regard to a person of whom the world knows so little. Yet it is a weakness, though an amiable weakness, to attempt, by force of such language, to overcome the inevitable decree of circumstances, and to try to dictate to the world an opinion which it cannot receive upon any single authority. It may be profoundly melancholy that such exalted merit should vanish without leaving more tangible traces; but it is useless to resent the fact, or to suppose that when such traces are non-existent, the defect can be supplied by the most positive assertions that they might have existed. And Mill would have seen in any other case what was the inevitable suggestion to his readers. He could not, he says, 'detect any mixture of errors' in the truths which she struck out far in advance to him. What are the opinions in which a man detects no mixture of error? Plainly his own. But these were far in advance of him. That means that they were deductions from his own. Is it possible, to speak it plainly, to resist a strong impression that these extravagant expressions of admiration may have been lavished upon a living echo—an echo, it is true, skilful enough to anticipate as well as to repeat, but still essentially an echo? We know, for Mill has told us, what he did alone, and we know what he did in co-operation; and if the earlier work was not his best, it certainly contained the whole sum and substance of his later teaching. That his wife must have been a remarkable woman may be a fair deduction from his admiration; that she was all that he then thought her would be, to say the least of it, a very rash conjecture.