Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/194

458 and other state papers connected with our Indian government, and to correspond with it in the management of the revenue; in fact, he might be considered as chief minister for Indian affairs to that most extensive and powerful of all senates, the East India Company.

Notwithstanding the onerous duties with which he was now invested, Mr. Mill did not throw aside his pen, or confine himself exclusively to his office. He wrote several valuable articles in the "Edinburgh Review," upon Education and Jurisprudence, and was a frequent and distinguished contributor to the Westminster and London Reviews. Some of the best essays, also, which appeared in the Supplement of the "Encyclopedia Britannica," and were afterwards published in a separate form, were of his production, comprising the important subjects of Government, Education, Jurisprudence, Law of Nations, Liberty of the Press, Colonies, and Prison Discipline. In 1821-2, he published his "Elements of Political Economy," which professed to be nothing more than a handbook of that Science; and in 1829, his "Analysis of the Human Mind," a work on which he had bestowed long and careful reflection. These productions gave him a high standing both as a metaphysician and political economist, and added no trivial contribution to these growing and improving sciences in which there is still so much to be accomplished.

In this way, the years of Mr. Mill were spent in a life of silent and unostentatious, but honourable and useful industry; and while he enjoyed the intercourse of such leading minds as Bentham, Brougham, Romilly, Ricardo, and others of a similar stamp, his society was eagerly sought, and highly relished by young men preparing for a public career in literature, who were enlightened by his experience, and charmed with his enthusiasm, as well as directed in their subsequent course by his watchful, affectionate superintendence. He thus lived, not only in his own writings, which had a powerful influence upon the opinions of the day, but in the minds which he thus trained for the guidance of a succeeding generation. As the political opinions of such a man were of no trivial importance, we may add that he belonged to the Radical party, and adhered to its principles with uncompromising integrity, at a time when they were least valued or regarded. It was a natural consequence of that love of Greek literature and philosophy which he retained to the end of his life. His last five years were spent at Kensington, where he died of consumption, on the 23d of June, 1836, in the sixty-fourth year of his age, leaving behind him a widow and nine children, of whom five had attained to manhood.

 MOIR, .—This gentle, amiable, and talented poet and physician, whose worth secured for him the esteem which his genius awakened, and whose recent death is still felt and bewailed as a national bereavement, was born at Musselburgh, on the 5th of January, 1798. His father was a respectable citizen of that ancient burgh, and had a family of four children, of whom David was the second. After having learned the usual branches of education at one of the private town seminaries, the young poet attended the grammar-school of Musselburgh for six years, where he studied the Latin, Greek, and French languages, and the elementary departments of algebra and mathematics. But however diligent a pupil he might be, and whatever might be his usual standing in the class, he was not, in after life, particularly distinguished for his attainments either as a geometrician or a linguist. Like many other men of genius, especially those of a sensitive and poetical temperament, he used these departments of learning merely as the means to an end, and not as the