ted by a
philosopher who tells him that the question may possibly be capable of
useful discussion towards the middle of the next century. But Mr. Mill's
argument is full of force and praiseworthy patience.

* * * * *

The union of boundless patience with unshaken hope was one of Mr. Mill's
most conspicuous distinctions. There are two crises in the history of
grave and sensitive natures. One on the threshold of manhood, when the
youth defines his purpose, his creed, his aspirations; the other towards
the later part of middle life, when circumstance has strained his
purpose, and tested his creed, and given to his aspirations a cold and
practical measure. The second crisis, though less stirring, less vivid,
less coloured to the imagination, is the weightier probation of the two,
for it is final and decisive; it marks not the mere unresisted force of
youthful impulse and implanted predispositions, as the earlier crisis
does, but rather the resisting quality, the strength, the purity, the
depth, of the native character, after the many princes of the power of
the air have had time and chance of fighting their hardest against it.
It is the turn which a man takes about the age of forty or
five-and-forty that parts him off among the sheep on the right hand or
the poor goats on the left. This is the time of the grand moral
climacteric; when genial unvarnished selfishness, or coarse and ungenial
cynicism, or querulous despondency, finally chokes out the generous
resolve of a fancied strength which had not yet been tried in the
burning fiery furnace of circumstance.

Mr. Mill did not escape the second crisis, any more than he had escaped
the first, though he dismisses it in a far more summary manner. The
education, he tells us, which his father had given him with such fine
solicitude, had taught him to look for the greatest and surest source of
happiness in sympathy with the good of mankind on a large scale, and had
fitted him to work for this good of mankind in various ways. By the time
he was twenty, his sympathies and passive susceptibilities had been so
little cultivated, his analytic quality had been developed with so
little balance in the shape of developed feelings, that he suddenly
found himself unable to take pleasure in those thoughts of virtue and
benevolence which had hitherto only been associated with logical
demonstration and not with sympathetic sentiment. This dejection was
dispelle