=John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)= born in Rodney Street, Pentonville. His education, which was conducted by his father, would have been the mental ruin of a mind of smaller powers. "I never was a boy," he said, "never played at cricket; it is better to let Nature have her own way." He began Greek at three, and Latin at eight years of age. The list of classical authors with whose works he was familiar at thirteen is truly appalling. This in itself would have been a small matter had not his cold, stern father discouraged all imaginative reading. Poetry in particular he was taught to look upon as mere vanity, and there are few passages in Mill's "Autobiography" more interesting than the story how in early manhood Wordsworth's poetry came to him like veritable "balm in Gilead," for spiritual refreshment and healing. In 1823 he obtained a clerkship in the India House, from which he withdrew, with ample compensation, when the Indian Government was transferred to the Crown in 1858. Meanwhile he had been an industrious contributor to the _Westminster Review_ and other periodicals, and regularly attended the debates of the Speculative Society which met at Grote's house. Scarcely any scene in literature is better known than the destruction of the manuscript of Carlyle's "French Revolution" which he had lent to Mill. Mill lent it to Mrs Taylor, the lady who afterwards became his wife, and it was inadvertently destroyed. The speechless agony of Mill when he went to inform his friend, the self-command with which Carlyle and his wife concealed their own misery in endeavouring to moderate his self-reproaches--these and many other details have been made familiar to us by many pens. Mill gave Carlyle what monetary compensation he could, and acted, as he always acted in life, with all possible nobleness. Mrs Taylor, who was the real culprit on this occasion, was the wife of a wholesale druggist in Mark Lane. When Mill made her acquaintance, his father remonstrated, but he replied that he had no other feelings towards her than he would have towards an equally able man. The equivocal friendship, which was the talk of all Mill's circle of acquaintances, lasted for twenty years, when Mr Taylor died, and Mill married his widow. It is impossible to regard the enthusiasm of Mill for this lady without feeling how much there was in it of the humorous, how much also of the pathetic. That Mill had a most exaggerated opinion of her intellectual attainments there can be no doubt. He declared her to be the author of all that was best in his writings. Much of his "Political Economy," he said, was her work, and also the "Liberty" and the "Subjection of Women." His language with regard to her was always extravagant, and Grote said that "only John Mill's reputation could survive such displays." Mill's brother George declared that she was "nothing like what John thought her," and there is much evidence to show that she was but a weak reflection of her husband. Still, it is