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.
Though Mill appears here purely as the disciple of Ricardo, striving after more precise statement, and reaching forward to further consequences, we can well understand in reading these essays how about the time when he first sketched them he began to be conscious of power as an original and independent thinker.
In his Representative Government (1860) he systematized opinions already put forward in many casual articles and essays.