hich he bequeathed to his son.

Mr. Stephen's third volume is chiefly occupied by the history of the
later Utilitarians, and the expansion of their cardinal principle in
its application to a changing temper of the times, under the
leadership of John Stuart Mill. We have, first, a closely written and
critical description of this remarkable man's early life, his
stringent educational training, the development of his opinions, and
their influence upon the orthodox tenets of the sect. Upon all these
subjects Mill has left us, under his own hand, more intimate and
circumstantial particulars than are to be found, perhaps, in any other
personal memoir. The writer who tells his own story usually passes
hastily over boyhood; the ordinary biographer gives some family
details, or endeavours to amuse us with trivial anecdotes of the child
who became an important man. J. S. Mill hardly alludes to any member
of his family except his father, and his early days are marked by a
total absence of triviality. He was bound over to hard intellectual
labour at home during the years that for most of us pass so lightly
and unprofitably at a public school; he was a voracious and
indefatigable reader and writer from his youth up, with a wolfish
hunger (as Browning calls it) for knowledge; he plunged into all the
current discussions of philosophy and politics; he became a practised
writer and made a good figure at debating clubs; he became so intent
on the solution of complex social problems as to acquire a distaste
for general society; his mental concentration blunted his sensibility
to the physical passions that so powerfully sway mankind.

Nevertheless, Mill's outlook upon the world was much wider than his
father's, and his aim was so to adjust the Utilitarian creed as to
bring it into closer working accord with the advancing ideas and
projects of the political parties to whom he was nearest in sympathy.
He allied himself in the beginning with the Philosophical Radicals, in
the hope of organising them for active service in the cause. But this
group soon broke up, and Mr. Stephen ascribes their failure in part to
their name, observing that the word '"Philosophical" in English is
synonymous with visionary, unpractical, and perhaps simply foolish.'
There would be less satire, and possibly more justice, in saying that
the word gives a chill to the energetic hot-gospeller of active
Radicalism, who pushes past the philosopher as one standing too far