The publication of the late Mr. John Mill’s Theism (writes a correspondent from England) has again brought forward its author and his peculiarities as subjects of general conversation.  Not content with having talked these matters pretty well over some months ago, people are at this moment discussing them with not a whit less of interest than if they were brand-new.  But it is what Mr. Mill has omitted to tell us in his Autobiography, quite as much as what he has there told us, that excites popular curiosity about him.  How came it that a man whose admiration of his wife was hardly distinguishable from idolatry should never once mention his mother?  Thousands have asked, and have asked in vain, who she was, and whether she could have been so entirely insignificant as to deserve being passed over, without even so much as an allusion to her, by her very philosophic son.  These questions, and others connected with them, I might answer at length.  However, the few facts I shall here state will perhaps be no less welcome than a long detail.  The wife of James Mill, and mother of John Mill, was a Miss Burrows, daughter of a Dr. Burrows who superintended an asylum for the insane at Islington.  She died in London about twenty years ago, having outlived her husband not quite that period.  Her children were nine in number, of whom four daughters are still living—­two in England and two in France.  She was not what would be reckoned a conspicuously intellectual woman, and yet she by no means deserved the heartless slight which was put on her memory by her son.  Indeed, such a slight could have its justification in little short of utter worthlessness; and Mrs. James Mill was not only esteemed, but beloved, by a large circle of friends.  On the appearance of the Autobiography her daughters were, naturally enough, not a little indignant at finding their mother as much ignored in it as if she had never existed, and were inclined, at first, to supplement, publicly, their brother’s account of himself by certain disclosures not exactly of a character to exalt him in the estimation of the world.  Suffice it to say here that for many years before his death he had been estranged from his family; and this estrangement was attributed, by those who had the best opportunities of judging, to the sinister influence of his wife.  This is all that I am disposed to communicate at present, but I should not be at all surprised if we were to know, by and by, much more of the private life of John Mill than we as yet know.

NOTES.