eighth year, at which time, however, I was
familiar with 'AEsop's Fables,' most of the 'Anabasis,' the 'Memorabilia'
of Xenophon, and the 'Lives of the Philosophers' by Diogenes Laertius,
part of Lucian, and the 'Ad Demonicum' and 'Ad Nicoclem' of Isocrates."
Besides these he had also read all of Plato, Plutarch, Gibbon, Hume and
Rollin, and was formulating in his mind a philosophy of history.

Whether these things "educated" the boy or not will always remain an
unsettled question for debating-societies.

But that he learned and grew through constant association with his
father there is no doubt. Wherever the father went, the boy trotted
along, a pad in one hand and a pencil in the other, always making notes,
always asking questions, and always answering propositions.

The long out-of-door walks doubtless saved him from death. He never had
a childhood, and if he ever had a mother, the books are silent
concerning her. He must have been an incubator baby, or else been found
under a cabbage-leaf. James Mill treated his wife as if her office and
opinions were too insignificant to consider seriously--she was only an
unimportant incident in his life. James Mill was the typical beef-eating
Englishman described by Taine.

According to Doctor Bain's most interesting little book on John Stuart
Mill, the youth at nine was appointed to supervise the education of the
rest of the family, "a position more pleasing to his vanity than
helpful to his manners." That he was a beautiful prig at this time goes
without saying.

The scaffolding of learning he mistook for the edifice, a fallacy
borrowed from his father. At the age of fourteen he knew as much as his
father, and acknowledged it. He was then sent to France to study the
science of government under Sir Samuel Bentham.

His father's intent was that he should study law, and in his own mind
was the strong conviction that he was set apart, and that his life was
sacred to the service of humanity. A year at the study of law, and a
more or less intimate association with barristers, relieved him of the
hallucination that a lawyer's life is consecrated to justice and the
rights of man--quips, quirks and quillets were not to his taste.

James Mill held the office of Chief Examiner in the East India House, at
a salary equal to seven thousand five hundred dollars a year. The gifted
son was now nineteen, and at work as a junior clerk under his father at
twenty pounds a year. Before the y