ssions,
assumptions, and exclusions that the weak points of his system are to be
found.

His style has also very considerable merits. It is not brilliant or
charming; it has neither great strength nor great stateliness. But it is
perfectly clear, it is impossible to mistake its meaning, and its
simplicity is unattended by any of the down-at-heel neglect of neatness
and elegance which is to be found, for instance, in Locke. Little
scholastic as he was in most ways, Mill had far outgrown the ignorant
eighteenth century contempt of the Schoolmen, and had learnt from them
an exact precision of statement and argument, while he had managed to
keep (without its concomitant looseness and vulgarity) much of the
eighteenth century's wholesome aversion to jargon and to excess of
terminology. In presenting complicated statements of detail, as in the
_Political Economy_, the _Representative Government_, and elsewhere, he
has as much lucidity as Macaulay, with an almost total freedom from
Macaulay's misleading and delusive suppression of material details. And
besides his usual kind of calm and measured argument, he can
occasionally, as in divers passages of the _Sir William Hamilton_ and
the political books, rise or sink from the logical and rhetorical points
of view respectively to an impassioned advocacy, which, though it may be
rarely proof against criticism, is very agreeable so far as it goes.
That Mill wholly escaped the defects of the popular philosopher, I do
not suppose that even those who sympathise with his views would contend;
though they might not admit, as others would, that these defects were
inseparable from his philosophy in itself. But it may be doubtful
whether, all things considered, a better _literary_ type of the popular
philosopher exists in modern English; and it certainly is not surprising
that, falling in as he did with the current mode of thought, and
providing it with a defence specious in reasoning and attractive in
language, he should have attained an influence perhaps greater than that
of which any English philosophical writer has been able during his
lifetime to boast.

The convenience of noticing the Mills together, and of putting Sir
William Hamilton next to his most famous disciples, seems to justify a
certain departure from strict chronological order. Hamilton was indeed
considerably the senior of his critic, having been born on 8th March
1788. His father and grandfather, both professors at the U