Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/350

 weakness of stomach. In both these organs he was subject to recurring derangements for the rest of his life.

The "London Review," projected in 1834, started in April, 1835. Sir William Molesworth undertook the whole risk, and Mill was to be editor, although he considered it incompatible with his office to be openly proclaimed in that capacity. His father lent his latest energies to the scheme, and opened the first number with a political article, entitled "The State of the Nation"—a survey of the situation of public affairs in the beginning of 1835, in his usual style. John Mill's first contribution was the Sedgwick article. I have heard that Sedgwick himself confessed that he had been writing about what he did not understand, but my informant was not himself a Cambridge man. Effective as the article was for its main purpose of defending the "Utilitarian Ethics" against a sciolistsocialist [sic], it always seemed to me rather weak in the introduction, which consists in putting the question, "For what end do endowed universities exist?" and in answering, "To keep alive philosophy." In his mind, philosophy seemed to mean chiefly advanced views in politics and in ethics; which, of course, came into collision with religious orthodoxy and the received commonplaces of society. Such a view of the functions of a university would not be put forth by any man that had ever resided in a university; and this is not the only occasion when Mill dogmatized on universities in total ignorance of their working.

The second number of the "Review" is chiefly notable for his father's article on "Reform in the Church." It is understood that this article gave a severe shock to the religious public; it was a style of reform that the ordinary churchman could not enter into. The prospects of the "Review" were said to be very much damaged in consequence. John Mill wrote on Samuel Bailey's "Rationale of Political Representation." Bailey's views being in close accordance with his own, he chiefly uses the work as an enforcement of the radical creed. After Bentham and the Mills, no man of their generation was better grounded in logical methods, or more thorough in his method of grappling with political and other questions, than Samuel Bailey.

In the same number Mill reviews Tennyson's poems. He assigns as his inducement that the only influential organs that had as yet noticed them were "Blackwood" and the "Quarterly Review"; on which notices he pronounces a decided and not flattering opinion. He is, accordingly, one of the earliest to mete out justice to Tennyson's powers; and as a critical exercise, as well as a sympathetic appreciation, the article is highly meritorious. In numerous instances besides, Mill was among the first, if not the very first, to welcome a rising genius.