I have undertaken to prepare a sketch of Mr. Mill's official career,
but find, on inquiry, scarcely any thing to add to the few particulars
on the subject which have already found their way 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,