Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/720

 child crying in the abbey! which had not happened for the whole time he had lived here, being near thirty years. Down a staircase from here is a long range of bedrooms, generally called the Monks' Walk. From it is a staircase leading into the cloisters. The rest of the house is not worth mentioning. If I was to mention the whole it would tire you exceedingly, as this house is in reality so large that the eight rooms on one floor of the wing which we inhabit, which make not one quarter of even that floor of the whole house, are as many as all the rooms in your house, and considerably larger.

I have been to the parish church which is at Thornecomb. Mr. Hume has been here a great while. Mr. Koe came the other day, and Admiral Chietekoff is expected. Willie and I have had rides in Mr. Hume's curricle.

He goes on to say—"What has been omitted here will be found in a journal which I am writing of this and last year's journeys." He then incontinently plunges again into descriptive particulars about the fish-ponds, the river Axe, the deer-parks, the walks, and Bentham's improvements. The performance is not a favorable specimen of his composition; the handwriting is very scratchy, and barely shows what it became a few years later. The reference to Joseph Hume's visit has to be connected with the passage at arms between the elder Mill and Benthara, which I had formerly occasion to notice ("Mind," viii., pp. 525, 526).

By far the most important record of Mill's early years is his diary during part of his visit to France, in his fifteenth year; and from this I hope to illustrate with some precision the real character of his acquisitions and his intellectual power at that age. A very valuable introduction to this diary was lately brought to light by Mr. Roebuck, who had fortunately preserved a letter of Mill's that he had received from Jeremy Bentham's amanuensis in 1827. It was addressed to Bentham's brother, Sir Samuel Bentham, and it is dated July 30, 1819, his age being thirteen years and two months. The letter begins thus:

My Dear Sir: It is so long since I had the pleasure of seeing you that I have almost forgotten when it was, but I believe it was in the year 1814, the first year we were at Ford Abbey. I am very much obliged to you for your inquiries with respect to my progress in my studies; and as nearly as I can remember, I will endeavor to give an account of them from that year.

He then goes on to detail his reading for the successive years from 1814. I do not print the details, but will compare them with the "Autobiography," and indicate agreements and differences. In the year 1814 (by the letter), he read, in Greek, Thucydides and Anacreon (an odd coupling), and, he believed, the Electra of Sophocles, the Phœnissæ of Euripides, the Plutus and the Clouds of Aristophanes, and the Philippies of Demosthenes; in Latin, only the Oration of Cicero for Archias, and part of the pleading against Verres. In Mathematics, he was reading Euclid; he began Euler's Algebra, and worked at Bonnycastle; also some of West's Geometry. In 1815, his reading was Homer's