Perhaps the two most striking instances of home training that have been given to the world are those of John Stuart Mill and Giacomo Leopardi; the principal difference being that, while the English boy was crammed scientifically by his father, the Italian poet was permitted to relentlessly cram himself. In both cases we see the same melancholy, blighted childhood; the same cold indifference to the mother, as to one who had no part or parcel in their lives; the same joyless routine of labor; the same unboyish gravity and precocious intelligence. Mill studied Greek at three, Latin at eight, the Organon at eleven, and Adam Smith at thirteen. Leopardi at ten was well acquainted with most Latin authors, and undertook alone and unaided the study of Greek, perfecting himself in that language before he was fourteen. Mill’s sole recreation was to walk with his father, narrating to him the substance of his last day’s reading. Leopardi, being forbidden to go about Recanati without his tutor, acquiesced with pathetic resignation, and ceased to wander outside the garden gates. Mill had all boyish enthusiasm and healthy partisanship crushed out of him by his father’s pitiless logic. Leopardi’s love for his country burned like a smothered flame, and added one more to the pangs that eat out his soul in silence. His was truly a wonderful intellect; and whereas the English lad was merely forced by training into a precocity foreign to his nature, and which, according to Mr. Bain, failed to produce any great show of juvenile scholarship, the Italian boy fed on books with a resistless and craving appetite, his mind growing warped and morbid as his enfeebled body sank more and more under the unwholesome strain. In the long lists of despotically reared children there is no sadder sight than this undisciplined, eager, impetuous soul, burdened alike with physical and moral weakness, meeting tyrannical authority with a show of insincere submission, and laying up in his lonely infancy the seeds of a sorrow which was to find expression in the key-note of his work, Life is Only Fit to be Despised.