When we remember how much and what varied knowledge is in those learned books, it is almost difficult to believe, that, during most of the years in which he was preparing them, Mr. Mill was also a hard worker in the India House, passing rapidly, and as the reward only of his assiduity and talent, from the drudgery of a junior clerk to a position involving all the responsibility, if not quite all the dignity, of a secretary of state.  One of his most intimate friends, and the one who knew far more of him in this respect than any other, has in another column penned some reminiscences of his official life; but if all the state papers that he wrote, and all the correspondence that he carried on with Indian officials and the native potentates of the East, could be explored, more than one volume would have to be written in supplement to his father’s great “History of British India.”

Having retired from the India House in 1858, Mr. Mill went to spend the winter in Avignon, in the hope of improving the broken health of the wife to whom he was devotedly attached.  He had not been married many years, but Mrs. Mill, who was the widow of Mr. John Taylor, a London merchant, had been his friend since 1835, or even earlier.  During more than twenty years he had been aided by her talents, and encouraged by her sympathy, in all the work he had undertaken, and to her rare merits he afterwards paid more than one tribute in terms that have no equal for the intensity of their language, and the depth of affection contained in them.  Mrs. Mill’s weak state of health seems to have hardly repressed her powers of intellect.  By her was written the celebrated essay on “The Enfranchisement of Women” contributed to “The Westminster Review,” and afterwards reprinted in the “Dissertations and Discussions,” with a preface avowing, that by her Mr. Mill had been greatly assisted in all that he had written for some time previous.  But the assistance was to end now.  Mrs. Mill died at Avignon on the 3d of November, 1858, and over her grave was placed one of the most pathetic and eloquent epitaphs that have been ever penned.  “Her great and loving heart, her noble soul, her clear, powerful, original, and comprehensive intellect,” it was there written, “made her the guide and support, the instructor in wisdom, and the example in goodness, as she was the sole earthly delight, of those who had the happiness to belong to her.  As earnest for all public good as she was generous and devoted to all who surrounded her, her influence has been felt in many of the greatest improvements of the age, and will be in those still to come.  Were there even a few hearts and intellects like hers, this earth would already become the hoped-for heaven.”  Henceforth, during the fourteen years and a half that were to elapse before he should be laid in the same grave, Avignon was the chosen haunt of Mr. Mill.