In the youthful Dutch universities the effect of the essays was greater.
He occupied a portion of his leisure in writing a book, entitled This Country of Ours (1897), treating of the organization and administration of the government of the United States, and a collection of essays by him was published posthumously, in 1901, under the title Views of an Ex-President.
On the 6th of October 1829 he began the actual work of composition, which was continued without more serious interruptions than those occasioned by the essays on Asylums for the Blind (1830), Poetry and Romance of the Italians (1831), and English Literature of the 19th Century (1832), until the 25th of June 1836, when the concluding note was written.
He had ceased to write for the Westminster in 1828; but during the years 1832 and 1833 he contributed many essays to Tait's Magazine, the Jurist, and the Monthly Repository.
The essays on Bentham and Coleridge constituted the first manifesto of the new spirit which Mill sought to breathe into English Radicalism.