Back in the old days, intellectuals used to smoke. Indeed, anyone who didn’t smoke couldn’t be a real intellectual, and a cigarette, held at an angle on the lower lip by dried saliva, added immense depth to anyone’s thought. It’s not surprising, then, that old philosophy books tend to smell like ashtrays. My copy of Father Copleston’s book on Nietzsche, for example, is particularly bad in this respect. Merely opening it is equivalent to smoking a pack of twenty; I could probably sue, if only I could remember the bookseller.

My copy of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography also reeks of stale tobacco, evidence perhaps not so much that intellectuals smoked more than others of their time, but that they lingered longer over their books than those whose tastes ran to lighter literature. The Autobiography is certainly worth lingering over; in his edition of the correspondence of Mill and Harriet Taylor, F. A. Hayek proposed that the Autobiography would be Mill’s most enduring work, read when even On Liberty had been forgotten.

I do not think you can read Mill’s prose without forming a strong and favorable impression of his character. It is exactly that which is conveyed by G. F. Watts’s famous portrait of him. (Watts was once compared, in England at least, with Michelangelo, as Saint-Saëns was in France with Beethoven.) Mill’s face, like his prose, is strong, direct, honest, and unflinching; when Mill writes something that is unsound, it is because he is mistaken, not