John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

86 REVIEW OF GROTE S GREECE. 1841-1848.
days, and re-wrote it in three more, but I had to read and think
a good deal for it first." His reading, I remember, included
the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey, for the sake of the Homeric
discussion, in which he perilously ventured to differ somewhat
from Grote. There was no man whose opinion Grote was
more sensitive to, but the objections raised did not alter his
views. In deference to Mill, he made some slight changes in the
next edition. One, I remember, was to leave out of the preface
the words "feminine" and "masculine," as a figurative expression
of the contrast of the artistic and scientific sides of the Greek
mind. Mill could never endure the differences of character
between men and women to be treated as a matter of course.
In the letter above quoted, he announces that he has
"
got on
well with the Pol. EC. I am on the point of finishing the third
beok (Exchange)." He was now beginning his most laborious
winter after 1842-3. It was the winter of the Irish famine,
and he thought he saw an opportunity for a grand regenerating
operation in Ireland. He began in the Morning Chronicle a
series of leading articles, urging the reclamation of the waste
lands to be converted into peasant properties, and iterated all
the facts showing the potency of the proprietary feeling in
strengthening the dispositions to industry.* In the months of
October, November, December, and January, he wrote two or
three leaders a-week on this : topic we used to call these, in the
"
Clinical Lectures ". He
language of the medical schools, his
was pushing on the Political Economy at the same time. More
over, a letter to his brother James (2nd Nov.), shows that he
was labouring under illness :
still a bad cold ". In
"
had been ill, now better, but
the middle of November, he wrote that
"
the articles have excited a good deal of notice, and have
snatched the initiative out of the Times He adds
quite ".
"
It is a capital thing to have the power of writing leaders in
* I believe that it was his friend W. J. Thornton that first awakened him to
the question of Peasant Properties.
"
Thornton s Plea" was published before
the Political Economy came out, and Mill read the proof sheets as it went
through the press.