143, line 13) folios 185 ( I have already mentioned, ibid. 113, line 21) to 142 ( speculation and for action, ibid. 55, line 6) folios 124 ( biographies, above all by Condorcet's life, ibid. 36, line 16 ( when it was applied, or) written in an unidentified continental hand (a) folios 1-23, Autobiography, 1813 edition, p.I, folios 1-265, the press-copy of the Autobiography of the philosopher John Stuart Mill (d 1873), in three hands, namely But my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done.The material comprises the press copy of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography and a separate copy, in the hand of Helen Taylor, of most of the first chapter of the Autobiography: I also read, in 1813, the first six dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphron to the Theætetus inclusive: which last dialogue, I venture to think, would have been better omitted, as it was totally impossible I should understand it.
At that time I had read, under my father’s tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon’s Cyropædia and Memorials of Socrates some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius part of Lucian, and Isocrates Ad Demonicum and Ad Nicoclem. Of grammar, until some years later, I learnt no more than the inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but, after a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation and I faintly remember going through Æsop’s Fables, the first Greek book which I read. The Anabasis, which I remember better, was the second. My earliest recollection on the subject, is that of committing to memory what my father termed Vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. I have been told that it was when I was three years old. I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek. Mill, J.S., Autobiography, in Robson ed., The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963.
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