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INDIA HOUSE, Saturday, August 6, 1837.

DEAR ROBERTSON, I entirely approve your intention of remaining at Boulogne as long as possible, and I hope you will remain as long as what requires to be done here can be done by me, of which you are the most proper judge.

None of the three articles you expect are at Hooper's, nor any other article except one on Poland by a Pole, which I have not looked at. There are a few books, chiefly Spencer's Circassia (from Colburn) and a translation of the King of Bavaria's Poems. Hooper says he was mistaken about 1025 copies having been sold; it was only 925. That is only 25 since you went away. . . . Nichol says his article will be here next week. You do not know Nichol. He is one

of the three or four persons living for whom I would answer that whatever they think and say they can do they can. He says: "I expect that the article will direct scientific attention to some few moot points in a mode not quite so limited as that of existing discussion regarding them. At all events, I shall show general readers at what geology has arrived." I will write to him immediately about connecting it with the geological transactions.

As for me, I am so immersed in Logic and am getting on so triumphantly with it that I loathe the idea of leaving off to write articles. I do not think you are right about the elections. The Tories, where they have gained, have gained impartially from the Whigs and Radicals, and so where they have lost. The only exceptions are Middlesex and the City; in both of which many Tories chose to split with Whigs for the express purpose of turning out Hume and Grote. Whenever the Tories choose to do this, of course the Radical candidates will, in the present state of parties, be in great danger. The Radicals seem to have lost most only because they have lost some of their most leading men, but those

will come in again for some other place very soon; and a great number of the new members are very decided Radicals, though generally not intemperate ones. Neither are the Tories who are turned out the extreme Tories. They almost all belong to the hack official jobbing adventurer Tories, who are seldom ultras, as Twiss, Bonham, Ross, and such like. On the whole, this election will so increase the already great difficulties of the Whigs that they must either propose the ballot and dissolve on it, or contrive to divide the Tory party, and make a compromise with one section of it. They stand much nearer to both goals than they ever did before, and have, I think, got clean up to the parting of the two roads. Either would be a decided improvement on the present aspect of affairs. For the present politics are wonderfully dull; and for the first time these ten years I have no wish to be in Parliament. If the offer you speak of is made me, which I shall not think at all probable until it is done, I shall not accept it unless I find by inquiry here that I can hold it with my situation in this house. For an object of importance I should not mind sacrificing my own pleasures and comforts, and obliging all connected with me to alter their style of living and go (as the vulgar phrase is) down in the world; but I certainly would not do it in order to exchange the speculative pursuits which I like, and in which I can do great things, for the position of a Radical member of this coming Parliament. Ever yours faithfully,

J. S. MILL.

I can do nothing about Hanover without you. Châles is the man I mean. He writes in the Journal des Débats and is a humbug; his reputation is, however, high.

It was now Mill's turn to take a holiday, it would appear, as the date of the next letter of importance shows: :

LEAMINGTON [probably September, 1837], Friday morning.

...

DEAR ROBERTSON, I agree with you. in thinking the Sedgwick quite unobjectionable, though there is less in it than I expected. . . . I think your Theodore Hook a much better article, though I have canceled one or two portions of sentences positively. . . . There are one or two ideas which I think questionable, but with those I have not meddled, nor do I propose to do so. In reading the article this time, it has struck me that there is a fault in some of your best sentences which there used to be very often in mine, and perhaps is still that of crowding too much into them, and, in doing that, falling into a Latinism of construction which, in our non-inflected language, leaves it doubtful what substantives some of your adjectives are intended for. In this article there is also, I think (but not so often as I should have expected in an article written as you said this was, invita Minerva), the fault of using three or four words which do not exactly fit instead of one which does. In the few instances where this fault appeared to me to amount to a serious one I have tried to correct it, and I hope you will find not at the sacrifice of any portion of your meaning. In other respects I like the article. The subject is, I think, viewed in the right light, and disposed of by making a few points, and those the important ones, and treating them in a decided manner.

The Italian article came to me in, I suppose, a proof from which corrections had already been made, but as I have made many more it will require to be carefully gone over. ... I doubt very much the expediency of the deviation from the old plan of keeping the same heading throughout a whole article. think, in our last number, the headings puzzled and displeased people; and though the modification you now propose is not so objectionable, I think it is still rather so; ... but if you wish

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decidedly to try the experiment, I do not object, provided you will follow the old plan as to my own particular articles. . . . I hope exceedingly you will be able to finish your other article as it was begun, and for this number. If you cannot, it must lie over to the next, for the subject is not pressing, and it is much better to have it later in time than inferior in quality; in which case it will not do us the good we expect from it. . . . Of course you have carte blanche about fill-up matter as long as I see it at some stage or other. I would not be particular about going to the extent of sixteen sheets, when we have a good number and plenty of bills so as to make it look thick. . . .

I have written to Napier. Most likely his terms are per article, and may not be higher than ours when the article is long, which I hope this will be. You will see that I have attended to your suggestions about the political article, and have altered besides some passages which were rather declamatory. Pray attend carefully to the revise. I tremble for it. As we shall so soon meet, I leave off.

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Saturday. DEAR ROBERTSON, - To my great satisfaction Carlyle consents to do at least the Scott, and wishes to begin on Monday morning.

I should not like to baffle him in that, but in order to do it he wants Volume I. of the Scott; so, pray, if you can buy, beg, or borrow it before that time, do. He has also a great wish to have the two books of and about Colonel Crockett, and I think has a "month's mind " to write about them. So, pray, send those too, and if the Review does not find its account therein I will pay for them. Yours in haste,

J. S. MILL.

DEAR R., I shall not be in town this evening, but will meet you at Hooper's to-morrow. I wish you would verify two queries of mine in the second sheet of Montaigne. You will see them in a corrected proof which I have returned to Reynell's, and from which, when that is done, it may be printed off. S. has overlooked some bad mistakes.

I send the Arctic with my corrections. They relate solely to small matters, but I do not think you are aware how often your sentences are not only unscholarlike, but absolutely unintelligible, from inattention to ambiguities of small words and of collocation. This article is a splendid instance of it.

Simpson has made all his corrections in such a manner that the printers are sure not to attend to them, but I have left this to you to remedy when you have determined how far to adopt them. J. S. MILL.

If we are much above our fourteen sheets, I think H. M. ought to wait till October. It will do as well then, if not better, and I am very anxious to save expense of that kind.

It will be expedient here to give part of a letter from Harriet Martineau, as it led to a short but sharp controversy between Mill and Robertson, of which Mill's letters only are preserved :

SWISS COTTAGE, CHESHUNT, HERTS, August 26, 1837.

DEAR SIR, Here is my say about the Queen. It will appear to you very obvious, I fear, and perhaps too sermonlike; but indeed I think this strain of meditation much wanted to be uttered.

I have put my address in full above, that you may find fault through the post if you wish to alter. I have avoided the subject of the Rights of Women (except in the way of passing allusion) as not being absolutely necessary. If you dislike the reference to Sydney Smith's reference to Singleton, I have not the

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Ross, 28 September, 1837. DEAR ROBERTSON, -I have read Harriet Martineau's article with the greatest desire to do it justice, and the result is more unfavorable to it than ever before. I always thought the notion it presupposes of the Queen's position an incorrect one, and I now think that even if that notion were correct she does not speak to the Queen in the right tone or give her the right advice. It seems to me that if we occupy ourselves with the Queen at all, we ought to make her believe that people feel interested about her just at present from mere curiosity, and not because they really believe she can do much ; and that unless she has the qualities of an Elizabeth she will be nothing, but that she should aspire to have these qualities, and that if she has she may be as great a ruler as Elizabeth.

Instead of that, H. M. says to her that Elizabeth in these days could do comparatively little for us, and that she must not aim at being like her; and why? Because she has many wills besides her own to consult as if Elizabeth had not! and a giant democracy to struggle with; yes, to struggle with! (is that what we should teach her?) as if Elizabeth had not Catholicism and Puritanism, and Philip and Catherine di Medici and Mary! I think this paper altogether contrary to the character which we are trying to give to the Review, namely, a character of dignity, and besides of practicalness. It is most completely unpractical; it is what a woman's view of practical affairs is supposed to be, and what the view of a person ignorant of life always is. She al

ways treats the Queen like a young person. Now the Queen cannot be young, except in ignorance of the world, and kings and queens are that even at sixty. She always treats the Queen as artless. She cannot be artless, as a person full of anxieties, or who will be so, about doing her duty to her subjects. I am convinced she is just a lively, spirited young lady, thinking only of enjoying herself, and who never is nor ever will be conscious of any difficulties or responsibilities, — no more than Marie Antoinette, who was a much cleverer woman and had much more will and character than she is ever likely to have. She is conscious, I dare say, of good intentions, as every other young lady is; she is not conscious of wishing any harm to any one, unless they have offended her, nor of intending to break any one article of the Decalogue. That is the nature of the well-meanings of a person like her, and if we wish to give her any higher feelings or notions about her duties, we cannot go a worse way to work than H. M. does. If she reads us, she will not recognize any one of her own feelings in what the article says, and therefore will not mind us at all; besides, the article is a ready-made apology to her for being and for doing nothing.

This is a very small part indeed of what this last reading of the article has made me think to its disadvantage. It seems to me childish, and if we take away the prettiness and masculine structure of some of the sentences it is what people may forgive and like well enough in a woman, but not in a parcel of men. There is continual trying hard for philosophy in the article, and not an opinion or observation that you may not drive a coach and six through. I could not have believed how much this was the case till I examined it minutely, for I was imposed upon at first by the writing, which is in the style of a better kind of thought, and yet just the writing one would expect from Miss Mit

ford, or any other woman who has written tragedies, and learnt to put good woman's feelings into men's words, and to make small things look like great ones. It is not like a person who knows what she is writing about, or who knows life in the world or the feelings produced by particular circumstances, and it will give us an air of attempting and not attaining, the sort of ignorance of courts which most excites the ridicule of those who know them, especially when exhibited in sententious, goody, small moralizing.

Altogether I cannot reconcile myself to its insertion in any shape, nor can I think of any note to prefix to it which would not in my view have a still worse effect, if possible, than inserting it just as it is, though even Dilke, you see, thinks we ought to separate ourselves from it to a certain extent; and Dilke's opinion in favor of inserting it may be influenced by a wish to do her a good turn which might serve his turn in many ways, and this without any impeachment of his sincerity. I would not tell H. M. all I think of the article, but I would tell her what is true, that I think it all very well from a woman to a woman, but not such as should be addressed by a body of men who aim at having authority to a woman and the public of that woman. We want now to give a character to the Review, as Carrel gave one to the National; and I am sure, if you attempt to scheme out to yourself the sort of article which with that view it would suit us to write to and of the Queen, you would arrive at an idea of one which this would not at all answer to. I dare not violate my instinct of suitableness, which we must the more strive to keep up the more we are exposed to swerve from it by our attempts to make the Review acceptable to the public. If you are not convinced by my reasons, consider it as a caprice which I cannot help. I hope you do not consider my putting a negative upon

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BRECON, Thursday, October 6, 1837. DEAR ROBERTSON, -I sent off my article from Chepstow yesterday.. I got your letter the same morning. detest that vile Queen thing more than ever for being the cause of the first real difference we have ever had about the Review. But I cannot see the force of what you say about our being committed. I am not committed, nor are you in any way which you cannot get rid of by throwing all upon me. You cannot be serious in what you say about Dilke. . . . We never thought of taking his opinion but in conjunction with oth

ers.

As for H. M., you have only to say to her that it is necessary for the Review to ménager me, and that I have seen the article and decidedly object to it. You may say, if it will assist you, that you tried to overcome my objection, and thought you had succeeded, but were mistaken. This will relieve you entire ly, at the price only of admitting your self to be under the restraint of considerations of expediency from which no editor is or can be free. As for me, I am willing, as in this case I am bound, to take entirely upon myself the resent ment of a very spiteful person rather than admit the article. The truth is, I feel that I never can have stronger objections to any article, nor justified to myself by stronger reasons, and that to let them be overruled would be to give up all power whatever over the Review; for a power which does not amount even to the power of excluding in an extreme case is no power at all. You com

pletely misunderstood my meaning in what passed between us that evening: I never considered anything as settled, and I expressly said, two or three times, that I would take time to consider. I did think, towards the end of the evening, that you were assuming rather too confidently that the compromise we proposed would be adopted, and I blame myself exceedingly that I led you into mistake by a foolish repugnance to put myself on the defensive and weigh words when I was discussing confidentially with you. Until I had made up my mind to say no decidedly, it was unpleasant to be constantly pulling up and drawing in. We should never have been in this embarrassment if I had not been so extremely averse to bring a matter about which you had so strong an opinion to a direct "collision," as they say in Parliament; one house throwing out a bill which the other has passed. I caught eagerly every straw which offered in the shape of a compromise, and the one you suggested of sending the article forth as H. M.'s, and not as our own, seemed to me the last chance of our settling the matter "without a division." But on reading the thing again I felt my objections to it so much strengthened, and my idea of its counterbalancing good qualities so much lowered, that nothing could reconcile me to its being inserted with any note which did not express dissent from it, with the reasons; and you must see how ridiculous that would make us. Putting it in an obscure place only adds a fresh ridicule to the rest; no place but a conspicuous one suits the subject, the first place or the last. I did not think that anything relating to the Review would have given me the worry and annoyance this has, from first to last. It was in an evil hour we asked her to write. But it was she who proposed the subject. I only said it promised the best of several which she proposed. If it is but left out of this number, we will leave the question open for next number if you

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