Autobiography by John Stuart Mill (easy books to read txt) 📖

or acquaintance: among those I had, _Robinson Crusoe_

was pre-eminent, and continued to delight me through all my boyhood.

It was no part, however, of my father's system to exclude books of

amusement, though he allowed them very sparingly. Of such books he

possessed at that time next to none, but he borrowed several for me;

those which I remember are the _Arabian Nights_, Cazotte's _Arabian

Tales_, _Don Quixote_, Miss Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_, and a book

of some reputation in its day, Brooke's _Fool of Quality_.

 

In my eighth year I commenced learning Latin, in conjunction with a

younger sister, to whom I taught it as I went on, and who afterwards

repeated the lessons to my father; from this time, other sisters and

brothers being successively added as pupils, a considerable part of my

day's work consisted of this preparatory teaching. It was a part which

I greatly disliked; the more so, as I was held responsible for the

lessons of my pupils, in almost as full a sense as for my own: I,

however, derived from this discipline the great advantage, of learning

more thoroughly and retaining more lastingly the things which I was

set to teach: perhaps, too, the practice it afforded in explaining

difficulties to others, may even at that age have been useful. In

other respects, the experience of my boyhood is not favourable to the

plan of teaching children by means of one another. The teaching, I

am sure, is very inefficient as teaching, and I well know that the

relation between teacher and taught is not a good moral discipline

to either. I went in this manner through the Latin grammar, and a

considerable part of Cornelius Nepos and Caesar's Commentaries, but

afterwards added to the superintendence of these lessons, much longer

ones of my own.

 

In the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement

in the Greek poets with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in

this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first

English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in

which for many years I most delighted: I think I must have read it

from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it

worth while to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I

had not, as I think, observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant

specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with boys,

as I should have expected both _a priori_ and from my individual

experience. Soon after this time I commenced Euclid, and somewhat later,

Algebra, still under my father's tuition.

 

From my eighth to my twelfth year, the Latin books which I remember

reading were, the _Bucolics_ of Virgil, and the first six books of the

Aeneid; all Horace, except the Epodes; the Fables of Phaedrus; the

first five books of Livy (to which from my love of the subject I

voluntarily added, in my hours of leisure, the remainder of the first

decade); all Sallust; a considerable part of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_;

some plays of Terence; two or three books of Lucretius; several of the

Orations of Cicero, and of his writings on oratory; also his letters

to Atticus, my father taking the trouble to translate to me from the

French the historical explanations in Mingault's notes. In Greek I

read the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ through; one or two plays of Sophocles,

Euripides, and Aristophanes, though by these I profited little; all

Thucydides; the _Hellenics_ of Xenophon; a great part of Demosthenes,

Aeschines, and Lysias; Theocritus; Anacreon; part of the _Anthology_;

a little of Dionysius; several books of Polybius; and lastly

Aristotle's _Rhetoric_, which, as the first expressly scientific

treatise on any moral or psychological subject which I had read, and

containing many of the best observations of the ancients on human

nature and life, my father made me study with peculiar care, and throw

the matter of it into synoptic tables. During the same years I learnt

elementary geometry and algebra thoroughly, the differential calculus,

and other portions of the higher mathematics far from thoroughly: for

my father, not having kept up this part of his early acquired

knowledge, could not spare time to qualify himself for removing my

difficulties, and left me to deal with them, with little other aid

than that of books: while I was continually incurring his displeasure

by my inability to solve difficult problems for which he did not see

that I had not the necessary previous knowledge.

 

As to my private reading, I can only speak of what I remember. History

continued to be my strongest predilection, and most of all ancient

history. Mitford's Greece I read continually; my father had put me on

my guard against the Tory prejudices of this writer, and his

perversions of facts for the whitewashing of despots, and blackening

of popular institutions. These points he discoursed on, exemplifying

them from the Greek orators and historians, with such effect that in

reading Mitford my sympathies were always on the contrary side to

those of the author, and I could, to some extent, have argued the

point against him: yet this did not diminish the ever new pleasure

with which I read the book. Roman history, both in my old favourite,

Hooke, and in Ferguson, continued to delight me. A book which, in

spite of what is called the dryness of its style, I took great

pleasure in, was the _Ancient Universal History_, through the

incessant reading of which, I had my head full of historical details

concerning the obscurest ancient people, while about modern history,

except detached passages, such as the Dutch War of Independence, I

knew and cared comparatively little. A voluntary exercise, to which

throughout my boyhood I was much addicted, was what I called writing

histories. I successively composed a Roman History, picked out

of Hooke; and an Abridgment of the _Ancient Universal History_; a

History of Holland, from my favourite Watson and from an anonymous

compilation; and in my eleventh and twelfth year I occupied myself

with writing what I flattered myself was something serious. This was

no less than a History of the Roman Government, compiled (with the

assistance of Hooke) from Livy and Dionysius: of which I wrote as much

as would have made an octavo volume, extending to the epoch of the

Licinian Laws. It was, in fact, an account of the struggles between

the patricians and plebeians, which now engrossed all the interest in

my mind which I had previously felt in the mere wars and conquests of

the Romans. I discussed all the constitutional points as they arose:

though quite ignorant of Niebuhr's researches, I, by such lights as my

father had given me, vindicated the Agrarian Laws on the evidence of

Livy, and upheld, to the best of my ability, the Roman Democratic

party. A few years later, in my contempt of my childish efforts, I

destroyed all these papers, not then anticipating that I could ever

feel any curiosity about my first attempts at writing and reasoning.

My father encouraged me in this useful amusement, though, as I think

judiciously, he never asked to see what I wrote; so that I did not

feel that in writing it I was accountable to any one, nor had the

chilling sensation of being under a critical eye.

 

But though these exercises in history were never a compulsory lesson,

there was another kind of composition which was so, namely, writing

verses, and it was one of the most disagreeable of my tasks. Greek

and Latin verses I did not write, nor learnt the prosody of those

languages. My father, thinking this not worth the time it required,

contented himself with making me read aloud to him, and correcting

false quantities. I never composed at all in Greek, even in prose, and

but little in Latin. Not that my father could be indifferent to the

value of this practice, in giving a thorough knowledge of these

languages, but because there really was not time for it. The verses

I was required to write were English. When I first read Pope's Homer,

I ambitiously attempted to compose something of the same kind, and

achieved as much as one book of a continuation of the _Iliad_. There,

probably, the spontaneous promptings of my poetical ambition would

have stopped; but the exercise, begun from choice, was continued by

command. Conformably to my father's usual practice of explaining to

me, as far as possible, the reasons for what he required me to do,

he gave me, for this, as I well remember, two reasons highly

characteristic of him: one was, that some things could be expressed

better and more forcibly in verse than in prose: this, he said, was

a real advantage. The other was, that people in general attached more

value to verse than it deserved, and the power of writing it, was, on

this account, worth acquiring. He generally left me to choose my own

subjects, which, as far as I remember, were mostly addresses to some

mythological personage or allegorical abstraction; but he made me

translate into English verse many of Horace's shorter poems: I also

remember his giving me Thomson's _Winter_ to read, and afterwards

making me attempt (without book) to write something myself on the same

subject. The verses I wrote were, of course, the merest rubbish, nor

did I ever attain any facility of versification, but the practice may

have been useful in making it easier for me, at a later period, to

acquire readiness of expression.[1] I had read, up to this time, very

little English poetry. Shakspeare my father had put into my hands,

chiefly for the sake of the historical plays, from which, however,

I went on to the others. My father never was a great admirer of

Shakspeare, the English idolatry of whom he used to attack with some

severity. He cared little for any English poetry except Milton (for

whom he had the highest admiration), Goldsmith, Burns, and Gray's

_Bard_, which he preferred to his Elegy: perhaps I may add Cowper and

Beattie. He had some value for Spenser, and I remember his reading to

me (unlike his usual practice of making me read to him) the first book

of the _Fairie Queene_; but I took little pleasure in it. The poetry

of the present century he saw scarcely any merit in, and I hardly

became acquainted with any of it till I was grown up to manhood,

except the metrical romances of Walter Scott, which I read at his

recommendation and was intensely delighted with; as I always was with

animated narrative. Dryden's Poems were among my father's books, and

many of these he made me read, but I never cared for any of them

except _Alexander's Feast_, which, as well as many of the songs

in Walter Scott, I used to sing internally, to a music of my own: to

some of the latter, indeed, I went so far as to compose airs, which

I still remember. Cowper's short poems I read with some pleasure, but

never got far into the longer ones; and nothing in the two volumes

interested me like the prose account of his three hares. In my

thirteenth year I met with Campbell's poems, among which _Lochiel_,

_Hohenlinden_, _The Exile of Erin_, and some others, gave me

sensations I had never before experienced from poetry. Here, too,

I made nothing of the longer poems, except the striking opening of

_Gertrude of Wyoming_, which long kept its place in my feelings as

the perfection of pathos.

 

During this part of my childhood, one of my greatest amusements was

experimental science; in the theoretical, however, not the practical

sense of the word; not trying experiments--a kind of discipline which

I have often regretted not having had--nor even seeing, but merely

reading about them. I never remember being so wrapt up in any book, as

I was in Joyce's _Scientific Dialogues_; and I was rather recalcitrant

to my father's criticisms of the bad reasoning respecting the first

principles of physics, which abounds in the early part of that work. I

devoured treatises on Chemistry, especially that of my father's early

friend and schoolfellow, Dr. Thomson, for years before I attended a

lecture or saw an experiment.

 

From about the age of twelve, I entered into another and more advanced

stage in my course of instruction; in which the main object was no

longer the aids and appliances of thought, but the thoughts themselves.

This commenced with Logic, in which I began at once with the _Organon_,

and read it to the Analytics inclusive, but profited little by the

Posterior Analytics, which belong to a branch of speculation I was not

yet ripe for. Contemporaneously with the _Organon_, my father made me

read the whole or parts of several of the Latin treatises on the

scholastic logic; giving each day to him, in our walks, a minute account

of what I had read, and answering his numerous and most