Mill, but as a help towards understanding the influences by which his
son was surrounded from his earliest years. James Mill was living in a
house at Pentonville when this son was born, and partly because of the
peculiar abilities that the boy displayed from the first, partly
because he could not afford to procure for him elsewhere such teaching
as he was able himself to give him, he took his education entirely
into his own hands. With what interest--even jealous interest, it
would seem--Bentham watched that education, appears from a pleasant
little letter addressed to him by the elder Mill in 1812. "I am not
going to die," he wrote, "notwithstanding your zeal to come in for a
legacy. However, if I were to die any time before this poor boy is a
man, one of the things that would pinch me most sorely would be the
being obliged to leave his mind unmade to the degree of excellence of
which I hope to make it. But another thing is, that the only prospect
which would lessen that pain would be the leaving him in your hands. I
therefore take your offer quite seriously, and stipulate merely that
it shall be made as soon as possible; and then we may perhaps leave
him a successor worthy of both of us." It was a bold hope, but one
destined to be fully realized. At the time of its utterance, the "poor
boy" was barely more than six years old. The intellectual powers of
which he gave such early proof were carefully, but apparently not
excessively, cultivated. Mrs. Grote, in her lately-published "Personal
Life of George Grote," has described him as he appeared in 1817, the
year in which her husband made the acquaintance of his father. "John
Stuart Mill, then a boy of about twelve years old,"--he was really
only eleven,--"was studying, with his father as sole preceptor, under
the paternal roof. Unquestionably forward for his years, and already
possessed of a competent knowledge of Greek and Latin, as well as of
some subordinate though solid attainments, John was, as a boy,
somewhat repressed by the elder Mill, and seldom took any share in the