version in R242r:] I continued long, and in some degree always, inexpert in anything which required the smallest manual dexterity, and not only my hands, but my mind never did its work properly when it was applied, or rather when it ought to have been applied, to the practical details which, though singly unimportant, are in the aggregate essential to the conduct of daily life. I was, as my father continually told me, as inobservant as if I had no organs of sight or hearing, or no capacity of remembering what I saw and heard

[f-f][Earlier version:] all the common things which everybody does, I did not only in an ungainly and awkward but in a thoroughly ineffective and bungling manner like a person without the most ordinary share of understanding

[g-g][Deleted by HTM]

[h-h][Altered by HTM to read: very]

[i-i][Altered by HTM to read: an]

[j-j][Marked for deletion by HTM, who pencilled at left: “To escape the contagion of boys society Probably he purposely prevented the intercourse with other boys wh wd have prevented this defect and he was too much occupied himself to share a boys healthful exercises”]

[k-k][Earlier version:] which was partly intentional on his part, of my having no playfellows or associates among other boys, since if I had, the bodily exercises I should have been led to cultivate and the activity of some sort, and adaptation of means to ends which might have been called forth, would probably have made a difference for the better [In the intermediate version (R242v, in which HTM interlined “dexterity and agility” above “practical skill and contrivance”) Mill added at this point. Some sacrifice in this respect he was no doubt willing to make, as the price of my escaping the contagion of boys’ society. But while he saved me from the demoralizing effects of school life, he made no effort to provide me with any substitute for its practicalizing influences. Whatever qualities he, probably, had acquired without difficulty or special instruction, he seems to have supposed that I ought to acquire as easily, and bitter reproaches for being deficient in them, were nearly all the help he ever gave me towards acquiring them. In the present extract HTM changed “otherwise” (the first word of the passage to which this note is appended) to “morally”.]

[l-l][Intermediate version in R252r:] as I had no boy companions, and the animal need of physical activity being satisfied by walking, my amusements, which were mostly solitary, were almost all of a quiet, if not a bookish turn, and gave little stimulus to any kind of even mental activity other than that which was already called forth by my studies

[m-m][Earlier version:] no [At left, opposite the last clause of this sentence, HTM pencilled an exclamation mark and a question mark, and commented. “It is always the eldest son of a large family who is especially the active and acting spirit”.]

[n-n][Earlier version:] The deficiency in my education as regards this most vital point consisted I think in two things, first, that there

[o-o][Earlier version:] This requisite my father did not provide. And, what was still more fatal, I had

[p-p][Intermediate version in R252r:] my practical faculties their fair share of developement. Along with this, I required, in addition to the book-lessons which were the staple of my instruction, well devised practical lessons, exercising the hands, and the head in directing the hands, and necessitating careful observation, and adaptation of means to ends. But my father had not bestowed the same amount of thought and attention on this, as on most other branches of education: and (as in some other points of my tuition) he seems to have expected effects without causes

[a-a][At left, opposite this passage and the next two sentences, HTM commented. “I do not believe it is possible for a parent to teach their own children effectually without the exercise of a degree of severity and authority which will make it impossible that the children should love them. It is easier for a young person to like a schoolmaster—partly because many other youths go thro the same discipline, the severity therefore does not seem so personal besides however some youth may respect and even like a schoolmaster they do not tenderly love him the personal suffering voluntarily inflicted is probably incompatible with tender love on either side”.]

[b-b][Earlier version:] three youngest

[c-c][Altered by HTM to read: elder children neither loved him, nor any one else. At this point Mill originally continued (but did not complete the sentence before deleting). Things would have been very different if under the influence of a mother of strong good sense and]

[d-d][Marked (beginning at the top of a new page) with a line in the margin by HTM]

[e-e]613[Deleted by HTM]

[f-f][Marked with a line in the margin by HTM, at left, opposite the last eight words of the sentence, she pencilled two X’s and a question mark.]

[g-g][Marked (beginning at the top of a new page) with a line in the margin by HTM]

[h-h][Earlier version:] terrible

[i-i][At left HTM pencilled a question mark and queried “how shd you?” In revising this paragraph in the final Early Draft text Mill copied the opening sentence verbatim, and for the whole of the second wrote: But I cannot trace to any of them, considered individually, any influence on my developement. After HTM marked the two sentences there, he reduced them to the seven-word prepositional phrase that appears above at 54.11.]

[j-j]614[All but the last eight words are deleted by HTM, who underscored and pencilled a question mark opposite “narrow”, pencilled “revisal”, “mesquin”, a large X, and “omit or remark upon” at various places opposite the next several lines, and then rewrote the sentence to read, up to this point. The habitual frequenters of my father’s house were]

[k-k][Altered by HTM to read: His other friends he saw occasionally but as they knew how important his time was to him they rarely came (she then apparently marked the entire sentence for deletion)]

[l][Cancelled text:] I therefore saw little of most of them, and some not at all

[m-m][Earlier version:] me

[n-n][Altered by HTM to read: questions of]

[a-a][Earlier version:] a regime of freedom

[b-b]616[Earlier version:] My hopes of improvement in these respects had hitherto rested upon the reason of the multitude, improved as I hoped it might be by education. I henceforth saw that this was not the best, and not even a reasonable, hope. Without becoming in the smallest degree less zealous for every practicable increase of the knowledge and improvement of the understanding of the many, I saw that they were never likely to be qualified for judges in the last resort of political any more than of physical truths; that what was wanted was such an improvement in the methods of political and social philosophy, as should enable all thinking and instructed persons, who have no sinister interest, to be of one mind on these subjects, as they are on subjects of physical science: after which the more the intelligence of the general multitude became improved, the more they would appreciate the greater knowledge and more exercised judgment of the instructed and the more disposed they would be to defer to their opinion

[a-a][HTM underscored “existence” and “many years of confidential intimacy”, and wrote at left, and who after twenty years of the most valuable friendship of my life became]

[b-b][HTM deleted “as early as” and added at left. when I was in my 25th she in her 23d year]

[c-c][Deleted by HTM, who wrote at left three sentences that Mill copied into the revised Early Draft text almost verbatim: With her husband’s family . . . lasting impression (See 192.6-11 above.)]

[d-d][Deleted (at the bottom of a page) by HTM]

[e-e][Marked with a line in the margin by HTM]

[f-f][Earlier version (one of several attempts):] and a most distinguée woman [deleted by HTM]

[g-g][Marked with a line in the margin by HTM]

[h-h][Altered by HTM to read: every good observer must have]

[i-i][Earlier version:] an [altered to final reading first by HTM]

[j-j][Earlier version:] but of no intellectual or artistic tastes, nowise [altered to final reading first by HTM]

[k-k][Interlined in pencil by HTM, then written over in ink by Mill]

[l-l][Deleted by HTM]

[m-m][Interlined in pencil by HTM, then written over in ink by Mill]

[n-n][Deleted by HTM]

[o][Cancelled text:] alone [deleted first by HTM]

[p-p][Earlier version:] an originally [altered to final reading first by HTM]

[q-q][Altered by HTM to read: Most intellects]

[r-r][Deleted by HTM]

[s-s][Altered by HTM to read: might have made an orator if any such carrières (for “a great orator” Mill first wrote “one of the greatest of orators”)]

[t-t][Earlier version:] into the possibilities and capabilities of the future than those who are reputed the most dreamy enthusiasts [altered several times by both Mill and HTM, the latter first writing the version that Mill accepted as final. She also marked the entire sentence with a line in the margin.]

[u-u][Deleted by HTM, who also underscored “infallible” and pencilled “unerring?” at left]

[v-v][Marked with a large X and a line in the margin by HTM, who also deleted the last eight or nine words of the sentence and interlined “derived &c” above “been”]

[w-w][Deleted by HTM]

[x-x]621[Marked with a line in the margin by HTM, who pencilled some forty or fifty words at left, now erased and largely illegible, beginning: “It is a subject on which we have often united as shewing [?] . . . ”]

[y-y][Earlier version:] radically

[z][Cancelled text:] much [deleted first by HTM, who marked the entire sentence with a line in the margin and pencilled several words at left, now erased and (except for “I mention” [?] and “attainments”) illegible]

[a-a][Earlier version:] . My principal recommendation, besides that of strong admiration and desire for sympathy with her, was our thorough agreement in opinion, which to any one, especially to a young person opposed to the reigning opinions, is [altered to final reading first by HTM]

[b][Cancelled text:] most essential

[c-c][Earlier version:] Her education, her personal habits and tastes were all [HTM deleted “Her education” and “all”, and wrote several words, now erased and illegible, at left.]

[d-d]622[Marked with a line in the margin by HTM]

[e-e][Deleted by HTM]

[f-f][Earlier version:] they give it in as full measure as they receive it

[g-g][Deleted by HTM, who marked the rest of this sentence and the next five sentences (through “now found one.”) with a line in the margin]

[h-h][Altered by HTM to read: This was]

[i][Cancelled text:] as a really existing character

[j-j][Earlier version:] objects of contemplation which she afforded to me [HTM underscored “objects” and wrote “Subjects” at left.]

[k][Cancelled text:] though considerable from the first [deleted first by HTM; who wrote several words, now erased and illegible, at left]

[l][Cancelled text:] : as will be abundantly shewn in the sequel

[m-m][Underscored and marked with a question mark by HTM]

[n-n][Altered by HTM to read: this but in a high degree]

[o-o][Marked with a line in the margin by HTM]

[p-p][Altered by HTM to read: followers]

[q-q][Earlier version:] servants

[r-r][Altered by HTM to read: a rich and strong nature]

[s-s][Altered by HTM to read: our acquaintance]

[t-t][Altered by HTM to read: preferred to]

[u-u][Deleted by HTM]

[v-v][Deleted by HTM]

[w-w][Deleted by HTM, who wrote at left: “explain how what is called society always becomes burthensome to persons of any capacity and therefore especially to those who require a real interchange of ideas to make a change from solitude refreshing—not wearysome”]

[x-x][Deleted by HTM]

[y-y][Altered by HTM to read: acquired increased]