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 April, 1846. It appears that the editor thought fit to omit a passage controverting the prevailing notion of the warlike propensity of the French. Mill wished the passage had been retained: "The opinion is a very old and firm one with me, founded on a good deal of personal observation." He adds, "The 'Edinburgh' has lately been sometimes very unjust to the French." He further interrupted the "Political Economy" to write his review of Grote's first two volumes, which appeared in the "Edinburgh" in October. This was, in every sense, a labor of love—love of the subject, love of the author, and admiration of the work. Writing in September, he says: "I have just corrected the proof of my review of Grote, in which I have introduced no little of the Comtean philosophy of religion. Altogether I like the thing, though I wrote it in exactly four days, and rewrote it in three more, but I had to read and think a good deal for it first." His reading, I remember, included the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey, for the sake of the Homeric discussion in which he perilously ventured to differ somewhat from Grote. There was no man whose opinion Grote was more sensitive to, but the objections raised did not alter his views. In deference to Mill, he made some slight changes in the next edition. One, I remember, was to leave out of the preface the words "feminine" and "masculine," as a figurative expression of the contrast of the artistic and scientific sides of the Greek mind. Mill could never endure the differences of character between men and women to be treated as a matter of course.

In the letter above quoted, he announces that he has "got on well with the 'Pol. Ec' I am on the point of finishing the third book (Exchange)." He was now beginning his hardest winter, after 1842-'43. It was the winter of the Irish famine, and he thought he saw an opportunity for a grand regenerating operation in Ireland. He began in the "Morning Chronicle" a series of leading articles, urging the reclamation of the waste land to be converted into peasant properties, and iterated all the facts showing the potency of the proprietary feeling in strengthening the disposition to industry. In the months of October, November, December, and January, he wrote two or three leaders a week on this topic; we used to call these, in the language of the medical schools, his "Clinical Lectures." He was pushing on the "Political Economy" at the same time. Moreover, a letter to his brother James (2d November) shows that he was laboring under illness—"had been ill, now better, but still a bad cold." In the middle of November he wrote that the articles "have excited a good deal of notice, and have quite snatched the initiative out of the 'Times.' He adds: "It is a capital thing to have the power of writing leaders in the 'Chronicle' whenever I like, which I can always do. The paper has tried for years to get me to write to it, but it has not suited me to do it before, except once in six months or so." On the 28th of December, he says: "I continue to carry on the 'Pol. Econ.' as well as I can with the