Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/345

Rh repeated it. It grew out of the very laudable desire to approach an abstract subject by a concrete introduction; but the conditions of success in that endeavor have scarcely yet been realized by any one of the many that have made it. At a later period, Grote declaimed strongly against Mill's setting Whately above Hamilton.

The final article in April, 1828, is the review of Scott's "Life of Napoleon." It extends to sixty pages, and is in every way a masterpiece. He had now made a thorough study of the French Revolution, and had formed the design to be himself its historian. He does ample justice to Scott's genius as a narrator, and to a certain amount of impartiality founded on his naturally tolerant disposition, and his aim at winning the good word of everybody. But the exposure of the many and deep-seated defects of the work, both in facts and in reasonings, is complete, and would have marred the fame of any other writer. In point of execution, it is not unworthy to be compared with the Sedgwick and Whewell articles.

I consider some observations called for on the mental crisis of 1826. He had then completed his twentieth year. The subjective description given of his state must be accepted as complete. But the occurrence is treated as purely spiritual or mental; the physical counterpart being wholly omitted; the only expression used, "a dull state of nerves such as everybody is liable to," is merely to help out the description on the mental side. Nothing could be more characteristic of the man. There was one thing he never would allow, which was, that work could be pushed to the point of being injurious to either body or mind. That the dejection so feelingly depicted was due to physical causes, and that the chief of these causes was overworking the brain, may I think be certified beyond all reasonable doubt. We know well enough what amount of mental strain the human constitution, when at its very best, has been found to endure; and I am unable to produce an instance of a man going through as much as Mill did before twenty, and yet living a healthy life of seventy years. The account of his labors in the previous year alone, 1825 (a lad of nineteen), is enough to account for all that he underwent in the years immediately following. Moreover, it was too 'early to have exhausted his whole interest in life, even supposing that he had drawn somewhat exclusively upon the side of activity and reforming zeal. Fifteen or twenty years later was soon enough to readjust his scheme of enjoyment, by delicate choice and variation of stimulants, by the cultivation of poetry and passive susceptibility. It so happened that, on the present occasion, his morbid symptoms were purely subjective; there was no apparent derangement in any bodily organ. Judging, however, from what followed a few years later, we can plainly see in this "mental crisis" the beginning of the maladies that oppressed the second half of his life in a way that could not be mistaken. He got over the attack apparently in two or three years,