rits in Mr James Mill, less publicly authenticated, yet not
less real. His unpremeditated oral exposition was hardly less effective
than his prepared work with the pen; his colloquial fertility on
philosophical subjects, his power of discussing himself, and of
stimulating others to discuss, his ready responsive inspirations through
all the shifts and windings of a sort of Platonic dialogue--all these
accomplishments were, to those who knew him, even more impressive than
what he composed for the press. Conversation with him was not merely
instructive, but provocative to the dormant intelligence. Of all persons
whom we have known, Mr James Mill was one who stood least remote from
the lofty Platonic ideal of Dialectic--[Greek: _Tou didhonai kahi
dhechesthai lhogon_]--(the giving and receiving of reasons) competent
alike to examine others, or to be examined by them, on philosophy. When
to this we add a strenuous character, earnest convictions, and
single-minded devotion to truth, with an utter disdain of mere
paradox--it may be conceived that such a man exercised powerful
intellectual ascendancy over younger minds. Several of those who enjoyed
his society--men now at, or past, the maturity of life, and some of them
in distinguished positions--remember and attest with gratitude such
ascendancy in their own cases: among them the writer of the present
article, who owes to the historian of British India an amount of
intellectual stimulus and guidance such as he can never forget.

When a father, such as we have described, declining to send his son
either to school or college, constituted himself schoolmaster from the
beginning, and performed that duty with laborious solicitude--when,
besides full infusion of modern knowledge, the forcing process applied
by the Platonic Socrates to the youth-Theaetetus, was administered by Mr
James Mill, continuously and from an earlier age, to a youthful mind not
less pregnant than that of Theaetetus--it would be surprising if the son
thus trained had not reached even a higher eminence than his father. The
fruit borne by Mr John Stuart Mill has been worthy of the culture
bestowed, and the volume before us is at once his latest and his ripest
product.

The 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy' is intended by Mr
Mill (so he tells us in the preface to the sixth published edition of
his 'System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive') as a sequel and
complement to that system. We are ha