ay into print. Of his
early official associates, all have, with scarcely an exception,
already passed away; and there is no one within reach to whom I can
apply for assistance in verifying or correcting my own impressions.
These are in substance the following.

In the few last decades of its existence, the East-India Company's
establishment, in Leadenhall Street, consisted of three
divisions,--the secretary's, military secretary's, and examiners'
offices,--in the last of which most of the despatches and letters were
composed which were afterwards signed by the directors or the
secretary. Into this division, in the year 1821, the directors,
perceiving an infusion of new blood to be very urgently required,
introduced, as assistant examiners, four outsiders,--Mr. Strachey
(father of the present Sir John and Major-Gen. Richard Strachey),
Thomas Love Peacock (author of "Headlong Hall"), Mr. Harcourt, and
Mr. James Mill; the selection of the last-named being all the more
creditable to them, because, in his "History of British India," he had
animadverted with much severity on some parts of the Company's
administration. Two years afterwards, in 1823, the historian's son,
the illustrious subject of these brief memoirs, then a lad of
seventeen, obtained a clerkship under his father. According to the
ordinary course of things in those days, the newly-appointed junior
would have had nothing to do, except a little abstracting, indexing,
and searching, or pretending to search, into records; but young Mill
was almost immediately set to indite despatches to the governments of
the three Indian Presidencies, on what, in India-House phraseology,
were distinguished as "political" subjects,--subjects, that is, for
the most part growing out of the relations of the said governments
with "native" states or foreign potentates. This continued to be his
business almost to the last. In 1828 he was promoted to be assistant
examiner, and in 1856 he succeeded to the post of chief examiner;
after which his duty consisted rather in supervising what his
assistants had written than in writing himself: but for the three and
twenty years preceding he had had immediate charge of the political
department, and had written almost every "political" despatch of any
importance that conveyed the instructions of the merchant princes of
Leadenhall Street to their pro-consuls in Asia. Of the quality of
these documents, it is sufficient to say, that they were John Mi