" 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
conversation carried on by the society frequenting the house." It is
perhaps not strange that a boy of eleven, at any rate a boy who was to
become so modest a man, should not take much part in general
conversation; and Mr. Mill himself never, in referring to his father,
led his hearers to suppose that he had, as a child, been in any way
unduly repressed by him.
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