UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
DAVIS

ISAAC FOOT COLLECTION

THE LIFE AND LETTERS
OF HUGH MILLER

BY PETER BAYNE, M.A.

TWO VOLUMES,— IT.

rty from"Unc\e 8

STRAHAN & CO., PUBLISHERS

56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON

1871

{All rights reserved \

LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

DAVfP

Vincent Brooks .Day iSon litli

BOOK IV.
THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

Would'you understand modern society]? Study it in a Bank parlour.

VOL. II. ( £

CHAPTER I.

OFFER OF A SITUATION RESOLVES TO ACCEPT IT SAILS FOR

EDINBURGH INTERCOURSE WITH SIR THOMAS .B LAUDER —

LINLITHGOW.

MANY as are the happy circumstances which we
have noted in Hugh Miller's life, it is to be re-
membered that, at the age of thirty-two, he still finds
himself a stone-mason ; and that he is ardently attached
to a lady, whom he has inflexibly resolved not to marry
while he continues to earn his bread by the labour of his
hands. The scheme of emigration to America, almost
insuperable as were his objections to it, begins to be
again entertained. ' My mother/ says Mrs Miller, ' had
at length agreed, if nothing suitable turned up, to give
us three hundred pounds of mine, of which she had the
life -interest ; and with this sum we were to face the
great wilderness/ Such is Hugh's outlook towards the
end of 1834 ; the final decision on the question of emi-
gration being, I suppose, deferred until the volume of
Traditions, of which we have heard so much, and
which is now getting actually into the printer's hands,
shall have seen the light.

One morning he sits down, by invitation, to break-
fast with Mr Robert Ross, just appointed agent of the
Commercial Bank in Cromarty. Mr Ross is a warm

4 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

friend of Miller's, and has asked him to his house on
this occasion to have some talk on a matter of business.
Mr Ross mentions that he will want an accountant, that
the young man who had been thought of for the situa-
tion cannot find security, and that his guest may have
the place if he will. Hugh is taken by surprise, and,
with his usual diffidence, commences to make excuse. c I
know nothing,' he says, c of business, and very little
of figures ; there is not a person in the country worse
qualified for the office/ Mr Ross understands his
man, and persists. ' Say, however, that you accept,
and I shall become responsible for the rest.' Hugh re-
flects for a few moments. ' I thought of the matter ;
I remembered that no man was ever born an accountant ;
and that the practice and perseverance, which do so much
for others, might do a little for me. The appointment,
too, came to me so unthought of, so unsolicited, and
there seemed to be so much of the providential in it,
that I deemed it duty not to decline.3 This last was no
mere conventional phrase on the lips of Miller. His reli-
gion, quiet and unobtrusive as it was, had impressed
itself upon all his habits of thought and life. It had
become the one thing essential to his happiness, that he
should feel a Divine hand leading him. As usual in
the changes of his life, he regarded the alteration in his
circumstances with calmness and equanimity, deliberately
glad to behold the prospect of life in Scotland with the
woman he loved opening before him ; but not forgetful
of the tranquil hours, so rich in delicate enjoyment of
heart and mind, which he had passed, mallet in hand, on
the chapel brae of Cromarty, or in sequestered country
churchyards, his thoughts busy with some problem of
science, or thesis of philosophy, or newly-discovered
jewel of poetry, while nature prepared for him, in every

ON BOARD SHIP. 5

changing aspect of the landscape, a fresh delight for eye
and soul.

To be initiated in banking, it was necessary for him
to proceed a second time to the South of Scotland. He
sailed for Edinburgh, expecting to be taken into the
office of the Commercial Bank there, but found, on his
arrival, that he was to be stationed in the branch office
at Linlithgow. He spent a few days in Edinburgh, both
before going on to Linlithgow, and on his return thence;
and experienced, on both occasions, great kindness from
Sir T. Dick Lauder, Mr Robert Paul, manager of the
bank in Edinburgh, and others.

Hugh was no sooner out of sight of Miss Fraser,
than he began writing to her. He embarked after
nightfall, November 27,1834; the ship weighed anchor
at dawn, and we find him, pen in hand, ' tossing on the
Moray Frith, on the swell raised by the breeze of the
previous night/ The breeze freshens, and he betakes
himself to his berth ; but the pen is not laid aside. He
overhears the master and one of the passengers discuss-
ing ' a highly interesting topic, — woman/ They appear
to be no enthusiasts on the subject of the sex. ' Your
sweetheart, for instance/ says the master, ' was just as
fine a lassie as a man could wish to meet with anywhere,
and yet you were only a short while in London when
she got married to another. But they are all the same/
' Rubbish/ thinks Hugh ; ' I don't believe a word of it.
The last things I looked on with interest, as we swept
along the Sutor, were the little grey rock and the beech
tree. How much happiness, my own Lydia, have I en-
joyed beside them ! ' But he has too much contempt for
the speakers, or is too sea-sick, to rise and do battle for
the fair. ' We have an eagle aboard/ he proceeds ; ' a noble-
looking bird, but quite as bad a sailor as myself. He is

6 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

so affected by the motion of the vessel, that he has not
tasted food since we left Cromarty. And yet, from his
previous mode of life, he must surely have been accus-
tomed to motion much more violent. I brought you
acquainted one evening, if I recollect right, with Cole-
ridge's rhyme of the " Ancient Mariner." It is a won-
derful poem. On shore I regarded it as merely a wild
and somewhat barbarous trophy of a powerful, but unre-
gulated, imagination ; at sea I can perceive that there is
much of truth as well as of imagination in it. I never
thoroughly understood the love-poetry of Burns, never
felt that his language is, so entirely above that of all other
poets, the language of the heart, until I became acquaint-
ed with you. A short trip at sea has enabled me to
make a similar discovery regarding the language of Cole-
ridge. It is thoroughly nautical ; there is sea in every
line of it.'

On Friday he is watching the pale sands upon
the coast of Moray ; on Sunday morning he is in
the Frith of Forth. ' We are bearing up the Frith in
gallant style, within less than a mile of the shore.
Yonder is the Bass, rising like an immense tower out of
the sea. How have times changed since the excellent
of the earth were condemned, by the unjust and the dis-
solute, to wear out life on that solitary rock ! My eyes
fill as I gaze on it. The persecutors have gone to their
place ; the last vial has long since been poured out on
the heads of the infatuated Stewarts, whose short-sighted
policy would have rendered men faithful to their princes
by making them untrue to their God. But the noble
constancy of the persecuted, the high fortitude of the
martyr, still live. There is a halo, my Lydia, encircling
the brow of that rugged rock ; and from many a solitary
grave, and many a lonely battle-field, there come voices

THE FRITH OF FORTH. 7

and thunderings, like those which issued of old from
oehind the veil, that tell us how this world, with all its
little interests, must pass away ; but that for those who
fight the good fight, and keep the faith, there abideth a
rest that is eternal. In a few hours, if the breeze does
not fail, we shall be within sight of Edinburgh. And
there, my Lydia, I must enter on a new scene of life, a
scene for which my previous habits have little fitted me.
But I shall think of you, and bend all my mind to my
untried occupation. The sun has just sunk behind the
Pentlands, and the coast looks dim and blue through
the twilight. One part of the line, about three miles in
extent, is entirely blotted from the landscape, by the
smoke of Edinburgh and Leith. And now the Isle of
May light is beginning to twinkle behind, and the
Inchkeith light to twinkle before. A few short hours,
and our voyage shall have come to its termination. The
various objects around me — the hills, the islands, the
buildings — recall a hundred recollections of my residence
here of ten years ago, which have lain buried in my
memory ever since. There was a double row of trees
beside the cottage in which I lodged, through which I
used to see the Inchkeith light twinkling every evening.
I remember the dark, lonely road which led past the
door to Edinburgh ; and how, when travelling on it in
the night-time, which I did often, 1 used to grasp my
stick every time I heard footsteps approaching. I must
strive to ascertain whether my old landlady is yet alive,
and what has become of my companion, John Wilson.'
A little touch this last, but characteristic. Hugh, at
this rather exciting moment, thinks more of old friends,
however humble, than of new.

' Edinburgh, Monday.

' Our vessel got into harbour this morning, about

8 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

two o'clock, just in time to escape a tremendous storm
of wind and rain from the south-west, which, had it
caught us in the Frith, would have driven us back to
Peterhead. I have taken lodgings at No. 14, Romilly
Place, to which you must address for me. Do write me
a very long letter, longer than mine by a great deal.
You may see, from my first and second page, that I was
within a hair's-breadth of being unable to write at all.
Had I been pledged to write any one else, I would have
pleaded incapacity, and firmly believed the plea a good
one, but the thought of you nerved me when half-dead,
and the words came. I love you ten times better when
separated from you by about 200 miles than when I
could draw in my chair beside you ; or, I dare say, it
would have been more correct to say, my affection is
just what it was, but I have now semething to measure
it by. Do you not think me a silly fellow? There
is something inspiriting in the air of Edinburgh ; I feel
myself an inch taller as I walk the streets. But I am
afraid I shall have something else to tell you when I
write again. I shall ere then be set down to my desk,
the least skilful and least confident of all clerks; and
you shall hear of little else than blunders and incapacity,
and of how ill-suited I am for the part I have to per-
form. Well, however dispirited I may be, I am sure
no man was ever born an accountant, and that the
practice and perseverance which do so much for others,
cannot fail doing a little for me. I see many changes
in Edinburgh. There are large open spaces, which were
occupied, ten years ago, by lofty masses of building;
and masses of building where there were then only open
spaces. Some of the new statues I don't at all admire.
I find few traces in them of the hand of the master.
They seem as if finished by the journeymen of genius,

IN EDINBURGH. 9

and as pieces of mechanical skill do barely well enough.
But the Promethean soul is wanting/

This on Monday. On Thursday the ardent lover
and indefatigable correspondent has again pen in hand.
He has been to the Grange House, the residence of Sir
Thomas Dick Lander, and writes of his reception with
enthusiasm. ' I cannot express to you the kindness
with which I was received. He scolded me for ^taking
lodgings. Why not come and live with him ? And I
was only forgiven on condition that, after arranging
matters Avith the secretary of the bank, I should part
with my landlady, and take up my abode at the Grange.
" I have a snug room for you," he said ; " breakfast
shall be prepared for you to suit your office hours ; and
in the evening I shall have you to myself. To-morrow
you must come and dine with me ; I shall get Black,
the bookseller, to meet with you, and meanwhile I shall
write him a note that will be at once an introductory
one and an invitation." He then introduced me to
Lady Lauder and his daughters ; showed me his library,
a capacious room, shelved all round, and rich in the
literature of the past and the present. " Here/' said he,
" Robertson, the historian, penned his last work ; and
here," — opening the door of an adjoining room, — " he
died." He next brought me to the leads of his house ;
pointing out the more striking features of the scenery ;
told, and told well, a number of little stories connected
with it ; showed me the extent of his lands, — but I
want space to enumerate. We parted/

Armed with Sir Thomas's note, he waits upon Mr
Adam Black, future Lord Provost of Edinburgh and
member of parliament for the city, and is civilly received.
Next day he starts for Linlithgow, and seems hardly
alighted there, when the indefatigable pen is again in

10 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

requisition, to describe to Miss Eraser what occurred on
the evening passed with Sir Thomas.

' Linlithgow, December.

'.I do not know that I have anything more amusing
to communicate to you, my Lydia, than what passed
during the evening I spent at Sir Thomas's. But I am
afraid you will find me no Boswell. I would fain be a
faithful chronicler ; but, in attempting to record dialogue,
the words always slip away, and only the ideas remain.
My invitation was for six o'clock, the fashionable hour
for dinner here ; but, by missing the road in the dark-
ness, I was, unluckily, rather late. The Grange House
is built in the style of two centuries ago, with a number
of narrow serrated gables, that break the light into fan-
tastic masses, by their outjets and indentation ; here a
pointed turret, there coped with stone, and bearing the
family crest atop ; yonder an antique balustrade ; and,
directly in front of the iron-studded door, there are two
time-worn columns with a huge dragon sprawling on
each. The garden is in quite the same ancient style,
planted by some old-world mason, with flights of stairs,
cross walls, and arches. The first thing that caught my
eye on entering the lobby was a huge, carved settle of
dark-coloured oak, with the bust of a mitred prelate
frowning from the wainscoting over it ; there were spears,
too, resting against the wall, and in the antique staircase
a host of old paintings of ladies, in strange, uncouth
dresses, who were loved and married three centuries ago ;
and of their lovers and husbands, grim-looking fellows,
with long beards and coats of mail. I was ushered into
the parlour, a splendid apartment, as lofty as any two of
our Cromarty rooms placed over each other, and more ca-
pacious than any four, with a carved oak roof, panelled
sides, antique wainscot furniture, and an immense pro-

GRANGE HOUSE. 11

fusion of paintings. Sir Thomas and Mr Black were
standing beside the fire, discussing the change in the
ministry ; * Lady Lauder was seated at a work table a
little away. I was received by the lady very kindly, by
Mr Black very politely, by Sir Thomas as if we had
been friends and companions for twenty years. The
political conversation was then resumed. Sir Thomas
remarked that if the Duke of Wellington calculated on the
soldiery, — and he could not well see what else he could
calculate upon, — he trusted he had mistaken their spirit.
For the army, said he, is composed of the people, and
in a time of peace like the present must be imbibing
their opinions. I stated to him, in proof of what he
remarked, that I had crossed the ferry of Fort George
last summer with a party of soldiers, and was interested
to learn, from their conversation, that many of them
were acquainted with the periodicals, and fond of read-
ing. And I question, I said, whether a reading soldiery
be the best for doing everything they are bid. Sir
Thomas deemed the remark of some value, simple as it
may seem . . . Sir Thomas showed us a highly-interest-
ing relic of Queen Mary, — a watch, formed like a human
skull, which was presented by her to that Lady Seaton
whom Scott has made the heroine of his Abbot. The
upper part of the skull is richly embossed with figures ;
there is the crucifixion, the adoration of the shepherds,
and several other Scripture scenes connected with the
history of our Saviour ; on the sides there is a series of
vignettes, — the frock without a seam, the nails, the
scourge, the crown of thorns, and the spear. The
workmanship is evidently French.

* The attempt made by Peel and Wellington, in the end of 1834,
to take the reins out of the hands of the Whigs. It broke down in a
few months.

12 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

' Sir Thomas took up a volume, presented by Sir
Walter Scott to Lady Lauder, and showed us Sir Walter's
holograph on the title-page. " This," said he, " I deem
a valuable volume ; and here is something I consider
as equally so." He opened a portfolio, and showed us
the original plan and elevation of Abbotsford, also a
present from Sir Walter to the lady. The conversation
then turned on Sir Walter. " I had some curious cor-
respondence with him," said Sir Thomas, " shortly before
his death. Contrary to the opinion he had formerly enter-
tained, he then held with Dr Jamieson that the Celts had
never inhabited the south of Scotland. I instanced
several Gaelic names of places in the south — among the
rest that of his own Melrose, or the barren promontory
—and he seemed reconvinced ; but half his mind was
gone at the time. Our Gaelic names," continued Sir
Thomas, "are strikingly characteristic of either the scenery
of the places which they designate, or of some incident
in their history, so very remote, perhaps, as to lie beyond
the reach of written records. I was led, after writing
my essay on the parallel roads of Glenroy, to examine
appearances on the course of the Findhorn, very similar to
those of the highland glens. Among the rest there is a
holm on the Relugas property, round the sides of which
I could trace very distinctly what seemed to have been
at one time the shores of a lake ; but what was my sur-
prise when, on asking a Gaelic scholar for the etymology
of the name of a field which occupies the upper part of
the holm, I was informed that it was composed of two
words which mean < head of the loch.' Now, at how
remote a period must not the name have been given ? " I
instanced some of our Cromarty names as apparently of
very remote antiquity ; stated that a moor in the upper
part of the parish had, as shown by its cairns and its

GRANGE HOUSE. 13

tumuli, been the scene of a battle at so early a period
that history bears no recollection of the event, but that
a farm in its vicinity still bears the name of Acknagarne,
i. e. field of the carcasses ; and that a rock in the sea,
which Sir Thomas, in his survey of the burgh, has
marked out as one of its boundaries, and on which
tradition, says a boat was once wrecked, is still known
as Clack Mallacha, i. e. the stone of the curse. We had
some conversation on the Celtic character. I described to
Sir Thomas the form of the old Celtic head, as given us
by the phrenologists, and as I have seen it in the skulls of
the Inverness Museum ; concluding my description by re-
marking that civilization seems to produce variety in the
human species, somewhat in the manner that domes-
tication produces it in some of the inferior animals.
Sir Thomas seemed pleased with the thought, and illus-
trated it by a fact or two.

f He must have been a very busy man. He showed
me his Travels in Italy in MS. They form four thick
quarto volumes, elegantly bound, and illustrated with
admirable crow-quill drawings. He showed me an
elegant piece of penmanship, " The Lamentable Case
of Sir William Dick," a thin folio, in which the old
style of printing and engraving was so well imitated, that
it was only from the freshness of the paper I detected it as
a copy. This Sir W. Dick was one of his ancestors (Scott
makes David Dean allude to him, in the Heart of Mid-
lothian, as the godly provost), who was possessed, in the
days of Charles I., of the then enormous sum of £200,000,
but who lost almost all during the Commonwealth and the
reign of Charles II. Sir Thomas stated to us besides that
he had filled with notices of his family a roll of vellum
about eighty feet in length. On Mr Black and I rising to
go away, he took down his large stick, and accompanied

14 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

us__by way of guard, he said — for about half a mile,
and on parting kindly repeated his invitation to me of
coming to the Grange the moment I returned from Lin-
lithgow.

1 1 do not know that you have ever seen Sir
Thomas. He is a noble-looking, elderly man, upwards
of six feet in height, very erect, with bold, handsome
features, and a profusion of grey hair, approaching to
white, curling round his temples. His head is a very
large one, with a splendid development of sentiment.
Benevolence, veneration, and ideality seem all of the
largest size. Love of approbation and combativeness are
also amply developed. His forehead is broad and high,
but the knowing organs are more powerful than the re-
flective ones. The contour of the whole is beautiful,
and as much the reverse of commonplace as anything you
ever saw.

' My trunk being too bulky for the coach, I took
a berth in a canal-boat, which leaves Edinburgh at seven
in the morning and reaches this place about ten. I saw
little on the passage to interest me except the old castle
of Niddrie, at which, as you will remember, Queen Mary
passed the night after her escape from Loch Leven, and
in which Scott has laid some of the scenes of the Abbot.
My fellow-passengers were a Paisley shop-keeper and a
Linlithgow farmer — the former a smart, shallow young
man, the latter a shrewd, sagacious old fellow, with a
decided cast of dry humour. On landing here I found
the bank accountant, a Mr Miller, waiting my arrival.
He introduced me to Mr Paterson the agent. Both of
them are exceedingly civil — nay more — kind young men ;
but the patience of both must be sorely tried ere I can
have done with them. I am one of the stupidest block-
heads you ever knew, and, considering how extensive

AT THE SANK DESK. 15

your experience in this way must have been among your
pupils, that is saying something. For the first day or
two I felt miserably depressed and sadly out of conceit
with myself. I do not know what I would not have
given to have had you beside me to speak me comfort,
but I dare say you would have begun by laughing at me.
My lodgings here are much too fine and too expensive,
but they were taken for me by Mr Paterson at the re-
quest of Mr Paul, who intimated my coming by letter,
and so I could on no account decline them. I dislike
expense even for its own sake, and independent of the
embarrassment which it always occasions, — especially
when 'tis incurred for a man's self, for food a little
more delicate, and clothes a little finer than ordinary.
My disposition, too — as the Edinburgh phrenologists
will, I dare say, find — leads me rather to acquire than

to dissipate Remember, I expect a reply. You

little know the exquisite pleasure which I derive from
your letters.'

A letter from Miss Eraser arrives in due course, but
it is with a feeling very different from pleasure that he
peruses it. She has been suffering from illness, and
her nervous excitement has been . such, that ' this morn-
ing,' she writes, ' when your letter was delivered to me,
I was almost fixed in the belief that I was suffering
under a temporary derangement. God alone knows
where I would have been to-day without it ; it turned, in
part, the current of my ideas.' Hugh writes, evidently
without loss of time, though the letter has no date, and
in the' greatest agitation. His first sentence appears to
intimate that he had a presentiment of evil so soon as
his eye fell upon the letter. ' 'Twas no wonder, my own
dearest girl, that I should have felt so unwilling to open
your letter, and that I looked twice at the seal to con-

16 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

vince myself that it was not a black one. You are un-
well, my Lydia; and here am I, whose part it should
be to soothe and amuse you, separated from you by more
than 200 miles. Your temperament, my Lydia, is a
highly nervous one ; your delicate tenement is o'er-
informed by spirit ; 'tis a hard-working system, and the
slightest addition to the moving power deranges the
whole machine. But be under no apprehensions for your
mind. Would that I were beside you to tell you how
strangely I have sometimes felt when in a state of nervous
irritability. The night before I received your letter, for in-
stance, I had a world of foolish fancies about you ; and my
sense of hearing was so painfully acute, that I was dis-
turbed by the noise of the blood circulating in the larger
arteries. But all this was merely the effect of over-exertion.
I had copied and calculated all day in the office, and had
written for the printer till late at night ; in the morning
I was quite well. Try and get yourself amused, my
Lydia, and do not suffer your spirits to droop. I shall
tell you what my chief — indeed only — amusement is at
present : I have a little paper book, which I carry about
with me, and when I have a minute's leisure I take it
out, and with the aid of my pen converse with you.
This is the secret of my long letters ; and of all my pre-
sent pleasures this, with one exception, is the most plea-
sant. I need not tell you that the excepted one arises
from your letters ; but not such letters, my Lydia, as your
last. I must hear that you are well before I shall have
recovered the shock it has given me.

' I have never yet been in any part of the country
where the surface is so broken into little hillocks ; one
might almost deem it an imitation, on a small scale, of
the Highlands. Its geological character is highly in-
teresting. Almost all the eminences are basaltic. In

GEOLOGY. 17

the hollows we meet with sandstone, lime, and indurated
clay. The lime is rich in animal remains, all of the
earliest tribes. They belong to a later era than the
fossils of the Eathie lias. I have procured a few speci-
mens, which I must try to bring home with me —
among the rest four varieties of bivalves and two of
zoophytes. I have procured, too, part of a fossil palm
and the joint of a flattened reed, possibly the vegetable
to which the south of Scotland owes its coal. But I
have met with neither ammonites nor belemnites. In
many places the basalt has overflowed the secondary
strata ; and in the side of an eminence, rather more than
a mile from town, where there is a deep section of rock,
it assumes the columnar form directly over a thick vein
of lime. You have, I dare say, never seen basaltic columns.
I saw them here for the first time, and wished for you,
that we might examine them together. So regular are
they, that old country people of the last age used to
attribute their erection to the Picts. I have seen it
stated in a paper by Creech, the Edinburgh bookseller,
and deem the fact a highly interesting one, that on
some occasion the furnace of a Leith glass-house having
been suffered to cool, it was found that the glass, in
passing from a fluid to a solid state, had assumed the
columnar form. There is a particular form of hill which
seems peculiar to basaltic countries, and of which there
are various instances in this. You have seen a superb
specimen in Salisbury Crags. It would seem as if, after
the masses had been thrown up, they had split in the
middle ; and that when one half of each remained stand-
ing, the other sunk into the abyss out of which the whole
had risen. Linlithgow forms, as you are aware, part of
the great coal-field of Scotland, and there are pits on
every side of it. The coal seems to have been formed

VOL. II.

18 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

out of vast accumulations of reeds, somewhat resembling
in appearance, at least, the sugar-cane. To what a re-
mote and misty antiquity do such appearances lead us ?
To a time in which the district in which I am now
writing to you formed part of the delta of some immense
river which drained of its waters a widely -extended con-
tinent, the place of which is now occupied by the Atlan-
tic. Think how many ages must have elapsed before the
vegetable spoils of even the largest stream could have
formed the depositions of so extensive a coal measure :
how many more must have passed in which new accumu-
lations of strata settled above these to a depth of many
hundred feet — settled so slowly, too, that each layer
formed a plain on which plants and animals flourished
and decayed. Continue the history till the immense
continent was slowly worn away, and the sea beyond,
enriched with the spoils of so many ages, became a scene
o^ earthquakes and volcanoes ; and then, after we have
marked in imagination the retiring of the waters, and
the ascent of a new continent from what had been the
profounder depths of the sea — after we are lost in calcu-
lating the periods which must have elapsed ere the ascent
of one plutonic eminence was followed by that of another—
antiquity, as it regards the human race, has but its be-
ginning. I find myself lost in immensity when I think
of such matters ; but I dare say you have quite enough
of geology for one letter.

' The church of Linlithgow is a fine old building,
well-nigh as entire in the present day as it was four
centuries ago. In style it seems to hold a middle place
between the simple Xorman Gothic and the highly
ornamental Gothic of the reign of Henry VII. ; and
there is a chastity in the design of at least the interior,
which we may vainly look for in our modern imita-

LINLITHGO W PALA CE. 1 9

tion buildings. I never look up to a lofty stone roof
without feelings of awe. Burke has said that tVar is a
necessary ingredient in the sublime. I do not know
but that there is a lurking sensation of terror in the feel-
ing which I experience ; it does not OAve its existence
to the art in which, according to Thomson, " greatest
seems the little builder man." I sit in the northern
aisle every Sunday, beside a huge column, and directly
opposite the gallery in which the spectre appeared to
James IV. The clergyman is a fine, useless preacher
of the Moderate party, who gives us rather ordinary
matter dressed up in pretty good language. He does
not pray on Sabbaths, like our north-country ministers,
to be " preserved from thinking his own thoughts," and
may, indeed, spare himself the trouble — he has none of
his own to think.

' The palace is situated a little behind the church.
It is a huge quadrangular pile, about sixty paces on each
side, full of those irregularities which would not be
tolerated in a modern building, but which, associated as
they are with our conceptions of Scotland in the past,
please more than elegance itself. There runs along the
top a deeply-tusked cornice ; the corners are crowned
with turrets, and broken piles of building, which finely
vary the outline a-top, rise high above the outer wall on
either side. The carvings are sorely time-worn, and they
seem to have been grotesque enough when at their best.
On either side of an old gateway, which was shut up
in the reign of James VI., there are two Gothic niches,
surmounted by miniature cupolas that resemble the
models of an architect ; at the base of each there is the
figure stretching forth his hands, and writhing in agony,
as if crushed by the superincumbent weight. The Scot-
tish shield, guarded by angels, is blazoned on an im-

20 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

mense tablet above. But decay has been busy with the
guardians, and with what they guard. There is a large
court in the interior, whose corners are occupied by lofty
towers, through each of which a staircase leads to the top.
The view inside is very striking: all the sides are unlike.
One of these was built in the reign of James VI. ; and
from the elegance and peculiar style of the architecture,
I would deem it a design of Inigo Jones. The other
sides are of a different character, and testify of an earlier
age. The windows are square, and huge of dimensions,
labelled a-top,and divided into compartments by mullions
of stone. There is an uncouth profusion, too, of Gothic
sculpture. In the middle of the court there are the
ruins of a well, and beside it a hollow which must once
have received its waters and formed a little lake ; but
the stream has long since failed. I passed through a
wilderness of arched passages, with windows darkened
by mullions of crumbling stone, and grated with wasted
iron. I have seen the room in which the unfortunate
Mary was born. I have seen, too, the large hall in
which our Scottish parliament sometimes assembled,
with the stone gallery in which the beauties of other
days have listened to the long-protracted and often
stormy debate. I ascended to the top of the build-
ing, and from an elevation of nearly a hundred feet
looked over the surrounding country. The palace is
built on a grassy eminence that projects into the lake,
which extends about half a mile on either side of it,
and nearly as much in front. A curtain of little hills
rises from the opposite shore, and shuts in the scene
towards the north. To the south we see the town, and
the long line of the canal, with its multitudinous bridges ;
and all around there is an undulating and freely diver-
sified country, studded with abrupt woody knolls of

A LITERARY BANKER. 21

plutonic formation, and speckled with human dwellings.
I need not tell you that, as I looked from the walls and
saw so much of the antique and the venerable beneath
me, and so much of the beautiful around, I wished for a
companion to see all that I saw, and to feel all that I
felt ; nor need I say, my Lydia, what companion it was
I wished for. Uncommunicated pleasure, you know, is
apt to change its nature, and to become pain.

1 Mr Miller, our accountant here, is the son of a dis-
senting clergyman, who died about four years ago. He
is a smart, obliging young lad, and a thorough master of
his business. He has introduced me to a few of his
acquaintance here, and to his mother, a remarkably fine-
looking woman, who, though her son is perhaps as old
as you are, might still pass for a young lady. I have
twice drunk tea with her. I have passed an evening,
too, with Mr Paterson, our bank agent, a frank, obliging
young man (he is five years younger than I am), of much
general information, and with none of the little pride of
our north-country bankers in his composition. Among
the many causes of gratitude which Providence has given
me, the kindness which I everywhere meet with is not
one of the least. Mr Paterson tells me that McDiarmid,
the editor of the Dumfries Courier, and the ablest of
all our provincial editors, was at one time a clerk in the
Commercial Bank; but he was by no means a very superior
one. One of the tellers was astounded on one occasion
to find his cash a thousand pounds short ; and after
vainly striving to discover some error in his calculations,
he gave up the search, and deemed himself ruined. He
lived a wretched life for about a fortnight, when he at
length ascertained that poor McDiarmid, in one of his
absent moods, had contrived, in carrying forward his
balance, to leave a thousand pounds behind. On leav-

22 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

ing Edinburgh for Dumfries, his desk was found stuffed
full of literary scraps, unfinished stanzas, and broken
sentences. I must try to avoid being made the subject
of a similar story, by keeping my literature at home.

£ This is the country of historical associations and his-
torical relics. I described to you in my last the watch
of Queen Mary. I have since seen two pieces of her
needle-work. They are at present in the possession of
my landlady, who was for many years housekeeper to a
lady of quality, whose name I forget, and who at her
death left her her wardrobe — the relics of Mary included.
The one is an apron, the other a tippet, both of muslin,
which was once white, but which now, both in colour
and in fragility, resembles a spider's web. The apron is
a complex piece of work — nearly as much so as the bor-
ders on which I have so often seen you engaged ; the
tippet is simpler. You will laugh at me when I tell
you that, all unpractised in the art as I am, I am em-
ployed in making a pattern of it for you, that you may
see how muslin was flowered in the sixteenth century,
and bedeck yourself, should you deem it worth your
imitation, in the same style of ornament with the beau-
tiful Mary. I need not tell you I am no critic in such
matters ; — it strikes me, however, that the flowering of
both pieces has a grotesque Gothic air, and differs as
much from the needle-work of the present day, as the
old castle of the sixteenth century does from the modern
mansion-house. In the possession of such persons as
my landlady one frequently meets with interesting relics
on the last stage of their journey to oblivion. The work
table on which I write is only about twenty inches
square a-top ; yet I am certain that top must have em-
ployed some skilful mechanic of a century ago for a full
month. It is curiously inlaid with more than four

A WELCOME LETTER. 23

hundred little pieces of coloured wood and bone, and
represents a flower piece.'

Miss Eraser's next letter was brief, but gave a good
account of her state of health. She had been visiting
Mrs Taylor, a friend resident on the Nigg side of the
Cromarty ferry, and had reaped much benefit, both in the
way of health and of happiness, from ' the quiet cheer-
fulness of a united and happy family/ Miller evidently
loses no time in replying.

' You were not mistaken, my Lydia, in thinking
that your letter, short as it was, would meet with a
sincere welcome. I had become extremely uneasy re-
garding you, for I attributed your silence to indisposi-
tion ; — the mail drives up to the Post-office here by a
street which fronts my window ; and regularly as the
hour of its arrival came, — 'tis a late one, — I used to
watch the approach of its two flaring lanterns, that seem
two terrific eyes, in the hope of hearing from you. But
evening after evening passed, and still no letter, and I
began to indulge in the gloomiest forebodings. Think,
then, what my feelings must have been, when, on perus-
ing your kind, though brief epistle, I found you were
well and not unhappy. I am much indebted to the
kindness of Mrs Taylor ; and the time may come, my
lassie, when there will be no impropriety in thanking
her for it.

' I am much gratified by your literary scheme. I
have long ago told you that you are not one of those
who can be at once indolent and happy ; and I am sure
you must often have felt that the remark was a just one.
Your mind is highly active, and must have employment ;
and I know no exercise more suited to it than the one
you propose. We must mutually assist and encourage
each other, my Lydia, and should you be unsuccessful

24 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

at first in forcing your way to the publisher's shop, you
must just remember that there are few writers who have
not failed in their earlier efforts. Genius itself seems
hardly more indispensable to the literary aspirant than
that mixture of firmness and self-reliance which, unde-
pressed by failure or disappointment, can pursue its per-
severing and onward course till at length it triumphs
over fortune and circumstance. At present your mind
resembles a musical instrument of great compass and
power, but nearly all the semi-tones are wanting. But,
my own dearest Lydia, for your own sake and mine you
must remember that your mind and body are unequally
matched ; — that though the one is strong and active,
the other is comparatively fragile and easily worn out,
and that your exertions must be modified to suit the
capabilities of the weaker of the two.

' I was only a few days in Linlithgow when a gen-
tleman called on Mr Paterson (the agent) to inquire for
me, stating that the Principal (Baird) was at his country
house, and very unwell, but desirous notwithstanding
that I should call on him on the following Thursday. I
then learned for the first time that the Principal's coun-
try house is not more than two miles from Linlithgow.
I found the grounds in the vicinity of the house laid out
into little patches, each bearing a different variety of
field or garden vegetables, and altogether presenting the
appearance of what is termed an experiment farm.
Husbandry and gardening are two of the Principal's
hobbies. The house is a little old-fashioned structure.
I was shown into a low parlour ; — the Principal was in
bed, I was told, but was just going to try to get up.
The poor Principal found himself unable to rise, and I
was shown up to his room. He received me with great
kindness, held my hand between both his for more than

VISITS PRINCIPAL BAIRD. 25

ten minutes, and overpowered me with, a multitude of
questions, — particularly regarding my new profession
and what had led to it. " Ah," said he, when I had
given him what he requested, — the history of my con-
nection with the Bank, — "the choice of your townsman,
Mr Ross, shows that you still retain your character for
steadiness and probity." After sitting by his bed-side
for a short time, I took my leave, afraid that he might
injure himself by his efforts to entertain me ; for they
were evidently above his strength. It struck me, too,
that there was a tone of despondency about him which
mere indisposition could not have occasioned. Bene-
volent old man ! from what I have since heard, I have
too much reason to conclude that his sickness is of the
heart/

Miller proceeds to mention his having formed the
acquaintance of a Mr Turpie, at whose house he was
introduced to a Dr Waldie, both unknown to fame. ' Mr
Turpie/ he goes on, describing an evening passed in the
company of these gentlemen, l took up a book, and
showed me what lie deemed a very old poem. I read a
few verses, and pronounced it to be a modern imitation.
The decision led to a few queries, and the queries to a
sort of colloquial dissertation on old Scottish poetry, a
subject with which, you know, I am pretty well acquaint-
ed. I quoted Barbour, Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, Lind-
say, and a great many others. The obsolete literature
of our country was quite a terra incognita, to all the
party, but they seemed interested by the glimpse I gave
them of it ; and Mr Turpie, when the conversation once
more became general, asked me, half in simple earnest,
half in the style of compliment (a question which by-the-
by Mr Paterson had put to me a few days before),
" Pray, Mr Miller, are there any books which you have

26 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

not read ? " A few evenings after, the Doctor and Mr
Turpie called on me at my lodgings. The former is a
metaphysician, and he had come to me apparently with
the intention of discussing what may be termed the
metaphysics of phrenology ; — its connection, for instance,
with the grand question of liberty and necessity, and
the doctrines of the will. I communicated to him my
ideas on the subject as clearly as I could; met his
objections when they could be met; and showed him,
—I should rather say strove to show him, — the
boundaries of that horizon of darkness which, closing
round the human intellect in this direction, renders
many of them unanswerable, not because they are power-
ful as arguments, but because they cannot be understood.
We parted very well pleased with each other. " The
Doctor," said Mr Turpie to me a few days after, " can find
no line long enough to measure you by ; he has just met
with a Dr Baird, a nephew of the Principal, who tells
him that his uncle is quite enthusiastic regarding you,
and deems you equal to anything." But enough of this.
Never in my life before did I write* anything so re-
dolent of conceit as the last page and a half ; but with
you, my lassie, I know I am more than safe. Remem-
ber, too, I give you full liberty to laugh at me as much
as you please.

' My own dearest Lydia, I must hear from you once
yet ; and to make up for the briefness of your former
letters, do write me on a double sheet. Tell me much
about yourself, — what you are doing, and saying, and
thinking, and seeing, and feeling ; on a theme so inter-
esting you cannot be tedious/

Miss Eraser's answer to this is dated Cromarty, 8th
January, 1835. An extract from it will tend to eluci-
date Miller's next letter. The manse of Alness, men-

THE MANSE OF ALNESS. 27

tioned by Miss Fraser, is beautifully situated on the
north of the Cromarty Frith. It was occupied in 1835
by the late Rev. Mr Flyter and his family. Through-
out the north of Scotland, where the manses had from
time immemorial been centres of hospitality in their dis-
tricts, none was more noted for cordial, generous, and
delicate hospitality than the manse of Alness. ' I was
received at Alness,' writes Miss Fraser, 'with great
affection. The increase of wealth there has not blunted
any of the finer emotions of the heart. I could perceive
some changes ; the simple manse is turned by additions
and improvements into something like a mansion-house,
and the glebe cultivated to resemble a gentleman's
pleasure-grounds ; I could perceive, too, among the in-
mates, something of an aristocratic turn of idea, caught
from the society of the neighbouring proprietors. But
in piety, and the discharge of pastoral duty, there is no
change. The spirit of the Presbyterian minister, as he
was in the days when the success of the gospel was all
to him, is kept alive in Ross-shire in perhaps greater
strength than in any other part of Scotland. The
ministers of the contiguous parishes for many miles
round meet every month in the house of each alternately,
to inquire into the state of their parishioners, and to
implore the aid of the Holy Spirit. Thus they pass a
whole evening.

' We had for two evenings the society of which I am
so enthusiastically fond, — that of a genuine Celt. I
sang and played, and he showed a fine taste for music.
I repeated some verses, — he criticized them at once
with the most just conception. The conversation be-
came general ; — he showed the best sense and soundest
practical observation ; — his grasp was not extensive, but
his ideas were all clear and well-defined, and he had

28 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

evidently thought for himself. At supper the conversa-
tion again became poetical. He quoted some words of
exquisite beauty and expressiveness in the Gaelic Psalms,
which no English ones could render. He described the
Gaelic word for " wind " in the line, " For over it the
wind doth pass," as expressing to the imagination a
breath so faint as to be almost dying, and yet sufficient
in its extreme feebleness to destroy the still feebler thing
over which it is passing. Again, in the same psalm, in
the lines,

" Such pity as a father hath
Unto his children dear,"

he said there was something inexpressibly tender and
delicate ; — they convey the idea of a parent yearning
to fondle what he so tenderly loves, and yet in his
solicitude almost afraid lest he injure it by the touch.
Oh what burning thoughts must have passed through
the brain of Ossian ! That a people with such genius,
and with such a language, should be deemed incapable
of producing such a poet ! That those who have felt but
for a moment the spirit of Northern poesy could doubt
ever after that Ossian sung ! Yes, annihilate the re-
mains of Highland feeling and language and manners,
and then tell us that the question is decided, but not
till then. I am so exasperated at you that I would fain
give you a — pinch.5

Hugh replies in a tone of quiet and kindly badin-
age. He will maintain against all comers that the
poems of Ossian illustrate the genius of the Highlanders,
particularly that of the gifted clan Mac Pherson. To
match the Alness Highlander he brings out a specimen
Celt of his own.

' Edinburgh.

' Dear me, what a red-hot Highlander you are ! You

GEORGE MUNRO. 29

make me say things against the poor Celt I never so
much as thought of, merely, I suppose, that you may
have the pleasure of defending him. Who ever doubted
that the poems of Ossian were the compositions of a
Scotch Highlander ? Truly not I, nor any one else I
ever heard of, except a few Irishmen. They were written
by a countryman every line of them, — bating the little
bits that were borrowed from Milton and the Bible, — by
a genuine countryman, who though not over endowed with
honesty, equalled in genius any writer of his age. Ossian,
indeed, or Oscian, as the Irish call him, was, as you
know, a bog-trotter of the beautiful island, who made
ballads in the days of the good St Patrick, and sold
them for half-pence a piece ; but who can say that of
Mac Pherson?

' Since you love Highlanders so well, I fain wish I
could introduce you to my cousin, George Munro.
I would not fear to match him, as a specimen of
what his country can produce, against your Alness
Highlander or any Highlanders you ever saw. He re-
sides with his wife and family in Stirling, and since I
last wrote you I have spent a day with him. Let me
describe him to you as he is both in mind and per-
son. He is a well-built robust man of five feet eight,
large-limbed, broad-shouldered, keen-eyed, and with re-
solution stamped on every feature. Nature has written
man on his whole appearance in her most legible hand.
But what I have to add will I am afraid give you a
lower opinion of him. No one ever regarded me as
particularly well built or handsome. I am, besides, fifteen
years younger than my cousin, and yet through one of
those tricks of resemblance so strangely occasioned by
blood, I have been repeatedly addressed as Mr Munro.
His mind is one of the most restless and most con-

30 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

centrated in its energies I ever knew. He never yet
attempted anything which he did not master, and never
mastered anything of which he did not tire. He was
born in the Highlands of Sutherland, and bred a mason :
— no one could have fewer opportunities of improve-
ment, and yet he was not much turned of twenty ere he
had added to the commoner rules of his art a knowledge
of architecture, drawing, and the mathematics. The
intellectual man is rarely an athlete, but George had a
body as well as mind to educate, and after studying the
mathematics, he set himself to study the art of defence,
and became so skilful a pugilist that there are few pro-
fessed boxers who would gain in a contest with him.
He resided at this time in GlasgOAv. On his "return
home he married and took a little farm on the banks of
a Highland loch, where he proposed to himself to spend
his days. But he soon tired of the agricultural life,—
it was too quiet and too monotonous, and quitting the
farm he engaged as superintendent of some saw-mills
erecting in that part of the country, and proved for some
months, from his thorough though hastily acquired
knowledge of the machinery, a most serviceable man to
his employers. He sickened, however, at the ceaseless
clatter of the wheels, and throwing up his superintend-
ency, he again resumed the mallet. He then became a
slater, and proved one of the best in the country, but
the details of the art were too soon mastered to engage
him long. He next applied himself to Gaelic literature,
and published a translation of Bunyan's Visions, which
has been commended as true to both the spirit and sense
of the original. He then spent some time in fruitlessly
attempting to square the circle, in studying botany, and
in the composition of a metrical tale. He then taught
a school, and applied to the General Assembly to be

GEORGE MUNRO. 31

admitted on their list of teachers, but was fortunately
unsuccessful. His next employment, unlike, any of the
others, was almost forced upon him, — he was nominated
superintendent of a bridge erecting over the Forth, and
acquitted himself with so much credit, that some of the
neighbouring gentlemen urged him to stay in that part
of the country. George consented, and became a Civil
Engineer. Lord Abercrombie requested him to inspect,
if he had courage enough, a copper mine in Airdrie,
which had lain un wrought for many years, and which,
damp, and dark, and full of water and unwholesome
gases, was deemed inaccessible by all the other engineers
of the country. George knew very little of copper
mines, but he furnished himself with a torch, and with-
out assistant or companion, explored the cavern to its
inmost extremity, and then drew up a report which has
since been successfully acted upon. Some works of an
unusual and difficult character were projected last season
on the river Dee. George undertook the superintend-
ency of them, constructed a theodolite for himself,
accomplished several difficult levellings which a recent
survey has proved to be correct, departed from the
original plan, and executed the whole in a manner which
the original designer has pronounced more complete and
effective. An eminent lawyer has described his re-
ports as at once the plainest and most rational ever pre-
sented to him ; but George has become master enough
of his new profession to long for another ; and ere I
parted from him he told me that he wishes much for
some employment such as that of a Gaelic teacher,
which would afford him leisure to write a work on
etymology.

' This is a curious portrait, but it is that of the indi-
vidual, not that of the Highlander ; . a few strokes more,

32 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

and you shall see it enveloped in tartan. Never was
there man more zealous for the honour of his country :
he finds more mind in her poets, and more meaning in
her language, than in the language and the poets of
every other put together. Ossian surpasses Homer, and
nothing can be more absurd than to question the authen-
ticity of his poems. He seems to have attached himself
to him by a true Highland contract, and stands by him
on all occasions in " the right and the wrong." To con-
clude, he has all the characteristic courage of his coun-
trymen, and all their hospitality and warmth of heart.
He accompanied me eleven miles on my way to Linlith-
gow, and as he shook my hand at parting, I saw the
tear gather in his eye. Do not grudge him, my Lydia,
the page and half which I have devoted to him ; nor
chide me when I tell you that I read to him the part of
your letter in which you describe the Alness Highlander
and the Ross-shire clergy. His remark on your style
you will deem a neat one. "There are," said he, "more
Mrs Grants than one."

' I saw much in my journey that interested me ;
never before did I pass over so large a tract of the
classic ground of Scotland. Almost every stream and
mountain in this district have been celebrated in song ;
almost every plain has been a field of battle. I stood
at Bannockburn on the stone where Bruce fixed his
standard, and repeated to my cousin the spirited de-
scription of Barbour. I have seen the scene of Wallace's
conference with the elder Bruce ; that of the battle of
Shirrarnuir, of Stirling bridge, and of Falkirk ; the
tombs of Sir John the Graham, Sir John Stuart, and
Sir Robert Munro ; the site of the house in which James
III. was assassinated; the room in Stirling Castle in
which his father, James II., stabbed the Black Douglas ;

CLASSIC GROUND. 33

the pulpit of John Knox ; the Tor-wood in which Wal-
lace so often sheltered from the English, and in which
Cargill excommunicated Charles II. ; the links of Forth,
rendered classic by Macneil ; and the distant peaks of
Ben Lomond and Ben Ledi. Had I time for geological
disquisition, I could tell you something curious of the
valley of the Forth, and of some singular etymologies
given me by my cousin, which, like the name of the
holm mentioned by Sir Thomas, throw light on a very
remote period. In founding the piers of the new bridge,
the workmen dug through a layer, composed mostly of
marine exuviae, in which they found the skull of a wolf,
with several other remains of a very early age, the pro-
ductions of art. There is an eminence that rises out of
the bottom of the valley, quite in the manner that Inch-
keith does out of the Frith, which still bears in Gaelic
the name of the Island, though now fully five miles from
the sea ; and a hollow that lies still farther up continues
to be known as the Bay of the Anchors. But all these
topics we shall discuss when we meet. Heigh-ho, my
Lydia, we have missed many a happy meeting this
winter !

' I saw the armoury in Stirling Castle ; it contains
11,000 stand of arms, with immense sheaves of pikes,
which we made, in 1803, under the dread of a French
invasion, for arming the people. I saw in it, too, pikes
of a much ruder fashion, which some of the people made,
in 1819, for arming themselves. You are too young to
remember how fierce an attitude the Radicals assumed
in that year, and what fears were entertained of a general
uprising, — you thought only of your doll at the time ;
I, on the contrary, was old enough to determine on
taking a part in the convulsion, though not quite decided
on which side. In Stirlingshire the Radicals broke into

VOL. II,

34 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

open rebellion ; and the arms I saw were taken from a
body that had assembled on a moor near Falkirk, and
which, better skilled in forming resolutions than fight-
ing, were dispersed by a party of military on the first
charge ; all except a boy, who, entrenching himself in a
bog, continued firing at the soldiers until surrounded
and captured. I saw his pistol and little sword. The
pikes are strange, uncouth things, like brooinsticks,
with points, some of which resemble large nails, others
butchers' knives. All that I have heard from history of
popular commotions and uprisings, — of Jack Cades and
Massaniellos and Jacks of Leyden, — came into my mind
as I looked at them ; I saw, too, a Shirramuir Lochaber
axe, and an old tilting spear. On my return to Linlith-
gow 1 was overtaken by a furious snow-storm, which, I
find, from the newspapers, has been the occasion of
much loss of life. Had you seen me as I entered the
town, — resembling nothing earthly except, perhaps, a
moving wreath, or one of those effigies of snow which
children set up in the time of thaw, — I am certain you
would not have known me.

' Since coming here I have made a very few accessions
to my library. My cousin has given me an old edition
of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, and I
have picked up at stalls cheap copies of Goldsmith's
Citizen of the World, Franklin's Essays, and Camp-
bell's Pleasures of Hope. My own volume is getting
on pretty well ; I have returned proofs for the first two
hundred pages ; but I am afraid I have committed a
sad blunder regarding it. Nothing could have been
easier for me than to have rendered it an unbroken
series of legendary stories ; I have materials at will, and
find no difficulty in narration. As it is, however, it
abounds in dissertation ; and holding, as it does, a mid-

DINES WITH BAIRD. 35

die station between works of amusement and abstract
thinking, runs no small risk, I am afraid, of being neg-
lected by the readers of both. Was it not strange that
I should not have discovered this when the work was in
manuscript ? But it is, I believe, of almost general
experience among writers, that their productions must
appear in print before they can form an estimate regard-
ing them at all approaching to correct. Lavater used
to remark that his works, when in MS., appeared to
him almost faultless, though no sooner had they passed
through the press than he became frightened to 'look at
them. Pope has expressed himself to nearly the same
purpose. Well, the past can't be recalled, but I may
trust that my fate is not staked on one throw, and that
the next may be a better game.

' On Wednesday last I dined with the Principal
(Baird), and have seldom spent an evening more
pleasantly. He was in one of his happiest moods, and
full of anecdote and remark. He seems to form a kind
of connecting link between the literature of the past and
of the present age ; in his youth he was the friend and
companion of men whose names leap to our tongues
when we sum up the glories of our country, — of Burns
and Robertson and Blair. Nearly fifty years ago he
edited the poems of Michael Bruce, in behalf of the
mother of the poet, who was then very poor and very
old, — childless, and a widow. Twenty years after he
was the warm friend and patron of the linguist Murray.
He was the first who introduced Pringle, the poet, to
the notice of the public. He lived on terms of the
closest intimacy with Sir Walter Scott, and is thoroughly
acquainted with Wilson. What a stride from the times
of the historian of Charles V. to those of the editor of
Blaclcwood's Magazine ! does it not sound somewhat

36 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

strangely that the friend and contemporary of the amiable
though ill-fated poet of Kinross, who died nearly sixty
years ago, should be the warm friend of your own
H — M — ? I need not tell you how very interesting I
found his anecdotes. He gave me notes of his conversa-
tions with Burns, and of his correspondence with Scott.
One of his remarks regarding the former in connection
with somebody else, I am too vain to suppress. " Burns,"
said he, " excelled all men I ever knew in force of genius ;
he leaped to his conclusions with a vigour altogether
wonderful, but I do not agree with those who regard his
mind as equally powerful in all its faculties. Any task
that required prolonged and steady exertion was no task
for him ; and I have remarked that his good sense never
reached the dignity of philosophy. The writer who
chose so humble a theme as the ' Herring Fishery of
the Moray Frith/ has, I dare say, never thought of enter-
ing the lists with Burns ; nor, perhaps, could he produce
such poems as ' Tarn o' Shanter ' and the ' Cotter's
Saturday Night ; ' but, in tracing causes and deducing
effects, Burns might just as vainly have entered the lists
with him."'

37

CHAPTER II.

HIS FIRST PROSE BOOK CORRESPONDENCE ON THE SUBJECT

LETTERS FROM MR CARRUTHERS AND MR R. CHAMBERS

RECEPTION AND CHARACTER OF THE BOOK DONALD MILLER.

WHILE initiating himself, not without irksomeness,
into the routine of bank business, and astonishing
Mr Turpie by the extent of his reading, Miller occupied
his spare moments in Linlithgow in correcting the proof-
sheets of the ' Scenes and Legends in the North of Scot-
land/ It was his first grand effort in prose, his first
clear preference of a claim to have his name inscribed
in the list of English authors. The Poems by a Jour-
neyman Mason had been printed, at his own expense,
in Inverness. The Letters on the Herring Fishery
had filled but a moderately-sized pamphlet. Here, at
last, was an unmistakeable book, introduced to the read-
ing world by publishing firms of the highest eminence
in Edinburgh and London. We have had a glimpse of
the difficulties encountered in bringing it this length,
but what we have seen will not by any means represent
to us their full extent, or the amount of exertion to
which Miller submitted in the furtherance of his pro-
ject. Erom his correspondence on the subject we shall
take two or three additional passages, recollecting, while
we read, that for at least two years he was engaged in

38 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

the task of opening a way for the publication of his
volume.

Here, first, is his account of the conception and plan
of the book, as presented to his tried and faithful friend,
Sir T. D. Lauder, so early as March, 1833 : ' In making
choice of my subject, I thus reasoned with myself :
White's Natural History of Selborne is a most popular
little book, and deservedly so, though Selborne itself be
but an obscure parish somewhere in the south of England.
The very local title of the work has not in the least
militated against its interest. But why ? Partly, it
would seem, from the very pleasing manner in which it
is written ; partly because the natural history of even a
single parish may be regarded as the natural history of
the whole country in which that parish is included. And
may not the germ of a similar popularity be found, if
the writer do not fail in his part, in the traditional his-
tory of a Scottish village ? Which of all the animals is
a more interesting study than man ? Or can those varie-
ties of any of the numerous classes which we find in one
district of country be more clearly identified with the
varieties which we find in another, than we can identify
with one another those multiform classes of the human
character which, though everywhere different in their
minor traits, are everywhere alike in their more import-
ant ? Besides, the history of one Scottish village is in
some measure the history of every one ; nay, more, it
may form a not unimportant portion of that of the king-
dom at large. The people of Scotland, in all its several
districts, have been moving forward, throughout the last
century, over nearly the same ground, though certainly
not at the same pace ; and a faithful detail of the various
changes and incidents which have occurred during their
march from what they were in the past to what they are

DISSATISFIED WITH HIS BOOK. 39

in the present, cannot surely be merely local in its in-
terest. What does it matter that we examine but only
a little part of anything, if from that part we acquire an
ability to judge of the whole ! The philosopher can
subject but comparatively small portions of any sub-
stance to the test of experiment, but of how wide an
application are the laws which he discovers in the pro-
cess !

' You will perceive at a glance the conception I thus
formed of my task was somewhat too high to leave me
any very great chance of satisfying myself in the exe-
cution of it. I have not done so, and, indeed, could be
almost sorry if I had. I have frequently met with an
ingenious argument for the immortality of the soul, drawn
from the dissatisfaction which it always experiences in
the imperfect good of the present, and from its fondly-
cherished expectations of a more complete good in the
future ; and so long as I am dissatisfied with what I
write, and with how I think, I solace myself, on a nearly
similar principle, with the hope that I shall one day
write better, and think more justly. My traditional
history, however, is, I trust, not a very dull one ; it is
a different sort of work, in some respects, from any of a
merely local cast I have yet chanced to see ; and I am of
opinion, though I dare say I may be mistaken by that
partiality which men insensibly form for any pursuit in
which they have long been engaged, that a set of works
of a similar character would not be quite without its
use in the literature of our country. The occurrences of
even common life constitute, if I may so speak, a kind of
alphabet of invention — the types, rather, which genius
employs in setting up her forms. She picks them out in
little broken bits from those cells of the memory in which
they have been stored up, and composes with them entire

40 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

and very beautiful pieces of fiction. And I am con-
vinced a set of works similar in character to my manu-
script history — from each district of the kingdom-
would form a complete part of this kind. Might not
such a set be properly regarded as a magazine of mate-
rials for genius to work upon ? '

Allan Cunningham, in whom, as a brother of the
hammer and a brother of the pen, Miller took a particular
interest, and whom he obliged with that sketch of Black
Russel which we have seen, was applied to when the sub-
scription scheme had been set on foot, in the hope that
he might do something for the book in London.

' Cromarty, August, 1834.

'For the last few years I have devoted to the pen
well-nigh all the hours I could spare from the mallet,
and have produced a volume which I would fain see in
print. It is traditional, and wants only genius to re-
semble very much some of your own. Our materials,
at least, must have been collected in the same manner
and from the same class — in prosecuting a wandering
employment in a truly interesting country, rich with the
spoils of the past — in the work-shed, and the barrack,
and the cottage, from old men and old women — the
solitary, fast-sinking remnants of a departed generation.
But the mason of the north has no such creative powers
as he of Galloway — powers that can operate on a darkened
chaos of obsolete superstitions and exploded beliefs, and
fashion it into a little poetical world, bright and beautiful,
and busy with passion and life. Still, however, my tra-
ditions are not without their interest, though possibly
they may owe little to the collector. They are redolent
of Scotland and the past, and form the harvest of a
field never yet subjected to any sickle except my own.

LETTER TO ALLAN CUNNINGHAM. 41

Our northern districts seem to have produced many
that could invent, but none that could give their inven-
tions much publicity ; many that could think and feel
poetry, but none that could write it : their literature is
consequently an oral literature — their very history is tra-
ditional ; they may be thought of as fields unreaped, as
mines unopened : and must not some little interest
attach to a work, however deficient as a piece of com-
position, that may properly be regarded as a sample
of the grain — a specimen of the ore ? I trust, however,
that my mode of telling my stories will not be deemed
very repulsive. I have had a hard and long-protracted
struggle with the disadvantages attendant on an imperfect
education. To you, at least, I need not say how hard
and how protracted such a struggle must always prove ;
but I have at length, I trust, got on the upper side of
them ; and, if I eventually fail, it will be rather from a
defect of innate vigour than from any combination of
untoward circumstances pressing upon me from with-
out.

' I publish by subscription — from the nature of the
work and the obscurity of the writer, the only way open
to me. But, trust me, I have no eye to pecuniary ad-
vantage ; I would not give a very little literary celebrity
for all the money I ever saw ; besides, bad as the times
are, I am master enough of the mallet to live by it. I
could ill afford, however, the expense of an unlucky spe-
culation ; and as literature is not so much thought of in
Cromarty as the curing of herrings, I find that, without
extending my field, I cannot securely calculate on cover-
ing the expense of publication. Forgive me that I
apply to you. I am a pilgrim, passing slowly and
heavily along the path which leads right through the
wicket — now floundering through the mud of the slough,

42 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

now journeying beside the hanging hill, now plodding
through the low-lying grounds haunted by Apollyon ;
and what wonder that I should think often and much of
one who has passed over the same tract ? and who, un-
deterred by the dark valley or the enchanted grounds,
with all their giants and all their wild beasts, has at
length set him down amid the gardens of Beulah, in full

view of the glorious city My booksellers in

London are Smith and Elder, to whom, should you
succeed in procuring a few names for me, the list may
be transmitted/

Allan sent a few sensible and friendly words in reply.
' 1 am glad that you think of publishing ; for there is so
much truth and nature and information in your writings,
that they cannot fail of doing your name a good turn. A
work of the kind set forth in your prospectus will be
welcome to all true-hearted Scotsmen, and, though
limited in its range, will influence many who live
besouth the Tweed. I have laid one of your printed
intimations on the table of my bookseller, and desired
him to mention it to his visitors. When the work appears
I will say a good word for it with all my heart. I men-
tioned it to some friends here; but you must understand
that the Londoners are not accustomed to put down their
names for works of a literary nature, whatever the merit
may be : but this must not discourage you ; almost all
authors sacrifice a work or two for the sake of hav-
ing their merits made widely known. I did this ;
and now I find purchasers, though I found few at first.
I desired our mutual friend Carruthers to place my
name among the subscribers long before you wrote to
me. Your bookseller must send copies to most of the
influential newspapers and reviews ; a kind word from
them saves an advertisement, and possibly helps the sale

LETTER TO SIR GEORGE MACKENZIE. 43

of the works. But take a brother-mason's as well as a
brother-writer's advice. Don't be too solicitous about
being noticed in reviews ; let the thing take its course :
a worthy work seldom fails.'

One sample will suffice of the letters in which he
applied to gentlemen of influence — landed proprietors,
clergymen, leading merchants — in his district, to coun-
tenance his enterprise.

TO SIR GEORGE MACKENZIE, OF COUL, BART.

' Permit me to submit to your judgment the inclosed
prospectus. I am acquainted with only your writings,
and the high character which you bear as a gentleman
of taste and science ; but there is more implied in such
an acquaintance than in a much closer intimacy with a
common mind ; and it is the knowledge I have derived
from it which now emboldens me to address you.

' I am one of the class almost peculiar to Scotland,
who became conversant in some little degree with books
and the pen amid the fatigues and privations of a life of
manual labour. For several years past I have amused
my leisure hours in striving to acquire the art of the
writer, and in collecting and arranging the once widely
spread, but now fast sinking, traditions of this part of
the country. I have written much, that I might learn
to write well, and have made choice, as the scene of my
exertions, of a field so solitary and little known that I
might not have to contend with labourers more prac-
tised than myself ; and I have found in this field much
that I have felt to be interesting, and much that I deem
original — incidents of a structure wholly unborrowed,
striking illustrations of character and manners, inven-
tions not unworthy of poetry, and strongly-defined traces

44 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

of thought and feeling, which might afford employment
to the philosopher.

' My amusements at length produced a volume
which, though not quite such a work as I had conceived
might have been written on the subject, I deemed not en-
tirely devoid of merit. I submitted my MS., through Sir
Thomas D. Lauder (a gentleman who has honoured me
by his notice and shown me much kindness), to some of
the literati of Edinburgh : their judgment regarding it
has been favourable beyond my most sanguine antici-
pations. Still, however, the work is local in its character,
and more exclusively so in its title, and in times like the
present I can have nothing to expect from the booksellers.
But the circumstances which militate most against the
general interest of the work must have some little tend-
ency to impart to it a particular interest in the district
of country whose traditions it relates, and whose scenery
and general character it purports to describe. If, like
a convex lens, the focus bears on only a narrow space,
in that narrow space the rays must be concentrated.
For a work of this kind the mode of publishing by
subscription is the only available one ; and, after hesitat-
ing long — for the scheme has often been resorted to in
this part of the country by men of an inferior cast, in-
ferior both in sentiment and intellect, and I was un-
willing it should be thought that I had anything in
common with them — I now betake myself to it. I
would ill like to risk my respectability as a man for the
uncertain chance of being a little known as a writer ;
but there is surely nothing mean in a mode of publica-
tion which such men as Pope and Cowper and Burns
have had recourse to. The meanness must consist not
abstractedly in the scheme itself, but, when the work
chances to be a worthless one, in the inveigling the

THE BOOK PUBLISHED. 45

public into what must be regarded as an unfair bargain.
I have no eye to pecuniary advantage. My hopes and
fears are those of the literary aspirant only ; and, little
known either as a man or a writer, my eye naturally
turns to one whose favourable opinion, holding as he
does so high a place in society and letters, would obtain
for me the suffrages of the class best able to forward my
little plan/

The disappointment experienced by Miller in pro-
curing the publication of his book was confined to his
attempts to induce a bookseller to undertake the risk of
issuing it. No sooner did he adopt the plan of sub-
scription, than he met with encouragement and aid on all
hands. Without any conscious effort he had succeeded
in inspiring every one who knew him with confidence,
and those who knew him well were not only confident
of his future, and proud of his abilities, but bound to
him by strong personal attachment. He had shown
himself friendly, and he had found friends who took de-
light in serving him. At last Mr Black agreed to pub-
lish on terms which, under the circumstances, must be
pronounced generous. Miller received 400 copies for
his subscribers at cost price, and, in the event of profit
being realized on the sale of the remainder of an edition
of 1250 copies, was to share it with Mr Black. The
selling price was fixed at seven shillings and sixpence.
On these terms Miller would clear about sixty pounds,
even if the unsubscribed copies should not sell. These
terms were not arranged until after Mr Black had met
Miller in Edinburgh, and it is evident that he also had
learned to believe that the Cromarty mason, just develop-
ing into a Bank clerk, was a man with a future.

In the spring of 1835, then, the book was in the

46 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

hands of the subscribers, and congratulations poured in
upon Miller. He was in a mood of quiet satisfaction,
wholly unimpassioned ; nay, he was not without anxiety
as to the loss which might be incurred by Mr Black :
his friends were joyful, cordial, exultant. Here is a
heart-warming letter from Mr Carruthers.

' Inverness, April 17, 1835.

' Many thanks for your bonny little book. It was
delivered to me yesterday evening about six o'clock, and
I went through fully three-fourths of it before going to
bed. Depend upon it, my dear fellow, you have made
a hit this time. I don't say that the Legends will lift you
into high popularity with all your robes and singing
garlands just at once. Your fame will not come rushing
on you like a spate. But the book will have a steady
general sale, and will lay the foundation of a permanent
literary reputation, destined, I trust, to go on increasing,
and be crowned with many honours.

'You are right in your remark about there being
rather too much dissertation, especially in the first two
or three chapters. This surplus, like that of the Irish
Church, would have, perhaps, been better appropriated to
other purposes ; yet one soon becomes reconciled to it or
ceases to consider it unnatural. I think you lack dra-
matic power ; at least, your sketches of character struck
me as inferior to the descriptive and moralizing passages.
I should, however, except honest Donald Miller, who is
equal to Washington Irving's happiest creations. The
great charm of the book is that it is full of original
matter, — not concocted from other works, though you
have much curious reading too, but fresh and flowing,
full of truth and nature. Taste, you know, is a plant of
very slow growth, yet you have already outstripped our

LETTER FROM CARRUTHERS. 47

friend Allan Cunningham in this respect. Allan had
better opportunities than you in his early days. His
father had an excellent library, was an intelligent man,
and mixed with intelligent people. Nay, the poet him-
self was turned of thirty, had been a reporter for the
London press, and was almost necessarily well versed in
critical lore, before he tried his hand at prose. Yet
even his last work, his Life of Barns, is full of sins against
right taste and delicacy of feeling. But, after all, your
solitude and seclusion were your best teachers. We
may wonder how you got your style — so pure and
vigorous, but it was your lonely communings with
nature that fixed the matter in your mind, and gave it
room to grow. You studied deeply and minutely all
you heard, read, and saw, and thus came to your task
fraught with thoughts, feeling, and knowledge, pondered
over daily for years, and moulded into perfect shapes.
Your imagination had merely to supply a coping for this
depository. But I am getting too dissertative myself.
If the Edinburgh Review is at your command, turn to
one of the early volumes for a review of " Cromek's Re-
liques," and you will find some excellent observations
of Jeffrey, on the peculiar position of Burns in his youth.
Situation is as necessary for the proper growth of genius
as of forest trees ; and I cannot help thinking, my dear
friend, that though your early lot has been hard, it has
been favourable for the development of your mental
power.

' It will be your own fault if you do not sail with
full and prosperous gale. Your next appearance will be
looked forward to with interest, and will secure you
good terms with your bookseller. Publishers are a
fraternity wise in their generation, and I really think
they will be casting out nets for you hereafter. I hope

48 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

you will go on writing, and accumulating materials.
You speak of White's Selborne as a sort of model. Your
work resembles Crabbe's Borough, and his general style,
much more closely. The same faithful and minute
painting of humble objects, — the same love of the sea
and all pertaining to it, — fishes, men, and marine scenery.
Of course the characters are different, being modified by
national and local circumstances. We of Scotland have
the advantage in point of morality and staid demeanour.
But Crabbe's poachers and navigators, with their strong
unbridled passions, are perhaps better fitted for poetry.
What do you say to a series of sketches in verse of your
Cromarty worthies, their characters, passions, and ad-
ventures ? Of this, and fifty other subjects, I shall hear
you speak, I hope, soon. When the suns get warmer,
and spring is leading (as Wordsworth finely says) her
earliest green along the leaves, I shall steal away some
Friday or Saturday, and ruralize with you on the hill-
side over the bay. I hope sincerely that Wilson will
shine on you with one of his long, laudatory, imaginative
articles in BlacTcwood. Adam Black will take every
means of giving you publicity. But I see no fear of
your success, so that the pushing of the trade will be the
less necessary. I send you a capital review from the
Spectator, which you may not have seen. Tell me
from time to time how you get on, and how the work
goes off.'

Miller sent at this time a copy of his book of poems
to Mr Robert Chambers, accompanying it with the fol-
lowing letter.

'The Moray Frith has been so blocked up this
spring, by the westerly winds, that it is only now an
opportunity occurs of sending you the Jacobite Psalm

LETTER TO MR ROBERT CHAMBERS. 49

wliich. I mentioned to you when in Edinburgh, It is
by no means a very polished composition, but the writer
was evidently in earnest ; and in the closing stanzas there
is an energy and power, united to much simplicity, which
he must have owed rather to his excited feelings as a
Scotchman and a Jacobite, than to his art as a poet. It
has struck me as a curious fact, and one which I do not
remember to have seen noticed, that almost all our
modern Jacobites are staunch Whigs. Burns was a re-
presentative of the. class, and I think I see from the
verses of the poor Jacobite Psalmist, that had he flour-
ished ninety years later he would have been a Whig
too.

' Oblige me by accepting the accompanying volume.
It contains, as you will find, a good many heavy pieces,
and abounds in all the faults incident to juvenile pro-
ductions, and to those of the imperfectly taught ; but
you may here and there meet in it with something to
amuse you. I have heard of an immensely rich trader,
who used to say he had more trouble in making his first
thousand pounds than in making all the rest. I have
experienced something similar to this in my attempts to
acquire the art of the writer. But I have not jet suc-
ceeded in making my first thousand. My forthcoming
volume, which I trust I shall be able to send you in a
few weeks, will, I hope, better deserve your perusal.
And yet I am aware it has its heavy pieces too, —
dangerous looking sloughs of dissertation, in which I well
nigh lost myself, and in which I shall run no small risk
of losing my readers. One who sits down to write for
the public at a distance of two hundred miles from the
capital, has to labour under sad disadvantages in his
attempts to catch the tone which chances to be the
popular one at the time, — more especially if, instead of

VOL. II. 4

50 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

having formed his literary tastes in that tract of study
which all the educated have to pass through, he has had
to pick them up for himself in nooks and by corners
where scarce any one ever picked them up before.
Among educated men the starting note, if I may so ex-
press myself, is nearly the same all the world over, and
what wonder if the after-tones should harmonize, — but
alas for his share in the concert who has to strike upon
a key of his own !

* All my young friends here, and I have a great
many, are highly delighted with your volume of Ballads,
and some of the elderly, who have hardly taken up a
piece of light reading for the last thirty years, have
eagerly renewed by means of it their acquaintance with
the favourites of their youth. I have an aunt turned of
seventy, who, with the assistance of spectacles, has
perused it from beginning to end. It is by far the best
collection I have yet seen, and the notes add infinitely
to its value/

To this there came, in due course, the following
reply.

' Anne Street, Edinburgh, March 31, 1835.

*I have just received your letter of the 19th inst.,
with the accompanying volume, of which I have already
read a considerable portion. It is fortunate it arrived
to-day, as 1 was about to write for another purpose than
the acknowledgment of your letter ; and it is better to
kill two birds with one stone than a single one only.
My object was to mention that I have read your history
of Cromarty all to the last two chapters, being, perhaps,
the fourth or fifth work of which I have read so much
these half dozen years. For a copy which has been
sent to me, apparently by your order, I beg to thank
you, but I had previously bought one, and was by that

LETTER FROM MR ROBERT CHAMBERS. 51

time far on in the perusal of it. Further, I have put
an extract from it into our printer's hands, with a pre-
liminary notice, in which I express my opinion of it ;
three weeks, however, must elapse before this can appear.
I think you will not be displeased with the terms in
which I have spoken of the volume and its author ; at
least, I am very sure that the notice is meant for the
benefit of both. I dwell chiefly on the value which I
conceive the book to 4iave, as an example of the opera-
tions of a mind of deep reflection and sensibility, reared
amidst humble scenes and circumstances, imperfectly
educated, and in want of all appropriate material to act
upon. Yet, while acknowledging that the reflection and
the sensibility are often misspent, I take care to convey
the impression that the book is a good one of the kind
it professes to belong to, and calculated to afford much
amusement to the reader, for I believe it would not be
bought as a " psychological curiosity " only. Between
ourselves, I think it would have been better to retrench
a good deal of the moralizing in the early chapters. I
assure you, though not unaccustomed to philosophical
reading, I find your thinking pretty hard and solid ; it
requires a little more time and pains to follow you than
the most of us care to expend on a book of what we
suppose light reading. The history of Cromarty ! you
would have made a history of John o' Groat's house
philosophical, I believe. Yours seems to be the true
sort of mind to make minnows talk like whales. Such
powers are not appropriate to topographical narration,
or the chronicling of old stories. A playful fancy and a
power of whimsical allusion answer these walks of litera-
ture much better. You are like a man assorting needles
with a gauntlet. I must also mention to yourself that I
have found a few little matters in your volume which

52 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

cannot be traditionary ; such, for instance, as a George's
Square in Edinburgh some fifteen years before the actual
erection of the place bearing that name ; the numbering
of houses, too, when there were no numbers ; and the
coining by the head of Leith walk from Queeiisferry to
Edinburgh. You speak of dates of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries on the front of Urquhart Castle, in
connection with architectural styles, I am sure not much
earlier than the seventeenth, and when I am equally
sure that no dates were carved on houses in Scotland,—
at least, far as I have ridden, and much as I have seen
in my native country, I never saw a date upon a build-
ing earlier than the sixteenth century. This shows that
you fill up and round off ; and why not ? but only such
matters must be managed discreetly.

' I am much obliged by the Jacobite Psalm, which
is certainly much above the tame poetry of the period.
Your remark about the Jacobites has often struck myself.
I account for their becoming Liberals in after-times, by
the fact of Jacobitism at length becoming identified with
a patriotic indignation at the corrupt government of the
early Brunswick sovereigns, in which last character it
must have very readily associated with modern Liberalism.
1 1 had thought of it as a duty to endeavour to give
you some hints as to your future conduct in literature,
such as a metropolitan may be sometimes able to give
to a provincial. But now that I see your volume I deem
it needless to try. A mind such as you have the fortune
to possess, can hardly ever or anywhere be at a loss. I
could hope, however, that you may keep in view the
advantage, for your own happiness, of advancing into
some more conspicuous situation in life, where the
powers and tendencies of your mind may find more
fitting scope and exercise than at present. For the at-

JACOBITE PSALM. 53

tainment of such an end, great worldly prudence and,
what people arc now universally calling tact, are as
essentially necessary as the bare possession of talent;
and here I hope you will never be found wanting. With
the best wishes for your happiness under whatever cir-
cumstances, I remain, &c/

The Jacobite Psalm, referred to by Mr Chambers,
is what Miller describes as ' a curious version of the
137th Psalm, the production of some unfortunate Ja-
cobite/ He supposes it ' to have been written at Paris
shortly after the failure of the enterprise ' of 1745, ' when
the prince and his party were in no favour at court ; for
the author, a man, apparently, of keen feelings, with all
the sorrowful energy of a wounded spirit, applies the
curses, denounced against Edom and Babylon, to Eng-
land and Prance/ Readers will perhaps like to see
the verses.

' By the sad Seine we sat and wept,
When Scotland we thought on ;
Reft of her brave and true, and all
Her ancient spirit gone,

' " Revenge," the sons of Gallia said,

" Revenge 3rour native land ;
Already your insulting foes
Crowd the Bataviari strand."

( How shall the sons of freedom e'er

For foreign conquest fight !
How wield anew the luckless sword
That i'ailed in Scotland's right !

* If thee, 0 Scotland, I forget,
Till fails my latest breath,
May foul dishonour stain my name,
Be mine a coward's death.

' May sad remorse for fancied guilt

My future days employ,
' 4 If all thy sacred rights are ndt
Above my chiefest joy.

54 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

1 Kemember England's children, Lord,

Who on Drumossie day,
Deaf to the voice of kindred love,
" Raze, raze it quite," did say.

' And thou, proud Gallia, faithless friend,

Whose ruin is not far,
Just Heaven on thy devoted head
Pour all the woes of war !

* When thou thy slaughtered little ones

And ravish'd dames shalt see,
Such help, such pity, may'st thou have
As Scotland had from thee.'

' My legendary volume/ says Miller in the Schools
and Schoolmasters, ( was, with a few exceptions, very
favourably received by the critics. Leigh Hunt gave it
a kind and genial notice in his " Journal ; " it was cha-
racterized by Robert Chambers not less favourably in
Ms ; and Dr Hetherington, the future historian of the
Church of Scotland and of the Westminster Assembly of
Divines, at that time a licentiate of the Church, made it
the subject of an elaborate and very friendly critique in
the Presbyterian Review! We have already referred to
the remark on its style made by Baron Hume, and the
eager delight of Miller at being recognized as a worthy
successor of the Addisons and Goldsmiths, at whose
feet he had loved to sit. The book c attained no great
popularity ; ' but it crept gradually into circulation, and
moved off ' considerably better in its later editions than
it did on its first appearance/

These words are likely to prove true for an indefinite
period. This is one of those books which has to find
its readers, but which, when it has found, retains them
by a charm like that of old friendship and of old wine.
There is in it an aroma of racy thought and natural home-
bred feeling. We may call it a bit of genuine historical

THE 'SCENES AND LEGENDS: 55

literature, for it reproduces with vivid faithfulness the
aspect of human life in one particular corner of the
planet. The actual fields and waters, crags and woods,
green dells and bleak moors, grey castles and thatched
cottages, wimpling burns, and broomy braes, and brown
sea-shores, beside which Miller has played since child-
hood, form the scenery of the drama ; and amid these life
goes masquerading in its coat of many colours — life, with
its fitful changes and abrupt contrasts, its heart-wrung
tears and grotesque grins, its broken-winged sublimities
and grandeurs tempered by absurdity ; its queer jumble
of tragedy and comedy, and merry scorn of all the unities.
The writing is, perhaps, too careful for full display of
strength. Miller lingered for many years over his stories,
copying andrecopying — here polishing down a roughness,
there throwing in a touch of colour ; now rounding a
sentence with more subtle curve, now drawing out a
similitude with more elaborate precision, grudging no
labour and no time. In this kind of work his arm could
not show its sweep and power. In much of his subsequent
writing there is a rapid force, a rhythmic energy, which
we do not find in the Addisonian periods of his first
prose book. But in quiet, delicately-wrought perfec-
tion— in beauty fine as the tints of a shell, as the vein-
ing of a gem, as the light and shade of a cameo — Miller
never surpassed, if he ever equalled, some parts of this
volume. The hint of Mr Carruthers as to its defect in
dramatic power, is not without pertinency and justice.
Hugh had trained himself to narrative, and was com-
paratively unskilled in dialogue ; but the essential
element in dramatic power, the ability to realize human
character and feeling in different situations, is certainly
displayed in the Scenes and Legends. The characters
live. We see them ; occasionally we hear them, and

56 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

what they say is characteristic : it is mainly the dramatic
form, not the dramatic substance, that is wanting.

To illustrate the careful finish of this book, it would
be easy to find a number of passages — exquisite descrip-
tions of landscape, specially felicitous similitudes, apt
and eloquent reflections ; but to select from these one
or two brief enough for quotation, and decisively the best
to be had, would be exceedingly difficult. It seems
preferable, therefore, to take by way of sample a passage
which is not remarkable for style, but is fitted to convey
a fair general idea of the character, interest, and power
of the book. I allude to the account of Donald Miller,
referred to with enthusiasm by Mr Camithers. The
story is introduced with a statement, not quoted here,
respecting severe storms which, for successive winters,
had visited Cromarty.

DONALD MILLER.

' Donald was a true Scotchman. He was bred a shoe-
maker ; and painfully did he toil late and early for about
twenty-five years with one solitary object in view, which,
during all that time, he had never lost sight of — no, not
for a single moment. And what was that one ? In-
dependence— a competency sufficient to set him above
the necessity of further toil ; and this he at length
achieved without doing aught for which the severest
censor could accuse him of meanness. The amount of
his savings did not exceed four hundred pounds ; but
rightly deeming himself wealthy — for he had not learned
to love money for its own sake — he shut up his shop.
His father dying soon after, he succeeded to one of the
snuggest, though most perilously situated, little pro-
perties, within the three corners of Cromarty ; the sea
bounding it on the one side, and a stream — small and

DONALD MILLER. 57

scanty during the droughts of summer, but sometimes
more than sufficiently formidable in winter — sweeping
past it on the other. The series of storms came on, and
Donald found that he had gained nothing by shutting
up his shop.

' He had built a bulwark in the old, cumbrous Cro-
marty style of the last century, and confined the wander-
ings of the stream by two straight walls. Across the
walls he had just thrown a wooden bridge, and crowned
the bulwark with a parapet, when on came the first of
the storms — a night of sleet and hurricane — and lo ! in
the morning the bulwark lay utterly overthrown ; and
the bridge, as if it had marched to its assistance, lay
beside it, half buried in sea-wrack. " Ah ! " ex-
claimed the neighbours, " it would be as well for us to
be as sure of our summer's employment as Donald
Miller, honest man ! " The summer came ; the bridge
strided over the stream as before ; the bulwark was
built anew, and with such neatness and apparent strength,
that no bulwark on the beach could compare with it !
Again came winter; and the second bulwark, with its
proud parapet and rock-like strength, shared the fate of
the first ! Donald fairly took to his bed : he rose, how-
ever, with renewed vigour, and a third bulwark, more
thoroughly finished than even the second, stretched, ere
the beginning of the autumn, between his property and
the sea. Throughout the whole of that summer, from
grey morning to grey evening, there might be seen on
the shore of Cromarty a decent-looking, elderly man,
armed with lever and mattock, rolling stones, or raising
.them from their beds in the sand, or fixing them together
in a sloping wall, toiling as never labourer toiled, and
ever and anon, as a neighbour sauntered the way, straight-
ening his weary back and tendering the ready snuff-box.

58 THE BANK A COO UNTANT.

That decent-looking elderly man was Donald Miller.
Bat his toil was all in vain. Again came winter and
the storms ; again had he betaken himself to his bed,
for his third bulwark had gone the way of the two
others. With a resolution truly indomitable he rose
yet again, and erected a fourth bulwark, which has
now presented an unbroken front to the storms of
twenty years.

' Though Donald had never studied mathematics as
taught in books or the schools, he was a profound
mathematician notwithstanding. Experience had taught
him the superiority of the sloping to the perpendicular
wall in resisting the waves ; and he set himself to dis-
cover that particular angle which, without being incon-
veniently low, resists them best. Every new bulwark
wras a new experiment made on principles which he had
discovered in the long nights of winter, when, hanging
over the fire, he converted the hearth-stone into a tablet,
and, with a pencil of charcoal, scribbled it over with
diagrams. But he could never get the sea to join issue
with him by charging in the line of his angles ; for,
however deep he sunk his foundations, his insidious
enemy contrived to get under them by washing away
the beach ; and then the whole wall tumbled into the
cavity. Now, however, he had discovered a remedy.
First he laid a row of large flat stones on their edges in
the line of the foundation, and paved the whole of the
beach below until it presented the appearance of a
sloping street, — taking care that his pavement, by run-
ning in a steeper angle than the shore, should at its
lower edge, base itself in the sand. Then, from the fla^
stones which formed the upper boundary of the pave-
ment, he built a ponderous wall which, ascending in the
proper angle, rose to the level of the garden, and a neat

DONALD MILLER. 59

firm parapet surmounted the whole. Winter came, and
the storms came ; but though the waves broke against
the bulwark with as little remorse as against the Sutors,
not a stone moved out of its place. Donald had at
length fairly triumphed over the sea.

' The progress of character is fully as interesting a
study as the progress of art; and both are curiously
exemplified in the history of Donald Miller. Now that
he had conquered his enemy, and might realize his long-
cherished dream of unbroken leisure, he found that con-
stant employment had, through the force of habit, be-
come essential to his comfort. His garden was the very
paragon of gardens ; and a single glance was sufficient
to distinguish his furrow of potatoes from every other
furrow in the field ; but now that his main occupation
was gone, much time hung on his hands, notwithstand-
ing his attentions to both. First he set himself to build
a wall quite round his property ; and a very neat one he
did build, but unfortunately, when once erected, there
was nothing to knock it down again. Then he white-
washed his house, and built a new sty for his pig, the
walls of which he also white-washed. Then he enclosed
two little patches on the side of the stream, to serve as
bleaching greens. Then he covered the upper part of
his bulwark with a layer of soil, and sowed it with grass.
Then he repaired a well, the common property of the
town ; then he constructed a path for foot-passengers on
the side of a road, which, passing through his garden on
the south, leads to Cromarty House. His labours for
the good of the public were wretchedly recompensed
by at least his more immediate neighbours. They would
dip their dirty pails into the well he had repaired, and
tell him, when he hinted at the propriety of washing
them, that they were no dirtier than they used to be.

60 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

Their pigs would break into his bleaching greens, and
farrow them up with their snouts ; and when he threat-
ened to pound them, he would be told " how unthriving
a thing it was to keep the puir brutes aye in the fauld,"
and how impossible a thing " to watch them ilka time
they gaed out." Herd boys would gallop their horses, and
drive their cattle, along the path he had formed for foot
passengers exclusively, and when he stormed at the little
fellows, they would canter past, and shout out, from
what they deemed a safe distance, that their "horses
and kye had as good a right to the road as himself."
Worse than all the rest, when he had finished whitening
the walls of his pigsty, and gone in for a few minutes
to the house, a mischievous urchin, who had watched
his opportunity, sallied across the bridge, and seizing on
the brush, whitewashed the roof also. Independent of
the insult, nothing could be in worse taste ; and yet
when the poor man preferred his complaint to the father
of the urchin, the boor only deigned to murmur in reply,
" that folk would hae nae peace till three Lammas tides,
joined intil ane, would come and roll up the Clach Ma-
lacha" (it weighs about twenty tons), "frae its place iJ
the sea till flood water-mark." It seemed natural to
infer, that a tide potent enough to roll up the Clach
Malacha would demolish the bulwark, and concentrate
the energies of Donald for at least another season.

' But Donald found employment, and the neighbours
were left undisturbed to live the life of their fathers
without the intervention of the three Lammas tides.
Some of the gentlemen farmers of the parish who reared
fields of potatoes, which they sold out to the inhabitants
in square portions of a hundred yards, besought Donald
to superintend the measurement and the sale. The
office was one of no emolument whatever, but he accept-

DONALD MILLER. 61

ed it with thankfulness ; and though, when he had
potatoes of his own to dispose of, he never failed to
lower the market for the benefit of the poor, every one
now, except the farmers, pronounced him rigid and
narrow to a fault. On a dissolution of parliament, Cro-
marty became the scene of an election, and the hon.
member apparent, deeming it proper, as the thing had
become customary, to whitewash the dingy houses of
the town, and cover its dirtier lanes with gravel, Donald
was requested to direct the improvements. Proudly did
he comply; and never before did the same sum of
election-money whiten so many houses, and gravel so
many lanes. Employment flowed in upon him from
every quarter. If any of his acquaintance had a house
to build, Donald was appointed inspector. If they had
to be enfeoffed in their properties, Donald acted as bailie,
and tendered the earth and stone with the gravity of a
judge. He surveyed fields, suggested improvements,
and grew old without either feeling or regretting it.
Towards the close of his last, and almost only illness, he
called for one of his friends, a carpenter, and gave orders
for his coffin ; he named the seamstress who was to be
employed in making his shroud; he prescribed the
manner in which his lyke-wake should be kept, and both
the order of his funeral, and the streets through which
it was to pass. He was particular in his injunctions to
the sexton, that the bones of his father and mother
should be placed directly above his coffin ; — and pro-
fessing himself to be alike happy that he had lived and
that he was going to die, he turned him to the wall, and
ceased to breathe a few hours after. With all his rage
for improvement, he was a good old man of the good old
school. Often has he stroked my head, and spoken to
. me of my father ; and when, at an after period, he had

62 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

learned that I set a valite on whatever was antique and
curious, he presented me with the fragment of a large
black-letter Bible which had once belonged to the
Urquharts of Cromarty.'

It is perhaps worthy of mention that the value of the
black-letter Bible here alluded to may have been some-
what enhanced to Hugh by the circumstance that, in his
researches into the history of his native district and of
its remarkable men, he had come upon evidence that he
had the blood of Sir Thomas TTrquhart of Cromarty in
his veins. Far too proudly contemptuous of such a title
to distinction to specify the fact in his published writings,
he nevertheless referred to it, when the matter turned
up in conversation, as incontrovertible. The chapter de-
voted to Sir Thomas in the Scenes and Legends describes
him as a man of genius and learning, but fantastic,
speculative, and eccentric in the highest degree. He
flourished in the times of the Covenant and Common-
wealth.

G3

CHAPTER III.

DEATH OF MISS DUNBAR.

DURING those months which Miller passed in Lin-
lithgow, his friend Miss Dunbar lay on her death-
bed, slowly sinking under intolerable agonies. She
retained her faculties unimpaired, and in the intervals of
pain manifested that gracious interest in all that con-
cerned her friends which characterized her in health.
Her malady was known to be incurable, but it does not
appear that Miller was aware of any reason for appre-
hending that it would soon have a fatal termination. He
continued, therefore, to write to her in the light dis-
cursive manner he had previously adopted.

' Linlithgow.

f I must try to coin time (the phrase is poor Henry
Kirk White's, who killed himself in the process), in which
to show you that the hurry of my new occupation is as
unable to dissipate the recollection of your kindness as
the rougher fatigues of my old one. The more I see of
life, the more I am convinced that " it is not in man that
walketh to direct his steps." Here am I in Linlithgow,
acquiring that degree of skill in business matters that
may fit rne for a bank accountant. Six weeks ago I had

61 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

as much thought — nay, more — of emigrating to the
wilds of America.

e I would much rather have spent in Edinburgh the
few weeks I have to pass in this part of the country
than here ; but it was necessary, in order to acquire the
skill of the branch accountant, that I should remove to
a branch bank ; and as I take care never to quarrel with
necessity, I get on pretty well. On the evening of my
arrival, Mr Gillon, the Radical M.P., addressed his con-
stituents of Linlithgow in the Town-house. I attended,
for I was desirous to ascertain what I had long doubted,
whether Radicalism and a powerful intellect be compati-
ble, and regarded Gillon as one of the heads of the
party in Scotland. But the doubt is a doubt still. The
speech I heard was such an one as might, perhaps, pass
without remark in an inferior debating society ; but
there was a sad lack of taste about the parts in which the
speaker attempted to be fine, and a deplorable deficiency
of grasp when he strove to be sensible. His audience,
too, seemed miserably low, and, with all the good-will in
the world, had hardly sense enough to applaud. Yv7herever
I looked I saw only low, narrow foreheads, and half-open
mouths. What can such people know of the most diffi-
cult of all sciences — politics ? You know my opinions
on the subject. I am a Whig, and not the less Whig-
gish now that the party are out (I found I could not quite
agree with them in all their measures when they were
in). But I see every day that men are not born equal ;
that "those who think must govern those who toil; "
and that those who toil frequently mistake the pressure
of the original curse for an effect of misgovernment.
Besides, I detest all quackery ; and the Radical, if he
be not altogether a blockhead, is of necessity a political
quack/

LETTER FROM MISS DUNBAR. G5

The following letter from Miss Dunbar was written,
as I conclude, after she had received the preceding. The
expression, 'that clamorous fool, a Radical,' and the
words, ' I am a Tory, though I believe your Whiggism
and my Toryism are not very dissimilar/ though they
do not occur in the way of formal reply to Miller, have
the look of being suggested by his political remarks.

' Forres, January 1, 1835.

' " I sat between the meeting years,

The coming and the past,

And I asked of the future one,

Wilt thou be like the last ?

' The same in many a sleepless night,

And many a painful day?
Thank Heaven, I have no prophet's eye,
To look upon thy way."

'These lines are Miss Lan don's — no very great favour-
ite of mine ; but as I lay sleepless and in pain last night
they came into my mind, and I found in them my own
thoughts and feelings sublimed into poetry. I suffer
much. I have many privations : it is not one of the least
of these that my right hand should have forgotten its
cunning ; but I trust I can value the comforts still left
to me. It is now two o'clock, and I am but just up and
dressed, and this is my first occupation. I heard of your
appointment from the .newspaper, and of your having
gone to Edinburgh from an acquaintance. Pardon me,
my dear friend : some sad thoughts — I may even call
them bitter ones — I will own I had amid all the pleasure
which both circumstances afforded me. I have always
borne much good-will to my acquaintance and friends
in general ; there are few whom I absolutely dislike, and
not a few whom I really like much ; but there was always
one who more particularly occupied my heart, and whom

VOL. II,

66 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

I loved more than all the rest put together, and for the
last five years you have been that one ; and now that I
have so short a time to be here, I can have no hope of
ever again seeing you. But I assure you the sad, bitter
thoughts were but passing ones • and your letter gave
me entire pleasure.

' There is scarcely any one I am sorry to part with
but you. God knows how fervently I wish you life and
happiness, and your advancement in public favour. I
consider your late appointment as very respectable, and
as procured for you in the most agreeable and delicate
manner, but cannot help regarding your literary pursuits
as the main business of your life. When, probably,
will your book be out, or is it actually gone to press ?
Many a time I have wondered to myself if ever I
shall see it, and have sometimes hopes that I may ;
but were I to be guided by my present feelings of
pain and discomfort, I should say the thing is not

very likely. , You are not aware of Lord

Medwyn's high appreciation of your genius. It was to
his brother, Mr John Forbes, that Major Gumming Bruce
lately transmitted one of your letters and extracts from
your Traditional His tori/, given him by the Messrs
Andersons, in four franked covers. The Major had sent
to me, as a thing of course, for your address, that Mr
Forbes might have waited on you, but I could give him
no clue.

' Sir Thomas [Dick Lauder] seems changed in many
things since he left this part of the country. He will
never become that clamorous fool, a Radical ; but he is
certainly far too violent in his politics. But I am a Tory,
you know ; though I believe your Whiggism and my

Toryism are not very dissimilar Will you not

come and see me on your way home ? You cannot, surely,

HIS EXPERIENCE OF GRIEF. 67

return by sea at this season, or by the Highland road ;
and if you come by the coast, Torres lies quite in your
way. And then, or never ! My only objection to your new
employment is, that it ties you down to Cromarty, so that
you cannot visit any of your friends a day's journey

away The day is coming when the first people

in the land will be desirous of seeing and being ac-
quainted with you/

Before writing the next letter, Miller heard that Miss
Dunbar had just lost by death two near relatives to
whom she was much attached. The thought of her
bereavement recalled to him his own sorrow for departed
friends, and in pensive mood, tenderly sympathetic,
deeply affectionate, he took pen in hand, and described
to her his experience of grief. If we would understand
the enthusiasm of love with which all who knew Hugh
Miller well regarded him, we ought to consider carefully
the heart-delineation of this letter.

' Cromarty, March, 1835.

' Intelligence of your sad bereavement reached me
through the medium of the newspapers ; — I cannot ex-
press what I felt. I knew that your cup was full be-
fore,— full to the brim ; — but I saw that, regarding it as
mingled by your Father, you were resigned to drink.
Now, however, a new ingredient has been added, — an
ingredient bitterer perhaps to a generous mind than any
of the others. To days of languor and nights of suffer-
ing, torn affections and blighted hopes have been added ;
and those relatives to whom the overcharged heart
naturally turns for solace and sympathy are equally in-
volved in misfortune. When we sit during the day in
a darkened chamber, we have but to throw open a case-
ment and the light comes pouring in ; but it is not so

68 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

during the night, when there is no light to enter. You
were before sitting in the shade, — not, however, in so
deep a recess but that at times a ray reached you from
without ; but I now feel that your sad bereavement must
have converted your day into night; — that you are
sitting in darkness, and that an atmosphere of darkness
surrounds you.

'I am not unacquainted with grief. There are
friends separated from me by the wide, dark, impassable
gulf whom I cannot think of even yet without feeling
my heart swell. Shall I not describe to you that pro-
cess of suffering of which my own mind has been the
subject ? There may be some comfort to you in the re-
flection that what you experience is, to use the language
of Scripture, " according to the nature of man." The
similarity in the structure of our bodies, which shows us
to belong to the same race, obtains also in our minds ;
and as dangerous wounds in the one are followed in
most cases by fevers and inflammations, which bear the
same names in every subject, and to which we apply the
same remedies, so wounds of the other are commonly
followed by similar symptoms of derangement in the
feelings, and to mitigate the smart and the fever, philo-
sophy applies the same salves, and religion, when called
upon, pours in the same balm.

1 There is an analogy between grief in its first stage
and that state of imperfect consciousness which is in-
duced by a severe blow. We are stupefied rather than
pained, and our only feeling seems to be one of wonder
and regret that we should feel so little. AVe ask our
hearts why they are so callous and indifferent, and won-
der that what we so prized as the lost should be so little
regretted. But we know not that, were we affected less,
we should feel more. The chords have been so rudely

STAGES OF GRIEF. 69

struck, that, instead of yielding their shrillest notes, they
have fallen slackened from the stops, and time must re-
cover their tone ere they vibrate in unison with the event.
In this first stage whole hours pass away of which the
memory retains no firmer hold than if they had been
spent in sleep. Seven years ago, when residing in In-
verness, word was brought me that an uncle, to whom
I was much attached, and who, though indisposed for
some time previous, was not deemed seriously ill, was
dead. I set out for Cromarty, and must have been
about four hours on the road ; but all that I next day
recollected of the journey was that the road was very
dark (I travelled by night), and that, as I drew near to
the town, I saw the moon in her last quarter, rising red
and lightless out of the sea.

' Sorrow in its second stage is more reflective. The
feelings have in some degree recovered their tone, and
we no longer deem them weak or blunted. At times,
indeed, we may sink into the apathy of exhaustion, but
when some sudden recollection plants its dagger in the
heart, we start up to a fearful consciousness of our
bereavement, and for the moment all is agony. The
mind during this stage seems to exist alternately in two
distinct states. In the one it pursues its ordinary
thoughts or its common imaginings, but when thus
engaged the image of the departed starts up before it
without the ordinary aid of association to call it in, — it
starts up sudden as an apparition, and the heart swells,
and the tears burst out. And this forms the second
state. I have remarked as not a little strange the want
of connection between the two. Occasionally, indeed,
some recollection awakened in the first may lead to the
second, but much oftener I have found the commoner
principles of association set aside altogether, and the

70 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

image of the deceased starting up as uncalled for by the
previous train of idea as if it were truly a spectre. And
oh, the aspect of that image ! How graceful its attitude !
How kind its expression ! How beautiful does the soul
look at us through the features ! Best, and kindest, and
most affectionate, and when we felt with most certainty
that we were truly dear to him ! And hence the depth
of our regret, — the bitterness of our sorrow. Grief, my
dear madam, is an idolater. It first deifies, and then
worships. It has a strange power, too, of laying hold of
the moral sense, so that it becomes a matter of con-
sequence with us to deny ourselves all pleasure, and to
reject all comfort, in what we deem justice to the deceased.
There is something wonderful in the feeling I have not
yet seen explained. It seems to have its seat deep in
the mysterious parts of our nature, and constitutes a tie
to connect, as it were, the living with the dead. No
man who truly deserves the name can desire to die
wholly unlamented; and the regret which the heart
claims for itself, it willingly — oh how willingly ! — ren-
ders to another. We weep not for ourselves, but in
justice to the lost, and even after exhausted nature can-
not yield another tear, there is a conscience in us that
chides us for having sorrowed so little. I need not ask
you if you have experienced this feeling ; — no heart was
ever truly sorrowful without the experience of it. It is
a sentiment of our nature that lies contiguous, if I may
so express myself, to that noble sentiment which leads
us, independent of our reasonings, to feel that there is a
hereafter. For do we not think of the dead to whom
we owe so many tears, as a being who exists ; and could
we owe anything to either a heap of dust or a mere re-
collection? It may be well, however, to remind you
that there is a time when the claims of this moral sense

THE LUXURY OF GRIEF. 71

should be resisted. It continues to urge that tribute be
given to the dead long after the tribute is fully paid,
and spurs on exhausted nature to fresh sorrows, when
the voice of duty and the prostration of the energies call
it to repose.

' Of grief in its third and last stage I need say little.
It forms the twilight of a return to our ordinary frame,
and is often more pleasing than the indifference of that
everyday mood in which there is nothing either to
gratify or to annoy. There is luxury in the tear, — re-
gret has become a generous feeling that opens the heart,
—and we can love and praise all that we valued in the
departed without feeling so continually that what we
so valued we have lost. There is truth in the doctrine
of purgatory, when premised not of the departed, but of
the surviving friend. There is the brief hurried period,
in which we can take no note of what we feel; the
middle state, with its unspeakable profundity of suffer-
ing ; and the after state, in which there is a cessation
from pain, and when even our sorrows become pleasant.

' I shall not urge with you the commoner topics of
consolation ; I know the heart will not listen even when
the judgment approves. Grief is a strange thing ; it is
both deaf and blind. Where could it be more perfectly
pure from every mixture of evil and folly than in the
breast of our Saviour ? and yet even in Him we see it
finding vent in a flood of .tears, when He must have
known that he whom He mourned as dead was to step
out before Him a living man. Can I, then, hope to
dissipate your sorrow ? Can I urge with you any argu-
ment of consolation equally powerful with the belief
which He entertained ? or, were I possessed of some
such impossible argument, could I hope that it would
have more influence with you than that belief had with

72 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

Him ? He believed, and yet He wept. May I not
remind you, however, that He who sorrowed then can
sympathize in our sorrows now ; that He loved little
children, and declared that of such is the kingdom of
Heaven ; and that He has enjoined us, through His
servant, not to sorrow as those who have no hope ? '

At about the same time, perhaps in the very hour,
when this letter was put into the hand of Miss Dunbar,
the Scenes and Legends, for which she had looked with
a solicitude more tenderly intense than that of Miller
himself, reached Eorres. The heart of the sweet and
gentle lady thrilled once more amid her anguish with a
joy like that of a mother when she knows that a beloved
son, whose efforts she has long watched, with whom she
has long hoped and feared, whose claim to a place of
honour among men she has never questioned, has at last
done something which will compel the world to own
that he is all she knows him to be. Miss Dunbar wrote
Miller the following touching letter, probably the last
she ever penned : —

' I know you wish to hear from me, and in gratifying
you I would gratify myself, for I have much to say to
you, but, alas ! the power of writing is past. My in-
tervals of ease from most excruciating pain are truly
like angel visits ; and when they do occur I am in such
a state of lowness and exhaustion, as to be incapable of
any exertion. I am now raised up, and supported in
bed by pillows, while I make this, I fear, last effort to

write to you What can I do, but throw myself

on His mercy who is the sent of God ? He is my rock,
my strength, my hope in life and in death. Often do I
wish to see you, and to hear you speak of the things
which pertain to eternity. I recollect the light and
comfort I derived from your conversation last summer

MISS DUNBARS LAST LETTER. 73

But to the Book ; contrary to all my anticipa-
tions, I have lived to have it in my hand ! What shall
I say of it ? It would seem, from the very little of it I
have yet read, as if I were quite satisfied with seeing
and handling it. I look into every chapter, I glance
over the whole, but, somewhat childlike, I feel too happy
to read.'

Hugh, with no suspicion that the end was near, had
begun his reply to this letter, and finished two or three
pages, when he received the following notice : ' Forres,
June 30, 1835, Miss Dunbar, of Boath, died here last
night at half-past ten o'clock.' Here is his unfinished
letter.

' Cromarty, June, 1835.

1 1 have sitten down to write you at the side of a
little cliff, grey with moss and lichens, and half hid in
fern, that rises on the northern sweep of the hill of Cro-
marty. The Moray Frith is at my feet. Towards the
north I see it spreading out from the edge of the preci-
pice below, league beyond league, till I lose it in the
long blue line of the horizon ; while the shores of Moray,
with their pale undulating strip of sand, rise over it
towards the east. The sun is bright overhead ; but the
sky is dappled with clouds, and the whole landscape is
checkered with an ever-changing carpeting of sunshine
and shadow. There is a sail on the far horizon so very
bright and so very minute, that I can liken it only to a
spark of fire ; the tower over Forres is also lighted up,
with the old castle beyond ; and still further to the west
I can see the coast line so thickly inlaid with spark-like
mansion-houses and villages, that I can only resemble it
to a belt of purple speckled with pearls. A true lover
of nature will not love it the less should circumstances
render his interviews with it brief and occasional ; ab-

74 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

sence only serves to enhance his passion, and he learns
to concentrate in his rare and hurried visits the same
amount of enjoyment which in other times was spread
over the many and prolonged. Never was I more
strongly impressed with the truth of this than at present,
or more desirous that I could convey to the solitude of
your chamber a transcript of the scene I contemplate,
and of the feelings it has awakened. Quiet pleasures
are ever the most lasting. How many sources of enjoy-
ment are shut up by time ! but that which draws its
supply from the wonderful sympathy that exists between
the frame of nature and the spirit of man is assuredly
not of the number. The child draws from it all unwit-
tingly when, rejoicing in the clear air and the sunshine,
it flings itself down for the first time on a bed of flowers ;
and many long years after, when the seasons of youth
and riper manhood have passed away, and a thousand
pleasures of after growth have palled on the sense, and
then ceased to exist, the heart of the invalid in his sick
chamber swells with all the quiet fervour of its earliest
attachment, when, from under the open curtain, he sees
the foliage of midsummer waving to the cool breeze, and
its sun sparkling to the sea. The true religion seems to
be the only one that addresses itself to this feeling. The
Psalms abound with delightful descriptions ; and there
are lovely images, that have all the green freshness of
nature about them, in the books of the prophets. But
there is, perhaps, only one religion that could avail itself
of the feeling. It is well for the Mahommedan and the
Polytheist, who wish to remain such, that they confine
themselves, the one to his mosque, and the other to his
temple ; but he wrho believes in the God of revelation
may look abroad on the glories of nature, and find no
discrepancy between the aspects of His character which

HIS REPLY. 75

His word presents to us and those exhibited in His
works.

* I should have written you long ere now, but for the
last three months my mind has been in a sort of transi-
tion state, and passing from old, firmly fixed habits, to
the acquisition of new ones, and my powers of applica-
tion were so dissipated in the process that I could
literally do nothing. I am coming round again, how-
ever, and, with a pile of unanswered letters in my desk,
dedicate to you the first-fruits of my diligence. I find
my new profession will leave me well-nigh as much
leisure as my old one ; but exercise will claim its part ;
and as my occupations must be less mechanical than
formerly, I shall have less time for thought. If, how-
ever, my mind be naturally a buoyant one, and I trust
it is, those circumstances which will weigh me down
must be more untoward than any I have yet experienced.

' My stay in Edinburgh last spring after my return
from Linlithgow was extremely brief, and I had to quit
it (a circumstance I shall ever regret) without seeing
Mrs Grant of Laggan. With all my haste, however, I
might have found time enough for the purpose could I
have but found courage, but the fear of being deemed
obtrusive held me back. 1 am the silliest fellow, in this
respect, I ever knew. No degree of faith in the assur-
ance of others can give me confidence in myself, and I
am certain I must often seem a cold and ungrateful fel-
low when I am in reality shrinking from the possibility
of being deemed an impertinent one. But I cannot
overcome the feeling. I have to regret, too, that though
I had a direct invitation to spend an evening with Mr
Thomson, the friend and correspondent of Burns, I could
not avail myself of it. In this case, however, it was a
prior invitation, not the deprecated feeling, that interfered ;

76 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

but in both cases I have lost what, from the great age of
the parties, no after opportunity can afford me. I dined
one day with Mr Black, and met at his table with his
brother-in-law, Mr Tait, the Radical bookseller. He
seems to be an outspoken somewhat reckless man, with
a good deal of rough power about him, and by no means
devoid of sense, but he is more disposed to pick up his
arguments from the surface of a subject than to take the
trouble of going deeper. I had little conversation with
him, for my spirits were rather low at the time, and
there were a great many topics on which I knew there
was small chance of our being at one. I had seen before
leaving Cromarty a volume published by Mr Tait on the
Game Laws, by my old antagonist, and as it seemed a
miserable production both in point of style and argu-
ment, I was curious to know how such a work must fare
in the hands of an active bookseller. " Ah, poor - — ,"
said he, in reply to my query regarding it, " he succeeds
just like every other man who writes in spite of sense
and nature ; and yet though invariably unlucky he still
persists. In men of a literary cast," he continued, " the
will and the power of production are often sadly dis-
joined. I sometimes meet with persons who, I am cer-
tain, could write admirably, but who cannot be prevailed
on to take up the pen, while a numerous tribe of others,

destitute, like , not only of ideas, but even of words,

cannot be persuaded to resign it." Some of the few
hours I passed in Edinburgh were spent very agreeably
in the back parlour of Mr Black, — a most agreeable
lounge, where in the course of a single forenoon one may
meet with half the literary men of the place. I saw in
it in the space of two short hours Mr James Wilson,
Professor Pillans, Professor Napier, Dr Jamieson, the
author of the Scotch Dictionary, and Dr Irving, the

EDINBURGH JOTTINGS. 77

biographer of Buchanan. Through the friendship of
Mr John Gordon, of the College, I was introduced to
Professor Wilson, and heard him lecture. He received
me with much politeness, but I felt a little out, and
found almost every time he spoke to me that I had
nothing to say in reply. I was collected enough, how-
ever, to remark that his head is one of the most strangely
formed I ever saw ; — it is of great size, immensely de-
veloped both in the ideal region and in that of what are
called the knowing organs, but singularly deficient for a
head of such general power in the reflective part. And
the lecture I heard was such an one as the phrenologist
would have anticipated from such a composition. I was,
besides, introduced to Robert Chambers, and passed a
long morning with him, — sitting down to breakfast at
the usual hour, and rising from it about twelve o'clock.
He is possessed of a fund of anecdote altogether in-
exhaustible, and is one of the most amusing and agree-
able companions I have ever met with.'

In a letter written, a few days subsequently, to Sir
Thomas D. Lauder, Miller refers to Miss Dunbar as fol-
lows :

' My kind friend, Miss Dunbar, of Boath, is- dead ;
she died on the evening of Monday, the 29th ultimo.
For the last four years her life has been one of much
suffering ; but she had a youthfulness of spirit about her
that availed itself of every brief cessation from pain. She
had learned, too, to draw consolation and support from
the best of all sources ; and so her latter days, darkened
as they were by a deadly and cruel disease, have not
been without their glimpses of enjoyment. Her heart
was one of the warmest and least selfish I ever knew. It
was not in the power of suffering or of the near approach
of death to render her indifferent to even the slightest

78 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

interests or comforts of her friends. I was employed
in writing to her, and with all the freedom which her
goodness permitted me, when the letter reached me
which intimated her death. My thoughts were so cast into
the conversational mould that I could almost realize her
presence ; and had she suddenly expired before me, I
could not have been more affected/

We must not quit this episode in Hugh Miller's life
without the remark that it reveals much of what he was.
The sister of Sir Alexander Dunbar, Bart., of Boath,
moving in the most refined and cultivated society of
Scotland, Miss Dunbar was in every sense a lady. Her
penetration and sound literary judgment might have con-
vinced her that Miller was a man of genius, and led her
to desire his acquaintance ; but that that acquaintance
should have ripened into friendship — nay, that she should
have signalized the journeyman mason as the truest and
dearest of all her friends — can be accounted for only on
the supposition that there was in him a sterling worth, a
delicate nobleness, a beaming purity of soul and dewy
tenderness of feeling, which would have marked him out
in any class of society as one of nature's gentlemen.

CHAPTER IV.

LETTERS TO MISS FRASER, FINLAY, AND DR WALDIE.

ON returning from Linlithgow to Cromarty, Miller
addressed himself with assiduity to his duties as a
bank accountant. In the course of the bank's operations
a sum of money, amounting to some hundreds of pounds,
was transmitted weekly from Cromarty to Tain, and he
thought it necessary to act as messenger. He walked
the whole way from the northern shore of Cromarty ferry
to Tain and back ; and as part of the road lay through a
deep wood, he provided himself with a brace of pistols,
and travelled with them loaded. This was the first oc-
casion of his carrying fire-arms ; and he seems to have
never subsequently, except, perhaps, for brief periods,
abandoned the practice. The resolute intensity of appli-
cation with which he mastered the details of banking,
and the conscientious caution with which he took the
road in order to obviate mishaps in the transmission of
the money, may be noted as characteristic of our man.

The change in his circumstances, when he thus passed
out of what is termed the working-class, was naturally
pleasing to his friends. Mr Stewart declared with hearty
satisfaction that he was ' at length fairly caught.' For
his own part, he took the matter with conspicuous quiet-

80 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

ness, betraying no consciousness of having risen in life,
not altering his demeanour by one jot or tittle, and
except in his thoughts of the future of domestic felicity
which was now virtually secure to him, not finding
himself a happier man. After a day spent in the
uncongenial drudgery of running up columns of figures,
he did not experience in literary composition that de-
licious freshness which it had formerly yielded him.
1 For the first six months of my new employment/ he
says, 'I found myself unable to make my old use of
the leisure hours which, I found, I could still command.
There was nothing very intellectual, in the higher sense
of the term, in recording the bank's transactions, or in
summing up columns of figures, or in doing business
over the counter; and yet the fatigue induced was a
fatigue, not of sinew and muscle, but of nerve and brain,
which, if it did not quite disqualify me for my former
intellectual amusements, at least greatly disinclined me
towards them, and rendered me a considerably more in-
dolent sort of person than either before or since. It is
asserted by artists of discriminating eye that the human
hand bears an expression stamped upon it by the general
character as surely as the human face ; and I certainly
used to be struck, during this transition period, by the
relaxed and idle expression that had on the sudden been
assumed by mine. And the slackened hands repre-
sented, I too surely felt, a slackened mind. The un-
intellectual toils of the labouring man have been occa-
sionally represented as less favourable to mental cultiva-
tion than the semi-intellectual employments of that class
immediately above him, to which our clerks, shopmen,
and humbler accountants belong ; but it will be found
that exactly the reverse is the case, and that, though a
certain conventional gentility of manner and appearance

LITERATURE AND LABOUR. 81

on the side of the somewhat higher class may serve to
conceal the fact, it is on the part of the labouring man
that the real advantage lies. The mercantile accountant
or law-clerk, bent over his desk, his faculties concentrated
on his columns of figures, or on the pages which he has
been carefully engrossing, and unable to proceed one step
in his work without devoting to it all his attention, is in
greatly less favourable circumstances than the plough-
man or operative mechanic, whose mind is free though
his body labours, and who thus finds in the very rudeness
of his employment a compensation for its humble and
laborious character. And it will be found that the
humbler of the two classes is much more largely repre-
sented in our literature than the class by one degree less
humble. Ranged against the poor clerk of Nottingham,
Henry Kirke White, and the still more hapless Edinburgh
engrossing clerk, Robert Ferguson, with a very few others,
we find in our literature a numerous and vigorous phalanx
composed of men such as the Ayrshire Ploughman, the
Ettrick Shepherd, the Eifeshire Eoresters, the sailors
Dampier and Ealconer, Bunyan, Bloomfield, Ramsay,
Tannahill, Alexander Wilson, John Clare, Allan Cun-
ningham, and Ebenezer Elliot. And I was taught at
this time to recognize the simple principle on which the
greater advantages lie on the side of the humbler class/
The unfavourable influence of his new occupation on his
literary activity proved to be of temporary nature. ' Gra-
dually/ he proceeds, ' I became more inured to a seden-
tary life, my mind recovered its spring, and my old
ability returned of employing my leisure hours, as be-
fore, in intellectual exertion/

Once more, therefore, we may pronounce him happy.
A time which, to him, seemed doubtless long, was still
to elapse before his union with Miss Eraser, but the

VOL. II. 6

82 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

engagement was now fully countenanced by her mother,
and the intercourse of the lovers was constant and un-
constrained. William Ross was in his grave ; John
Swanson was about to leave the district ; his friendship
with Miss Dunbar had become a tender and exalting
reminiscence. He clung all the more closely to her who
was yet left to him, in whom he found the affection of
Ross, the mental stimulus of Swanson, the sympathy
of Miss Dunbar, and who was dearer to him than them
all. As Miss Eraser resided almost uninterruptedly in
Cromarty, there is not much in the way of correspond-
ence between her and Hugh to throw light upon their
intercourse at this period ; but we have one or two let-
ters, through which, as through 'luminous windows,'
we can see into the ' happy palace ' of love and friend-
ship in which these two abode. Here is a note from
the lady.

' My own Hugh, I am tired, tired of being away
from you. Alas ! you have no idea of the frivolous
bondage to which sex and fashion subject us. I do no-
thing all day, and hear nothing, yet I am obliged to take
the time from sleep which I devote to you. I have found
the young captain whom I threatened you with much
handsomer than I described him to you, but a thousand
times more insipid. Why, when I look at him, do I
always think of you ? or why do his black, bright eyes,
that would be fine had they meaning, always remind
me of those gentle blue ones which I have so often seen
melt with benevolence and a chastened tenderness ?
Why are mankind such slaves of appearances as to ad-
mire the casket and neglect the gem ? It is degradation
to the dignity of thought and sentiment to compare it
with a mere beauty of form or colour. Good-bye.

' It is morning, but I am not beside you on the

A GIPSY BOY. 83

leafy hill, with the blue water shimmering at our feet.
When shall we be there again ? '

When this letter reached Cromarty Hugh was in
Tain, but he evidently lost no time in replying to it on
his return.

' Cromarty, July, 1835.

' I need not tell you at this time of day how much
it is in your power to make me happy, and how
thoroughly my very existence seems to be bound up in
yours. I have but one solace in your absence, my
Lydia — that one thought of your return.

' There crossed with me in the ferry-boat a little
ragged gipsy boy, the most strongly marked by the
peculiar traits of his tribe I almost ever saw. Have
you ever observed the form of the true gipsy head ? I
am much mistaken if it be not the very type of that of
the Hindoo. In the line of the nose the forehead is
perfectly perpendicular, indicating, I should think, a
large development of comparison, but causality is less
marked, and the whole contour is one of little power.
It is not, however, the sort of head one would expect to
find on the shoulders of a savage, more especially of the
savage who can continue such in the midst of civilization.
On reaching the school-house I learned that John (Swan-
son) had resigned the school in consequence of an ap-
pointment to the mission at Fort William. I find that
in a pecuniary point of view he is to gain almost nothing
from the change. The salary does not exceed sixty
pounds a year, and he is to be furnished with neither
house nor garden. But it is to open to him a wider
field of usefulness, and to John that is motive enough.
He is, in the extreme meaning of the term, what Bona-
parte used to designate with so much contempt, an
ideologist, i. e. a foolish fellow who does good just be-

84 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

cause it is good, and for the pure love of doing it. I
feel, however, very anxious on his account regarding the
mission. The part of the country to which he is going
is said to be wretchedly unwholesome — full of lakes
and marshes, and infested with miasma ; and sometimes,
when I consider the exhaustive fervency of his spirit
and the weakness of his frame, I cannot avoid fearing
that I may have yet to think of him in connection with
a solitary Highland churchyard and a nameless grave.
Poor William Ross ! he is now seven years dead, and
were I to lose John also, where might I look for friends
of the same class, — men who, attached to me for my
own sake alone, could regard me in every change of
circumstance with but one feeling? And John, too, is
more than my friend. He is, my own Lydia — and I
love him ten times the more for it — he is ours.

6 1 pursued my journey from the school-house in the
morning, and in passing through the deep, dreary wood
of Culrossie, found myself, as I supposed, quite on the
eve of an adventure. I carried with me a considerable
sum of money — several hundred pounds, — and that I
might be the better able to protect it, had furnished
myself with a brace of pistols, when, lo ! in the thickest
and most solitary part of the wood up there started
two of the most blackguard-looking fellows I ever saw.
They seemed to be Irish horse-jockeys. One wore a
black patch over his eye, and a ragged straw hat ; the
other a white frieze jacket, sorely out at the elbows ;
and both were armed with bludgeons loaded with lead.
I had time enough ere they came up to cock both my
pistols. One I thrust under the breast flap of my coat,
the other I carried behind my back, and sheering to the
extreme edge of the road with a trigger under each
fore-finger, I passed them unmolested. One of them

LEIGH HUNTS CRITICISM. 85

regarded me with a sardonic grin. My posture, I sus-
pect, must have seemed sufficiently stiff and constrained
for that of a traveller/

He next touches upon some book-purchases in
which he and his correspondent have a common interest.
' There is a neat pocket-copy of Johnson's Lives that
will do well for the beech tree ; I have besides got a
copy of Paley similar to the one you had from Mrs I — ;
a copy of Smollett's Humphrey Clinker (my heart warmed
to this book, — for, though many years have passed since
I last perused it, it was one of my earliest favourites),
and a minute copy of Childe Harold. I saw in Douglas's
Leigh Hunt's Journal. The notice of our little book is
a highly gratifying one; — is it not well that it is the
highest names who praise it most ? Hunt characterizes
it as "a highly amusing book, written by a remarkable
man, who will infallibly be well known." I am placed
side by side with Allan Cunningham ; there is a but,
however, in the parallel, which 1 suspect Allan will not
particularly like. " But," says Hunt, " Mr M — , besides
a poetical imagination, has great depth of reflection ; and
his style is so choice, pregnant, and exceedingly like an
educated one, that if itself betrays it in any respect to be
otherwise, it is by that very excess ; as Theophrastes
was known not to have been born in Attica by his too
Attic nicety."

' My poor friend, Miss Dunbar of Boath, is dead ;
she died on the evening of Monday, the 30th June. The
severe and ever-recurring attacks of her cruel disease
had undermined a constitution originally good, and it at
length suddenly gave way under the pressure of what
seemed to be comparatively a slight indisposition. She
is gone, and I have lost a kind and attached friend.
But it would be selfish to regret that suffering so ex-

86 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

cruciating as hers should have terminated ; for months
past I could think of her only as a person stretched on the
rack, with now and then, perhaps, a transient glimpse
of enjoyment, for such is the economy of human feeling
that every cessation from suffering is positive pleasure
to the sufferer ; but what, alas ! had she to anticipate in
this world save pang after pang in prolonged and direful
succession, — nights of pain and days of weariness, and
at length the opening of a door of escape, but only that
door through which she has just passed. I trust,
my own Lydia, that it is well with her. Her heart was
in the right place, — it was ever an affectionate one,—
perhaps too exquisitely so, but it seems finally to have
fixed on the worthiest of all objects. She had learned
to look for salvation through Him only in whom it is
alone to be found. There are many whom suffering
has the effect of so wrapping up in themselves that they
can feel for no one else. But it was not thus with Miss
Dunbar : she could think, even when at the worst, of the
little comforts and interests of her friends ; half her last
letter to me is occupied with a detail of what she had
thought and heard regarding my Traditions. 1 was
engaged in writing her when the note was brought me
which intimated her death.

1 1 have got a rather severe cold, which hangs
about me. Never was cold better treated than mine ;—
it eats and drinks like a gentleman. A shop-keeping
acquaintance gives it liquorice, Mr Ross gives it bram-
ble-berry jam, Mrs Denham has given it honey, and
now Mrs TYaser has sent it a pot of tamarinds. 'Twill
be a wonder if, in such circumstances, it goes away at
all. I have begun, but barely begun, my statistical
account of the parish ; it must, I am afraid, be both
dull and commonplace, for I am alike unwilling either

A PICNIC. 87

to repeat myself, or to anticipate any of my better mate-
rials for a second volume of " Scenes and Legends/' and
the residue is mere gossip. Even were it otherwise, my
abundance, like the wealth of a miser, would have the
effect of rendering me poor. Had I but a single story
to tell I would tell it, but who would ever think of tell-
ing one of a hundred !

' I have no words to express to you, my own Lydia,
how much I long for your return, or how cold a look-
ing place Cromarty has become since you left it.
Ordinary pleasures and lukewarm friendships do well
enough for men who have not yet had experience of
the intense and the exquisite, but to those who
have, they do not seem pleasures or friendships at all.
I am amusing myself, however, just as I best can ;
sometimes picking up a geological specimen for my col-
lection,— sometimes making an excursion to the hill or
the burn of Eathie. I accompanied to the latter place
on Saturday last Mr Ross and his children, with two of
their cousins, the Joyners. We were all thoroughly
wetted and thoroughly amused ; we told stories, gathered
immense bunches of flowers, incarcerated a light com-
pany of green grasshoppers, who were disorderly, and
ruined two unfortunate born beauties . of the butterfly
tribe. We, besides, ran down a green lizard. I have
picked up of late, in the little bay below the willows, a
fossil fish, in a high state of preservation ; — the scales,
head, tail, fins are all beautifully distinct, and yet so
very ancient is the formation in which it was found, that
the era of the lias, with all its ammonites and belemnites,
is comparatively recent.

' You are fretted, my own dear girl, by the bondage to
frivolity, which sex and fashion impose upon you. No
wonder you should, when one thinks of the sort of laws

88 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

by which you are bound. The blockheads are a pre-
ponderating majority in both sexes : but somehow in
ours the clever fellows contrive to take the lead and
make the laws, whereas I suspect that in yours the
more numerous party are tenacious of their privileges as
such, and legislate both for themselves and the minority/

In the letter from Miss Eraser, to which our next
from Miller is a reply, there occurred several descriptive
sketches of the scenery amid wrhich she was at the time,
and an allusion to the Rev. Mr Eraser of Kirkhill, who
had just lost his life by a fall from his gig. The passage
in which Hugh refers to the early writings of David
Urquhart and the threatening ambition of Russia is
curious when viewed in connection with the issue of
Russian scheming in the Crimean war.

' I am thinking long for you, dearest, and for the last
week have been counting the days, — counting them in
the style of the fool whom Jacques met in the forest.
" To-day is the 19th, the 20th comes to-morrow, and the
32nd will be here the day after; " they will creep away
one by one, and Lydia will be with me ere they bring
the month to an end. My heart is full of you ; full of
you every hour, and every minute, and all day long. I
walked last Saturday on the hill and saw our beech tree,
but lacked heart to go down to it ; I thought it looked
dreary and deserted, and I felt that, were I to lose you,
it would, be, of all places in the world, the place I could
least bear to see. Your grave — but how can I speak of
it ! — would be a place devoted to sorrow, but to a sorrow
not sublimed into agony. I could clasp the green turf
to my bosom, and make my bed upon it, but our beauti-
ful beech tree with its foliage impervious to the sun, and
its deep cool recess in which we have so often sat under
the cover of one plaid, — I could not visit it, Lydia, un-

THE BRIDGE OF ARDROSS. 89

less I felt myself dying, and were assured I would die
under its shadow. Many, many thanks, dearest, for
your kind sweet letter. It is just what a letter should
be, with heart and imagination and pretty easy words in
it, and yet it is an unsatisfactory thing after all. In-
stead of consoling me for your absence, it only, makes
me long the more for you. It" is but a pouring of oil
on a flame that burnt fiercely enough before.

' I have seen one of the scenes you describe so
sweetly, — the bridge of Ardross ; but it is a good many
years since, and it was after I had just returned from the
western Highlands of Ross-shire, where I had visited
many scenes of a similar character but on a much larger
scale. And so I was not so much impressed by it. I
still remember, however, the dark rocks and the foaming
torrent, and the steep slopes waving with birch and
hazel, that ascend towards the uplands, and the abrupt
heathy summit of Foyers overlooking the whole. I
trust your guides did not forget to point out to you the
two majestic oak trees of this wild dell, that are famed
as by far the finest in Ross-shire. One of them has
been valued at £100 ; and not many years since, when
the late Duke of Sutherland purchased the estate of
Ardross on which it grows, there was a road cut to it
that he might go and see. You are now in the parish
of Urquhart with good Mr Macdonald. There is not
much to be seen in your iminediate neighbourhood. Do
not omit visiting, as it is quite beside you, the ancient
burying-ground of Urquhart. See whether there be not
yet an old dial-stone on the eastern wall beside a little
garden. I saw it there fourteen years ago, and the
thoughts which it suggested have since travelled far in
the stanzas beginning " Grey Dial-stone."

' I am happy, dearest Lydia, that you are not going

90 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

to Cadboll. Typhus is still raging, I hear, in that part
of the country. My own dearest lassie, why am I so
much more anxious on your account than on my own ?
But it is always thus when the heart takes a firm grasp
of its object. Man in his colder moods, when the
affections lie asleep, is a vile selfish animal; his very
virtues are virtues so exclusively on his own behalf that
they are well-nigh as hateful as his vices. But love,
my dearest, is the fulfilling of the law : it draws us out
of our crust of self, and we are made to know through
it what it is to love our neighbour not merely as well
but better than ourselves. We err grievously in those
analogies by which we attempt to eke out our knowledge
of the laws of God through an acquaintance with the
laws of man • and quite as grievously and in the same
way, when we strive to become wise by extinguishing
our passions. The requirements of the statute book are
addressed to the merely rational part of our nature ; and
could one abstract the reason of man from the complex
whole of which he consists, that single part of him would
be quite sufficient for the fulfilment of them. But it is
not so with the law of Deity : it is a law which must be
written on the heart, and it addresses itself to our whole
nature; or, to state the thing more clearly, it is not more
a law promulgated for man's obedience than a revelation
of his primitive constitution ; and through grace this
constitution must be in some degree restored ere the
law, which is as it were a transcript of it, can be at all
efficient in forming his conduct. . We are mutually
pledged, my Lydia, and the law of God commands us to
love one another better than we love all human kind be-
sides,— than parents, relatives, or friends ; and how does
the affection we bear to each other conform to this ?
Why, it is the very injunction embodied. And would it

A WALK ON THE HILL. 91

not be so to us with the requirements of the whole
law, were our natures as much restored in all as in part ?

' On the evening of Monday week I had a long walk
among the woods of the hill with a party to whom I
was showing " the lions." Lieutenant C — and his young
wife were there, Lieutenant W — , too, and his wife, and
Miss - - and the Misses - — , with two of the young

— s. The ladies were talking altogether of bonnets
and scenery, and London and new patterns, and the two
gentlemen were discussing the world afloat, but one of
the young people, a fine-spirited boy, was curious about
stones and berries and old stories, and so I attached
myself to him. You remember the remark of Lamb's
brother on the boys of Eton school, " What a pity 'tis
that these nice young fellows should in a few years be-
come frivolous members of parliament ! " There is as
much truth as wit in it. Most of our fine young boys
and girls are spoiled in the transition stage when shoot-
ing up into men and women, and they do not recover all
their lives after. Mere men and women are but poor
things, my Lydia ; but it is well to love them as well as
we can, — they will be better ere the world ends. Your
pupil, Miss Harriet, has, for one so young, a great deal
of heart about her. Children, it strikes me, are little in
their whole minds, in their affections as certainly as in
their judgments. There obtains, however, a contrary
opinion, from the fact, doubtlessly, that in the present
state of the world, children have indisputably some
affections, and grown-up people, in most instances, little
or none. But this, I am certain, is not according to
nature. A warm heart, well cultivated, cannot fail of
being warmer in one's twentieth than in one's twelfth
year. When a boy I could not love with half the
warmth either as a lover or a friend that I can now.

92 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

'Are you aware that wild deer sometimes swim
across wide estuaries such as the Frith of Cromarty?
It was only last week that some of our boatmen found
a fine roe swimming across to the Black Isle side, nearly
opposite the church of Rosskeen, and fully three quarters
of a mile from the nearest shore. It is still alive, and in
the keeping of Mr Watson. My uncle tells me that in
calm weather deer not unfrequently cross the opening of
the bay from Sutor to Sutor ; and that when he was a
boy there was a fine large animal of this species captured
by some fishermen when swimming from the Black
Park, near Invergordon, to the Cromarty quarries, where
the Frith is fully five miles in breadth.

' I have seen of late some highly interesting articles
on the political designs of Russia, by David Urquhart of
Braelanguel, a talented young fellow, better acquainted
with the details of the question than perhaps any other
Briton of the present day. It is wonderful with what
art this mighty empire has been extending and con-
solidating its power for the last century. Should it go
on unchecked for half a century more civilized Europe
must fall before it, and the world witness, a second time,
the arts and refinements of polished life overwhelmed and
lost in a deluge of northern barbarism. The democratic
principle, says Hume, is generally strongest among a
civilized people — the thirst of conquest among a semi-
barbarous one. Urquhart shows me that the Russians
of the present times are strongly possessed by the latter,
and never, certainly, was the democratic principle stronger
in civilized Europe than now. Witness the struggles of
the antagonist parties in France, Austria, and Italy, and
to what extremes Whigs and Tories carry matters among
ourselves. And the democratic principle has this dis-
advantage when contemporary with the other, that it

ERASER OF KIRKHILL. 93

leads men to seek their opponents at home and draws
their attention from abroad. And hence they may re-
main unwarned and disunited until warning and union
be of no avail. But forgive me, my Lydia, I am boring
you with politics ; remember, however, that I do not
often transgress in this way.

' Poor Kirkhill ! I could hardly bring myself to
believe the story of his death. Even in the present age,
when every college student arrogates to himself the praise
of superior ability, men of real talent are very few. The
proportion, too, of the people who are cut off by accident
in a quiet well-regulated country like ours, is exceed-
ingly small ; and hence, in at least the later annals of
talent and genius, we find hardly an instance of other
than natural death. The lightning, says the proverb,
spares the laurel ; and Hume remarks that mankind
often lose more in the single philosopher, whom the
jealousy of a tyrant cuts off, than in the thousands who
perish in an earthquake or conflagration — taking it for
granted, doubtless, that thousands may perish so without
there being a man of mark among them. But alas for the
poor minister of Kirkhill ! He has left few clearer heads
behind him in the Church. I have often wished, when
listening to him, that he mingled more of the philosopher
with the theologian ; that, instead of always strengthen-
ing one Scripture doctrine by showing its correspondence
with another not better established than itself, he might
have occasionally descended to the broad level of self-
evident truth. But no one could admire him more
than I did in his own peculiar field. Do you really
think our Tory Churchmen will be unable to forgive
him his Whiggism even in death ? '

Readers will recollect Finlay, the gentle rhyming
boy, who had been of the Marcus Cave band, and to

94 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

whom Miller had been ardently attached. Seventeen
years hcd passed away since he left Cromarty, and it does
not appear that any tidings of him had reached Hugh
in the interval. One day, however, he was surprised
by the arrival of a letter dated Spanish Town, Jamaica,
signed by the hand of Finlay. He had often, he said,
thought of writing, but he had fancied that Miller had
left Scotland, being convinced that, had he remained in
his native country, he must have distinguished himself.
' Often/ he proceeds, ' have I looked into the advertising
columns of BlacJcwood, Fraser, and Tait, to see the
announcement of a volume of poetry, tales, or something
to show that genius was not confined to the south, and
at length I was yesterday gratified by seeing your name
in a stray number of Chambers' Journal for last year
as the author of the Traditionary History of Cromarty.
You have no idea, my dear fellow, how my heart glowed
when I read your praises ; and with the whole Scotsman
running riot in my veins, have I revelled in the story of
Sandy Wright (there is some of it like my own, entre
nous), so like the benevolent heart of my ain Hugh
Miller/

This was a great occasion for Miller. The image of
his boy-friend lay in his heart like a coin of pure gold
committed to a delicate casket, and when he looked upon
it after seventeen years the likeness was bright as on
the morning when he bade Einlay adieu. He seized his
pen and wrote as follows. As we read this letter can
we help loving Hugh Miller ?

' Cromarty, Oct. 15, 1836.

6 MY OWN DEAR FINLAY,

' Yes, the wise old king was quite in the right.
" As cold waters to the thirsty soul, so is good news
from a far country/' My very hopes regarding the

LETTER TO FINLAY. 95

boy-friend, whom I loved so much and regretted so long,
have been dead for the last twelve years. I could
think of you as a present existence only in relation to the
other world ; in your relation to this one merely as a
recollection of the past. And yet here is a kind, affec-
tionate letter, so full of heart that it has opened all the
sluices of mine, that assures me your pulses are still
beating, and shows me they desire to beat for ever. I
cannot tell you how much and often I have thought of
you, and how sincerely the man has longed after and
regretted the friend of the bo?/; you were lost to me ere I
knew how much I valued and loved you. I dare say you
don't remember that shortly before you left Cromarty you
scrawled your name with a piece of burnt stick on the
eastern side of Marcus Cave, a little within the opening.
I have renewed these characters twenty and twenty
times ; and it was not until a few years ago, when a
party of gipsies took possession of the cave, and smoked
it all as black as a chimney, that they finally disappeared.
Two verses of the little pastoral you wrote on leaving us
are fresh in my memory still — fresh as if I had learned
them only yesterday. But I dare say at this distance of
time you will scarce recognize them.

" Ye shepherds, who merrily sing

And laugh out the long summer day,
Expert at the ball and the ring,
Whose lives are one circle of play,

" To you my dear flock I resign,

My colley, my crook, and my horn ;
To leave you, indeed, I repine,
But I must away with the morn."

' There they are, just as you left them in the winter
of 1819. What, dear Pinlay, have the seventeen inter-
vening years been doing with your face and figure ? The

96 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

heart, 1 know, is unchanged, but what like are you?
Are you still a handsome, slender, high-featured boy,
dressed in green ? John Swanson is a little black
manny, with a wig ; and I have been growing older, but
you won't believe it, for the last eighteen years. Great
reason to be thankful, I am still ugly as ever. Five feet
eleven when I straighten myself, with hair which my
friends call brown, and my not-friends red; features irre-
gular, but not at all ill-natured in the expression ; an im-
mense head, and a forehead three quarters of a yard across.
Isn't the last a good thing in these days of phrenology ?
And isn't it a still better thing that a bonny sweet lassie,
with a great deal of fine sense and a highly-cultivated
mind, doesn't think me too ugly to be liked very much,
and promises to marry me some time in spring? Do give
me a portrait of yourself first time you write, and, dearest
Finlay, don't let other seventeen years pass ere then. Is
it not a wonder we are both alive ? John Layfield, John
Mann, David Ross, Andrew Forbes, Adam McGlashan,
Walter Williamson, are all dead — yes, Finlay, all dead.
Of all our cave companions, only John Swanson survives.
John is a capital fine fellow. He was quite as wild a boy,
you know, as either of ourselves, and perhaps a little
worse tempered ; but, growing good about twelve years
ago, he put himself to college with an eye to the Church,
and is now a missionary at Fort William. Dearest Fin-
lay, have you grown good too ? I was in danger of be-
coming a wild infidel. Argued with Uncle Sandy about
cause and effect and the categories ; read Hume and
Voltaire and Volney, and all the other witty fellows who
had too much sense to go to heaven; and was getting
nearly as much sense in that way as themselves. But
John cured me ; and you may now say of me what Gray
says of himself, " No very great wit, he believes in a

LETTER TO FINLAY. 97

God." The Bible is a much more cheerful book than I
once used to think it, and has a world of sound philoso-
phy in it besides.

'Do you remember how I stole you from John?
You were acquainted with him ere you knew me, and
used to spend almost all your play-hours with him on
the Links or in his little garden. But I fell in love with
you, and carried you off at the first pounce. And John
was left lamenting ! I brought you to the woods, and
the wild sea-shore, and the deep dark caves of the Sutors,
and taught you how to steal turnips and peas ; and
succeeded (though I could never get you improved into
a robber of orchards — though you had no serious objec-
tion to the fruit when once stolen) in making you nearly
as accomplished a vagabond as myself. Are not you
grateful ? " The boy," Wordsworth says, " is father to
the man." If so, your boy-father was a warm-hearted
lonny laddie, worthy of all due honour from you in your
present filial relation ; but as for mine, I can't respect
the rascal, let the commandment run as it please. Don't
you remember how he used to lead you into every kind
of mischief, and make you play truant three days out of
four ? A perfect Caliban, too.

" I'll show thee the best springs, I'll pluck thee berries,
And I, with my long nails, will dig thee pig-nuts."

But he's gone, poor fellow ! and his son, a much graver
person, who writes a highly sensible letter, has a thorough
respect for all his father's old friends, and steals neither
peas nor turnips. Fine thing, dearest Finlay, to be able
now and then to play the fool. I wouldn't give my non-
sense— to be sure the amount is immensely greater — for
all my sense twice told.

' You give me the outlines of your history, and I

YOL. II. 7

98 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

must give you those of mine in turn. But they are sadly
unlike. You have been going on through life like a
horseman on a journey, and are now far in advance of the
starting-point, I, on the contrary, have been mounted,
whip and spur, on a hobby, and after seventeen years'
hard driving, here I am in exactly the same spot I set out
from. But I have had rare sport in the fine ups and
downs, and have kept saddle the whole time. You re-
member I was on the eve of becoming a mason appren-
tice when you left me. The four following years were
passed in wandering in the northern and western High-
lands, and hills, and lakes, and rivers, one of the hap-
piest and most contented, though apparently most forlorn
of stone-masons. I lived in these days in kilns and barns,
and on something less than half-a-crown per week, and
have been located for months together in wild savage
districts where I could scarce find in a week's time a
person with English enough to speak to me ; but I was
dreaming behind my apron of poets and poetry, and of
making myself a name ; and so the toils and hardships
of the present were lost in the uncertain good of the
future. Would we not be poor, unhappy creatures, dear
Einlay, were there more of sober sense in our composition
and less of foolish hope ? In 1824 I went to Edinburgh,
where I wrought for part of two years. I was sanguine
in my expectations of meeting with you. I have looked
a thousand times after the college students and smart
lawyer-clerks whom I have seen thronging the pavement,
in the hope of identifying some one of them with my early
friend. On one occasion I even supposed I had found
him, and then blessed God I had not. I was sauntering
on the Calton on a summer Sabbath morning of autumn,
when I met with a poor maniac who seemed to recognize
me, and whose features bore certainly a marked resem-

LETTER TO FIN LAY. 99

blance to yours. I cannot give expression to what I felt ;
and yet the sickening, unhappy feeling of that moment is
still as fresh in my recollection as if I had experienced it
but yesterday. Strange as it may seem, I gave up from
this time all hope of ever seeing you, and felt that even
were you dead — and I had some such presentiment-
there are much worse ways of losing a friend than by
death.

' After returning from Edinburgh I plied the mallet
for a season or two in the neighbourhood, working mostly
in churchyards — a second edition of Old Mortality—
and then did a very foolish thing. I published a volume
of poems. They were mostly juvenile ; and I was be-
guiled into the belief that they had some little merit by
the pleasing images and recollections of early life and lost
friends which they awakened in my own mind through
the influence of the associative faculty. But this sort of
merit lay all outside of them, if I may so speak, and ex-
isted in relation to the writer alone — just as some little
trinket may awaken in our mind the memory of a dear
friend, and be a mere toy of no value to everybody else.
My poems, like the Vicar of Wakefield's tracts on the
great monogamical question, are in the hands of only the
happy few ; they made me some friends, however, among
the class of men whose friendship one is disposed to boast
of ; and at least one of them, Stanzas on a Sun Dial,
promises to live. Chambers alludes to it in the notice
to which I owe the restoration of a long-lost friend. The
volume which, maugre its indifferent prose broken into
still more indifferent rhyme, and all its other imperfec-
tions, I yet venture to send you, is dedicated to our
common friend, Swanson, but being as tender of his
name as my own, the whole is anonymous. In the latter
part of the year in which it appeared, I sent a few letters

100 THE BANK A CCO UNTANT.

on a rather unpromising subject, the Herring Fishery,
to one of the Inverness newspapers. They were more
fortunate, however, than the poems, and attracted so
much notice that the proprietors of the paper published
them in a pamphlet, which has had an extensive circula-
tion. I send it you with the volume. Every mind,
large or small, is, you know, fitted for its predestined
work — some to make epic poems, and others to write
letters on the Herring Fishery.

' I continued to divide my time between the mallet
and the pen till about two years ago, when I was
nominated accountant to a branch of the Commer-
cial Bank, recently established in Cromarty. I owe
the appointment to the kindness of the banker, Mr
Robert Ross, whom I dare say you will remember as
an old neighbour, and who, when you left Cromarty, was
extensively engaged as a provision merchant and ship-
owner. I published my last, and I believe best, work,
Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, shortly
after. Some minds, like winter pears, ripen late ; and
some minds, like exotics in a northern climate, don't
ripen at all, and mine seems to belong to an intermediate
class. Sure I am it is still woefully green, somewhat
like our present late crops ; but it is now twenty per
cent, more mature than when I published my former
volume, and I flatter myself with the hope that, if winter
doesn't come on too rapidly, it may get better still.
Read, dear Finlay, my Scenes and Legends first ; you
may afterwards, if you feel inclined, peep into the other
two as curiosities, and for the sake of lang syne ; but I
wish to be introduced to you as I am at present, not as
I was ten years ago. The critics have been all exceed-
ingly good-natured, and I would fain send you some of
the reviews with which they have favoured me (these

LETTER TO FINLAY. 101

taken together would form as bulky a volume as the
one on which they are written), but I have only beside
me at present the opinion expressed by Leigh Hunt
(the friend and coadjutor of Byron, you know), and the
notice of a literary paper, The Spectator. These I make
up in the parcel.

1 Where, think you, am I now ? On the grassy
summit of McEarquhar's Bed. It is evening, and the
precipices throw their cold dark shadows athwart the
beach. But the red light of the sun is still resting on
the higher foliage of the hill above ; and the opposite
land, so blue and dim, stretches along the horizon, with
all its speck-like dwellings shimmering to the light like
pearls. Not a feature of the scene has changed since
we last gazed on it together. What seem the same
waves are still fretting against the same pebbles ; and
yonder spring, at which we have so often filled our
pitcher, comes gushing from the bank with the same
volume, and tosses up and down the same little jet of
sand that it did eighteen years ago. But where are all
our old companions, Einlay ? Lying widely scattered
in solitary graves ! David Ross lies in the sea. John
Man died in a foreign hospital, Lay field in Berlin,
McGlashan in England, Walter Williamson in North
America. And here am I, though still in the vigour of
early manhood, the oldest of all the group. Who could
have told these poor fellows, when they last met in the
cave yonder, that " Eternity should have so soon in-
quired of them what Time had been doing ? "

' ftegard, my dear Einlay, my Scenes and Legends as
a long letter from Cromarty. Do write me a little news-
paper. Tell me something of your mode of life. Give
me some idea of a Jamaica landscape. What are your
politics ? What your creed ? What have you been

102 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

doing, and thinking, and saying since I last saw you?
Tell me all. Your letter is the greatest luxury I have
enjoyed for I know not how long/

The Dr Waldie of whom we heard as a friend of
Miller's in Linlithgow, wrote to him after his return to
Cromarty, and received a reply. The science, or sham
science, of phrenology, was then making much noise in
the world, and Hugh was for some time disposed to trust
in it. The examination of his own head by a professional
phrenologist did not tend to confirm him in his pre-
possessions ; and as he had argued with Dr Waldie in
favour of phrenology, he hastened to lay before the doctor
those grounds on which he was now constrained to ques-
tion its pretensions.

' I think with much complacency of our little dis-
cussions on phrenology and geology and all the other
ologies, and of the relief which I used to derive from
them when well-nigh worn out with the unwonted em-
ployments of the desk. You will, I dare say, be disposed
to smile when I tell you that I am not half so staunch a
phrenologist now as I was six months ago, and be ready
to infer that my head did not prove quite so good a one
as I had flattered myself it should. Nay now, that is
not the case, the head did prove quite as good a one,
scarcely inferior in general size to that of Burns, and
well developed both in front and atop. I am more dis-
posed to quarrel with the science for what it confers
upon me than for what it withholds. For instance, few
men are so entirely devoid as I am of a musical ear ; it
was long ere I learned to distinguish the commonest
tunes, and though somewhat partial to a Scotch song, I
derive my pleasure chiefly from the words. Besides,
and the symptom is, I suspect, no very dubious one, of
all musical instruments I relish only the bag-pipe. Judge,

PHRENOLOGY. 103

then, of my surprise to learn from Mr Coxe (and I
warned him to be wary) that Nature intended me for a
musician. You are aware that 20 is the highest number
in the phrenological scale, — the proportional develop-
ment of music in my head is as 16. But if more than
justice be done me as a musician, in other respects I
have cause to complain. The organ of language is more
poorly developed than any other in the head. One, of
course, can't claim the faculty one is said to want with
as much boldness as one may disclaim the faculty
one is said to possess ; but you will forgive me if I pro-
duce something like testimony on the point. The effects
of an imperfect development of language, say the phren-
ologist, are a difficulty of communicating one's ideas to
another from a want of expression, which frequently
causes stammering and a repetition of the same words,
and a meagreness of style in writing. But what say
the critics in remarking on my little book ? " What
we chiefly found to admire," says one, " is the singular
felicity of the expression." " The wonder of the book,"
says another, " lies in the execution ; there is nothing of
clumsiness, and the style is characterized by a purity
and elegance, an ease and mastery of expression, which
remind one of Irving, or of Irving's master, Goldsmith."
The Presbyterian Review and Leigh Hunt testify to a
similar effect. " But has not vanity something to do in
calling in such testimony ? " Nothing more likely ; still,
however, the evidence is quite to the point ; and as I
have perhaps in some little degree influenced your
opinions regarding phrenology, I deem it proper thus to
state to you the facts which have since modified my own.
The rest of the forehead, regarded as an index of mind,
has its discrepancies. Causality is largely developed ;
wit, will you believe it ? still more largely ; whereas com-

104 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

parison and individuality are only moderate. Now, I
know very little of my own faculties if this order should
not be reversed. Individuality, or the ability of remem-
bering facts, if I be not much mistaken, takes the lead,
comparison comes next, causality follows, and wit at a
considerable distance brings up the rear. I find little
to remark regarding the rest of the head, — constructive-
ness, benevolence, conscientiousness, firmness, ideality,
and caution are all large, self-esteem is moderate, love
of approbation is amply but not inordinately developed,
and the lower propensities are barely full. You see it is
not altogether my interest to become a sceptic to the
reality of the science ; but my opinions regarding it
have, notwithstanding, undergone a considerable change.
Phrenology, however, whatever conclusion the world
may ultimately arrive at regarding it, will be found to
have had an important use. It has brought the meta-
physician from the closet into the world, and turned his
attention, hitherto too exclusively directed to the com-
moner operations of our nature, as these may be ob-
served in the species, to the wonderful varieties of in-
dividual character.

' I am glad you have read Edwards. He stands high
as a philosopher, even with those who differ with him.
Sir James Mackintosh, in his masterly dissertation on
Ethics, describes his reasoning powers as " perhaps un-
equalled, certainly unsurpassed, among men." Nothing
so common among thinkers of a low order as what are
termed common-sense objections to the Scripture doc-
trine of predestination ; from minds capacious enough
to receive the arguments of Edwards, we have none of
these. But the man who studies him would need be
honest. No sincere lover of the truth was ever the
worse for his admirable reasonings, and religious men

LITERARY EMPLOYMENT. 105

have been often the better for them ; but they may be
converted by the vicious into apologies for their in-
dulgence of every passion, and the perpetration of every
crime.

' I trust you will recommend me to Mr Turpie. Ask
him if he remembers how he used to mar my calculations
by getting astride of my shoulders, and my many threats
of beating him, which he learned to treat with so
thorough a disregard/

In the course of the summer of 1835 Miller was
applied to for contributions to the Tales of the Borders,
a periodical series began by Mr J. Mackay Wilson, and
highly and deservedly popular. Wilson had died, and
the publication of the Tales was continued for the benefit
of his widow. Hugh consented, and a sufficient number
of sketches and tales from his pen to fill a considerable
volume appeared in the series. His entire remunera-
tion, as he informs us in the Schools and Schoolmasters,
was five pounds.

106

CHAPTER V.

MARRIAGE CORRESPONDENCE DEATH OF DAUGHTER VIEWS

ON BANKING.

ON the 7th of January, 1837, Hugh Miller was mar-
ried to the lady whom he had so long and so ar-
dently loved. Mr Ross, his superior in the Bank and
attached personal friend, gave away the bride, and Mr
Stewart performed the ceremony. It was a day to make
Hugh's heart, calm as he was in all things, profoundly
calm as to his own achievements and successes, glow
with honourable pride and well-earned joy. He had
dared, while in his mason's apron, to aspire to the hand
of one who was by birth and breeding a lady. The
attractions of personal beauty, enhancing those of a
cultivated mind and graceful and animated manners,
had led him captive, and for the first and last time,
in all the intensity of meaning that can be thrown into
the word, he loved. This affection had been for him
an inspiration, turning the current of his existence into
a new channel and rippling its smooth surface with the
genial agitations of hope. He had waited five years, and

HIS MARRIAGE. 107

at times he had been anxious and despondent, for he
never wavered in his determination either to marry Miss
Eraser into the position of a lady or not to marry her
at all. He had now established himself in all points
essential to right success in life, and might contemplate
the future in a mood of quiet assurance. He had made
his mark in the literature of his country. He had passed
into the ranks of the brain-workers of the community,
depending no longer for livelihood on the toil of his
hands. Any bride might now be proud of him. What
was very pleasant for him at the time, and is pleasant
for us to contemplate from this distance, his ascent had
been viewed with unaffected satisfaction by his fellow-
townsmen and by all who knew him. He had approved
himself a thoroughly friendly man, and he had been
rewarded by the good-will and kind wishes of many
friends. On the occasion of his marriage his happi-
ness was heartily shared in by the people of Cromarty,
and the married pair drove off on their wedding trip
in the carriage of Mrs Major Mackenzie, which she
had offered, some time before, to her friend Miss
Eraser.

' Setting out,5 says Miller, ' immediately after the
ceremony, for the southern side of the Moray Frith,
we spent two happy days together in Elgin ; and,
under the guidance of one of the most respected
citizens of the place — my kind friend, Mr Isaac Eor-
syth — visited the more interesting objects connected
with the town or its neighbourhood. He introduced
us to the Elgin Cathedral ; — to the veritable John
Shanks, the eccentric keeper of the building, who
could never hear of the Wolf of Badenoch, who had
burnt it four hundred years before, without flying into

108 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

a rage, and becoming what the dead man would have
deemed libellous ;— to the font, too, under a dripping
vault of ribbed stone, in which an insane mother used to
sing to sleep the poor infant, who, afterwards becoming
Lieutenant-general Anderson, built for poor paupers like
his mother, and poor children such as he himself had
once been, the princely institution which bears his name.
And then, after passing from the stone font to the in-
stitution itself, with its happy children, and its very un-
happy old men and women, Mr Forsyth conveyed us to
the pastoral, semi-Highland valley of Plus car dine, with
its beautiful wood-embosomed priory, — one of perhaps
the finest and most symmetrical specimens of the un-
ornamented Gothic of the times of Alexander II. to be
seen anywhere in Scotland/

His wedding gift to his wife was a Bible, on which
he inscribed a few stanzas expressive of the pious joy,
deep but not exultant, and with its pensive vein, which
he felt on putting it into her hand.

' 0 much-beloved, our coming day

To us is all unknown ;
But sure we stand a broader mark

Than they who stand alone.
One knows it all : not His an eye

Like ours, obscured and dim ;
And knowing us, He gives this Book,

That we may know of Him.

' His words, my love, are gracious words,

And gracious thoughts express :
He cares e'en for each little bird

That wings the blue abyss.
Of coming wants and woes He thought,

Ere want or woe began ;
And took to Him a human heart,

That He might feel for man.

HIS HOUSEHOLD. 109

' Then oh, my first, my only love,

The kindliest, dearest, best !
On Him may all our hopes repose, —

On Him our wishes rest !
His be the future's doubtful day,

Let joy or grief befall ;
In life or death, in weal or woe,
Our God, our guide, our all.'

Under such auspices, Hugh Miller set up his house-
hold in Cromarty. His salary was but sixty pounds
a year, and the addition which he made to it by literary
contributions was as yet small. Mrs Miller continued
to take a few pupils. A parlour, bed-room, and kitchen
had been furnished, and one servant did the menial
work. An attic room was occupied with shelves, on
which his few books and fossils, the nucleus of a good
library and a valuable museum, were arranged. A
table and chair were placed in this room, and it became
Hugh's study. It was here that he wrote a number of
tales and sketches, published in the continuation of
Wilson's Tales of the Borders. They are, perhaps, of
all his compositions, the least marked by fascination
and originality. He had no enthusiasm, he tells us,
either for the memory of Wilson or for the publication
he had set on foot. The dreary, semi-intellectual rout-
ine of a bank clerkship, besides, damped his literary
ardour ; and when, at a late hour in the evening, he took
up for literary composition the pen which an hour
earlier he had used to chronicle his monotonous summa-
tion of figures, he seemed to have lost the power to con-
jure with it. Add that the remuneration was wretchedly
small, — five pounds for matter to fill a goodly volume,—
and enough will have been said to account for the de-
fectiveness of the pieces. His mind gradually regained
its elasticity, and he soon found more lucrative em-

110 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

ployment as a writer for Chambers' s Edinburgh Journal.
The month in which he was married had not yet
come to an end when he learned that John Swanson had
lost his mother. To comfort his friends in their distress
was always a sacred duty with Hugh, and he at once
wrote the following letter.

' Cromarty, January 31, 1837.

' You have lost a very dear relative, and I condole
with you. What a world of tender retrospection and
fond regret is associated with that one word, mother !
How many tender recollections that bear date from the
first dawn of memory to the moment of the last farewell !
How untiring her solicitude ! how innumerable her acts of
kindness ! How certain our assurance that these rose
out of a love which, perhaps the least selfish of all human
affections, sought only the welfare of its object ! And
then to think that she who loved us so much and did
so much for us has left us for ever ! You will now find
yourself much more alone in the world than you ever
did before. You have passed, as it were, into a new
state of life. For several years you have been the head
of your family ; but yet, so long as your mother was
with you, you must have felt that you were merely
residing in her house. It was the same person who sat
at the head of the table beside you, that had done so
when you were a little boy. You had your mother to
come between you and the world, as it were ; there were
some remains of the feeling of confidence in her protec-
tion with which, when you were a child, you have laid
hold of her gown. But now she is gone, and you will
deem yourself stripped of your shelter. There is no
longer a breakwater between you and the casualties of
life. Even the grave itself seems immensely nearer ;—

HIS HAPPINESS. 1 1 1

the generation you spring from has passed away, and
you stand in the front rank.

' There is little need, my dear John, that I should
address you in the language of consolation. You know
that she whom you loved "is not dead, but sleepeth."
Nor is yours one of those doubtful cases when he
who attempts to console is fain to rest in vague general-
ities ; — fain to take it for granted without question that
the deceased has been living well, and therefore has died
safe. I have known Mrs Swanson for the last twelve
years. I have seen her character with all its peculiarities
in a hundred different aspects. And at what conclusion
have I arrived regarding her? Simply this, — That I
never knew a woman more thoroughly conscientious. We
might deem her at times over wise and prudent, but who
ever saw her prudence chill her kindness, or her wisdom
set up in opposition to that of God, as displayed in the
gospel? Nay, but it is by much too little to say so.
Was she not a humble, devoted Christian ?

' I am happy, — happier than I was ever in my life be-
fore, and my companion is happy too. Love marriages
are after all the most prudent of any. Had I taken Lydia's
advice, I would have written you long ere now ; but be-
lieve me, and do not accuse me of selfishness when I say
so, I was by much too happy to write. Great enjoyment
naturally induces an inaptitude for thought and exertion.
I am convinced that, had not Adam fallen and become
miserable, the alphabet would have been yet to invent/

So that Miller held the doctrine which, according to
Goethe, Shakespeare proclaims ' with a thousand tongues '
in Antony and Cleopatra, 'that enjoyment and action
(Genuss und That) are irreconcilable/

On the 12th of September of the same year we find
him writing to Mr Robert Chambers, offering one or two

112 . THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

pieces for the Journal. ' I am leading,5 he says, ' a quiet
and very happy life in this remote corner, with perhaps
a little less time than I know what to do with, but by
no means overtoiled. A good wife is a mighty addition
to a man's happiness ; and mine, whom I have been court-
ing for about six years, and am still as much in love with
as ever, is one of the best. My mornings I devote to
composition ; my days and the early part of the evening
I spend in the*bank; at night I have again an hour or
two to myself ; my Saturday afternoons are given to plea-
sure,— some sea excursion, for I have got a little boat of
my own, or some jaunt of observation among the rocks
and woods ; and Sunday as a day of rest closes the round.

' Your collection of ballads I have found to be quite a
treasure, — excellent in itself as a most amusing volume,
and highly interesting, regarded as the people's literature
of the ages that have gone by. Barbour's Bruce and
Blind Harry's Wallace belong, also, to the same library,
and must in their day have exerted no unimportant in-
fluence on the character of our great-grandfathers. You
yourself now occupy the place in relation to the people
which the metrical historians and the authors of the
ballads did a few centuries ago/

To this there came a reply warmed by that true-
hearted kindness with which Miller's correspondent has
cheered so many of the youthful soldiers of literature.
' The account you give me of your domestic condition is
necessarily gratifying to one who feels as your friend and
is anxious to be regarded in the same light by yourself.
Your present circumstances are most creditable to you,
and show that your intellect has its true and proper
crown, — moral worth. May you ever be thus happy, as
you deserve to be ! I have sometimes thought of more
prominent and brilliant situations for you ; but after all,

CORRESPONDS WITH MR CHAMBERS. 113

if you can be content with the love of a virtuous woman
in a place where you have the chief requisites and a
little of the luxuries of life, and where, exempt from the
excitements and sordid bustle of a town, you can employ
those contemplative powers of mind which I believe to
be your highest gifts, you are probably better as you are.
Wordsworth has been much laughed at for keeping so con-
stantly in the country, but I believe he is right. There is
everything certainly in town that can make the mind
active, but it is not the place for doing anything great, and
it is not the place for a pure and morally satisfactory life.'

Hugh was gladly welcomed as a contributor to the
Journal.

As usual, he replies promptly to Mr Chambers's
' kind and truly friendly letter/ Having stated that Mr
Ross had been absent in London, he proceeds : — ' Since
he left me — now rather more than a month ago — I have
been a busier man than I was ever in all my life before ;
for though the business of the office here is perhaps not
very extensive for that of a branch bank, it is sufficiently
so for the employment of a single person, and I have
been left in charge of the whole without clerk or assist-
ant. How strangely flexible the human mind ! Three
years ago I was hewing tombstones in a country church-
yard, with perhaps a little architectural knowledge, and
rather more than the average skill of my brother me-
chanics, but totally unacquainted with business. And
now here I am among day-books and ledgers, deciding
upon who are and who are not safe to be trusted with
the bank's money, and doing business sometimes to the
amount of five hundred pounds per day.

' I have some legendary stories lying by me, which
I wrote about a twelvemonth ago, with the intention of
giving them to the public in a volume, but the Journal

VOL. II. 8

114 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

will spread them much more widely. There is a dash of
the supernatural in some of them, but I trust that will
break no squares with us unless they should lack in in-
terest ; — besides, I hope there is philosophy enough in
them to save the writer's credit with even the most scep-
tical of your readers. Superstition, however, is not at all
the same sort of thing in these northern districts of the
kingdom that it is in those of the south. It is no mere
carcase with just enough of muscle and sinew about it
for an eccentric wit to experiment upon now and then
by a sort of galvanism of the imagination, but an ani-
mated body, instinct with the true life. I am old enough
to have seen people who conversed with the fairies, and
who have murmured that the law against witchcraft
should have been suffered to fall into desuetude ; and as
for ghosts, why, I am not very sure but what I have seen
ghosts myself. Superstition here is still living supersti-
tion, and, as a direct consequence, there is more of living
interest in our stories of the supernatural and more of
human nature. When man has a place in them, it is not
generic, but specific, man — man with an individual cha-
racter. The man who figures in an English or South of
Scotland legend is quite as abstract a person as the man
in a fable of JEsop ; — with us he has as defined a person-
ality as the Rip Fan Winkle of Washington Irving him-
self. By the way, much of the interest of this admirable
story is derived from the well-defined individuality of
poor Rip.9

One or two other letters or notes passed between
him and Mr Chambers, but they are of little importance.
Hugh once has this remark on the nature of content-
ment : — ' The content which is merely an indolent ac-
quiescence in one's lot is so questionable a virtue, that it
seems better suited to the irrational animals than to man.

LETTER TO SIR T. D. LAUDER. 115

That content, on the other hand, which is an active en-
joyment of one's lot, cannot be recommended too
strongly. And it is this latter virtue, if virtue it can be
called, that my papers attempt to inculcate. True, it
leads to no Whittington and his cat sort of result, but it
does better, — it leads to happiness, a result decidedly
more final than a coach and six/ Mr Chambers once
suggests that he might advantageously ' shift the scene '
from his ' dearly beloved Cromarty/ and that the less he
introduces of superstition the better. ' I am at the same
time very sure/ he adds, ' that whatever be the nature of
your subject, you cannot fail to give it that certain yet
indescribable interest which so peculiarly characterizes all
that comes from your pen/

In a letter to Sir T. Dick Lauder, containing much
eulogistic criticism of a legendary work, just published
by Sir Thomas, Hugh refers 'incidentally to his maniac
friend of Conon-side, mentioning a particular or two
which he does not elsewhere touch upon. ' She was
a McKenzie, some of whose ancestors, as they had re-
sided for centuries within less than a mile of the chapel
of Killiechrist, might probably have fallen victims to
the fiery revenge of the MacDonald. I wish you- could
have heard some of her stories. She was, like Christy
Ross (one of the personages of Sir Thomas's book), a
wild maniac, and used to spend whole nights among
the ruins of the chapel, conversing, as she used to say,
with her father's spirit ; but her madness was of the
kind which, instead of obscuring, seems rather to
strengthen the purely intellectual powers (her malady
seemed but a wilder kind of genius), and so, mad as
she was, I used to deem her conversation equal to that
of most women in their senses. I scraped an acquaint-
ance with her when working as a mason apprentice,

1 1 6 THE BANK A CCO UNTANT.

about sixteen years ago, in the neighbourhood of Killie-
christ. She had taken it into her head that I was some
great person in disguise, and used to come to me every
evening after work was over, to consult me on such
questions as the origin of evil, and the eternal decrees,
and others of equal simplicity and clearness. I gave her,
of course, the benefit of all my metaphysics, whether
doubtfully bad, or bad beyond doubt, and got in return
sets of the finest old stories I have met with anywhere.
How her eyes used to brighten when she spoke of the
bloody and barbarous MacDonald, and the fearful raid
of Killiechrist ! She was a sister to that Mr Lachlan
McKenzie of Loch Carron — the modern prophet of the
Highlands, of whom you cannot fail to have heard ;
and in some respects she must have closely resembled
him. But she is gone, and many a fine old story has
died with her/

He gives Sir Thomas a bright little sketch of his
marriage trip, and subsequent happiness : — ' I had the
pleasure, last winter, when on a two days' visit to
Elgin, of seeing the Priory of Pluscardine, which you
have so beautifully described in your tale of the rival
lairds ; and a painting could not have recalled it more
vividly to my recollection. I saw much during my brief
visit, and enjoyed much, for the occasion was a joyous
one — my marriage — and I had Mr Isaac Eorsyth of
Elgin for my guide. I saw Lady-hill, with its rock-like
ruin, and its extensive view ; the hospital, with all its
wards ; the museum, with its spars and its birds ; the
splendid institution, so redolent of the showy benevolence
of the present age ; and the still more splendid cathedral,
so redolent of the showy piety of a former time ; but
above all, it was the hermit-like priory, in its sweet
half-Highland, half-Lowland glen, with its trees, and its

THE SCOTTISH CHRISTIAN HERALD. 117

ivy, and all its exquisite innumerable combinations of
the simple and the elegant, that impressed me most
strongly. I found, too, that my companion, whose taste
had been much more highly cultivated than mine, was
quite as much delighted with it. You, who are yourself
so happy in your domestic relations, will not be dis-
pleased to learn that, after having enjoyed for full five
years all that a lover enjoys in courtship, I now possess
all that renders a husband happy in a wife. I have now
been rather more than eight months married, and am as
much in love as ever/

Pleasant as were Miller's relations with the Messrs
Chambers, he experienced the want of a literary vehicle,
in which the deepest feelings of his nature, his religious
feelings, might have free expression. He accordingly
offered his services as occasional contributor to the Scot-
tish Christian Herald, a periodical conducted chiefly by
clergymen of the Church of Scotland. He forwarded for
publication a sketch and a poem. Both were declined.
' The narrative/ said the editor, ' though well written, is
scarcely of that description which accords with the design
of the Herald, our great anxiety having always been that
the interest of the periodical should rest, not on love
affairs or the operation of mere worldly motives, but on
the varied aspects in which Christianity presents itself
among men. From beginning to end, in short, we wish
not to be merely moral and entertaining, but decidedly
religious' He added that, if Miller pleased, he would
hand the piece to the Messrs Chambers for publication
in the Journal.

Hugh was considerably pained. ' My story/ he
wrote in reply, ' turns on a case of conversion. Who-
ever heard of such a thing in one of our lighter period-
icals ? Not in Blackwood, I am sure, with all his zeal

118 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

for the Church, nor in Tait, with all his love of the Dis-
senters. Chambers, too, though beyond comparison less
exceptionable than either of these, seems to have a pretty
shrewd guess that stories of this kind are not at all the
best suited to secure to him his hundred thousand read-
ers. I would fain see a few good periodicals set agoing
of a wider scope than either those of the world or of the
Church — works that would bear on a broad substratum
of religion the objects of what I may venture to term a
week-day interest. I can cite no book that better illus-
trates my beau ideal of such a work than the Bible itself.
No book more abounds in passages essentially popular
in their interest. And yet I question whether some of
these passages, were they now to appear for the first
time, would find admittance into many of our religious
periodicals. There are chapters in the Book of Proverbs
that would be deemed merely moral, and the stories of
Ruth and of Esther would be thought to rest too ex-
clusively on the operation of mere worldly motives. But
this is not at all what I meant to say. I merely intended
to remark that I would fain see periodicals established,
which would not only be suited to convince the man of
the world that it is more philosophic to believe than to
doubt the truth of Christianity, but which would also be
so written that the men of the world would read them.'
The cup of Miller's happiness was full when a little
daughter began to smile upon him from the arms of her
mother. All gentle helpless things he loved with a pas-
sion of tenderness, and his affection for his own little
prattler was inexpressible. He observed her movements
with ever fresh interest and charm. ' My little girl/ he
wrote once, ' has already learned to make more noise than
all the other inmates of the house put together, and is
at present deeply engaged in the study of light and

HIS INFANT DAUGHTER 119

colour. She is still in doubt, however, whether the
flame of the candle may not taste as well as it looks/
' She was/ says Mrs Miller, ' a delight and wonder to
Hugh above all wonders. Her little smiles and caresses
sent him always away to his daily toil with a lighter
heart. When he took small-pox, I, of course, slept on
a couch in his room, and was with him night and day.
But the great privation was, that he could not see her.
We ventured, when he was mending, to open the room
door, and let him look at her across the entrance lobby,
and allow her to stretch out her little arms to him. Her
own illness began soon after. It was a very tedious one,
connected with teething, and lasting nine or ten months.
All our mutual recreations, and many of my employ-
ments, including a school for fisher-lads, which I had
taught for some years, at eight every evening, had to be
given up. In the spring of '39 I had a close nursing
of several weeks. Then there was a marked amendment.
One lovely evening in April I went out, for the first time
that spring, to breathe the air of the hill. When I re-
turned, I found the child in her nurse's arms, at the
attic window, from which she used to greet her papa
when he came up street. She had been planting a little
garden in the window sill of polyanthus, primrose, and
other spring flowers. When she saw me, she pushed
them away, with the plaintive " awa, awa " she used to
utter, and laid her head on my breast. An internal fit
came on. The next time she looked up it was to push
my head backwards with her little hand, while a startled,
inquiring, almost terrible look, came into her lovely eyes.
All the time she lay dying, which was three days and
three nights, her father was prostrate in the dust before
God in an agony of tears. Whether he performed his
daily bank duties, or any part of them, I do not remem-

120 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

her. But such a personification of David the King, at a
like mournful time, it is impossible to imagine. All the
strong man was bowed down. He wept, he mourned,
he fasted, he prayed. He entreated God for her life.
Yet when she was taken away, a calm and implicit sub-
mission to the Divine will succeeded, although still his
eyes were fountains of tears. Never again in the course
of his life was he thus affected. He was an affectionate
father, and some of his children were at times near death,
but he never again lost thus the calmness and dignity,
the natural equipoise, as it were, of his manhood.' This
was the first and the last poignant domestic sorrow
Miller experienced. He cut the little headstone for his
darling, and never again put chisel to stone.

It contributed not a little to his happiness at this
period that his relations with Mr Ross, his superior in
the bank, were amicable and harmonious in the highest
degree. Several years after Hugh had terminated
his connection with the bank, he took occasion to bear
witness to the ' unvarying kindness ' he had experienced
from Mr Ross. During the five years when they worked
together he had not once heard from Mr R. l the slight-
est word of censure or of difference/ and this though his
place had been one of ' great trust and occasional difficulty/
Nay, his acquaintance with the character of Mr Ross
heightened his appreciation of that of mercantile men as
a class. ' During the not inconsiderable period/ he says in
the dedication of a pamphlet to Mr Ross, ' in which I en-
joyed your confidence, I was conversant with the inner
details of your conduct in the various branches of trade
which you have prosecuted so long and so successfully, and
the effect has been to heighten my estimate of the important
class — our men of merchandise and traffic — to which you
belong. Of the many thousand transactions in which I

OBSERVATIONS ON SOCIETY. 121

have seen you engaged, there was not one of a kind in
any degree suited to lessen my well-founded respect for
you, as a sagacious man of business, of genial feelings,
of nice integrity, and a discriminating intellect.'

Irksome as was the routine of bank business to one
who, in his hours of hardest toil, had always previously
had the breath of heaven, the cool breeze of the hill-side,
to fan his brow, Miller soon found that as a bank ac-
countant he occupied a coigne of vantage from which
to conduct his studies of human nature and of human
life. If anything was still wanted to secure him against
those showy plausibilities and political, social, senti-
mental extravagances, which are the besetting sins of
self-educated men, it was the opportunity afforded him
in a bank office of drawing the line between sound and
substance, between gold and glitter, between reality and
pretence. There is a passage in the Schools and School-
masters illustrative of this remark, which has always
seemed to me to contain a singular amount of practical
sense, and of accurate valuable information.

' However humbly honesty and good sense/ thus it
proceeds, ' may be rated in the great world generally,
they always, when united, bear premium in a judiciously
managed bank office. It was interesting enough, too, to
see quiet silent men, like " honest farmer Flamburgh,"
getting wealthy, mainly because, though void of display,
they were not wanting in integrity and judgment ; and
clever unscrupulous fellows like " Ephraim Jenkinson,"
who " spoke to good purpose," becoming poor, very much
because, with all their smartness, they lacked sense and
principle. It was worthy of being noted, too, that in
looking around from my peculiar point of view on the
agricultural classes, I found the farmers on really good
farms usually thriving, if not themselves in fault, however

122 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

high their rents ; and that, on the other hand, farmers on
sterile farms were not thriving, however moderate the
demands of the landlord. It was more melancholy, but
not less instructive, to learn from authorities whose evi-
dence could not be questioned, bills paid by small instal-
ments, or lying under protest, that the small-farm system,
so excellent in a past age, was getting rather unsuited for
the energetic competition of the present one ; and that
the small farmers — a comparatively comfortable class
some sixty or eighty years before, who used to give
dowries to their daughters, and leave well-stocked farms
to their sons — were falling into straitened circumstances,
and becoming, however respectable elsewhere, not very
good men in the bank. It was interesting, too, to mark
the character and capabilities of the various branches of
trade carried on in the place, — how the business of its
shopkeepers fell always into a very few hands, leaving to
the greater number, possessed, apparently, of the same
advantages as their thriving compeers, only a mere show
of custom ; how precarious in its nature the fishing trade
always is, especially the herring fishery, not more from
the uncertainty of the fishings themselves, than from the
fluctuations of the markets, and how in the pork trade of
the place a judicious use of the bank's money enabled
the curers to trade virtually on a doubled capital, and to
realize, with the deduction of the bank discounts, doubled
profits. In a few months my acquaintance with the cha-
racter and circumstances of the business men of the dis-
trict became tolerably extensive, and essentially correct ;
and on two several occasions, when my superior left me
for a time, to conduct the entire business of the agency,
I was fortunate enough not to discount for him a single
bad bill. The implicit confidence reposed in me by so
good and sagacious a man was certainly quite enough of

VIEWS ON BANKING. 123

itself to set me on my metal. There was, however, at
least one item in my calculations in which I almost always
found myself incorrect. I found I could predict every
bankruptcy in the district ; but I usually fell short from
ten to eighteen months of the period in which the event
actually took place. I could pretty nearly determine the
time when the difficulties and entanglements which I
saw ought to have produced their proper effects, and
landed in failure ; but I missed taking into account the
desperate efforts which men of energetic temperament
make in such circumstances, and which, to the signal
injury of their friends and the loss of their creditors,
succeed usually in staving off the catastrophe for a
season.'

When the financial policy of Sir Robert Peel threat-
ened the one pound note circulation of Scotland with
extinction, Miller took part strongly with those who
opposed the measure. His views found expression in
a series of newspaper articles on Sir Robert Peel's Scotch
currency scheme, which were republished in the form
of a pamphlet entitled Words of Warning to the People
of Scotland. Having carefully examined this little work,
I am bound to admit that the writer appears to -me to
have failed to appreciate with perfect accuracy and lucidity
the distinction between wealth and the machinery by
which wealth is exchanged. That he erred with some
of the shrewdest men the world has seen — with Benjamin
Franklin, for example, and Sir Walter Scott — is un-
questionable, but the error does not change its nature
on that account. A passage which Miller quotes from
Franklin, with the italics as Miller inserts them, will
show wherein, as I conceive, all orthodox economists of
the present day would declare both men in the wrong.
' The truth is,' wrote Franklin, ' that the balance of

124 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

our trade with Britain being against us, the gold
and silver are drawn out to pay that balance, and
the necessity of some medium of trade has induced the
making of paper money, which cannot thus be carried
away. Gold and silver are not the produce of North
America, which has no mines, and that which is brought
thither cannot be kept there in sufficient quantity for a
currency. Britain, an independent great state, when
its inhabitants grow too fond of the expensive luxuries
of foreign countries that draw away its money, can, and
frequently does, make laws to discourage or prohibit
such importations, and by that means can retain its
cash. But the Colonies are dependent governments ;
9,nd their people, having naturally great respect for the
sovereign country, and being thence immoderately fond
of its modes, manufactures, and superfluities, cannot be
restrained from purchasing them by any province law,
because such law, if made, would immediately be re-
pealed, as prejudicial to the trade and interests of
Britain. It seems hard, therefore, to draw all their real
money from them, and then refuse them the poor privilege
of using paper money instead of it! So far Franklin,
as approvingly quoted by Miller. That a country which
has no real money can make money out of paper, is an
idea so palpably erroneous that one has difficulty in
comprehending how it could have imposed upon Ben-
jamin Franklin.

It was not, however, necessary to penetrate far into
the mysterious problems of the currency in order to find
sound reasons for leaving the circulating system of Scot-
land alone. That system had worked well. Sir Walter
Scott and Hugh Miller knew the fruits of the tree, that
they were good, and they justly concluded that it was
a good tree. There was no cause for anxiety on the

VIEWS ON BANKING. 125

part of Sir Robert Peel that the Scotch might put too
great confidence in their one pound notes ; and the
opinion of eminent Scottish bankers, that if they were
deprived of their note circulation, they would be com-
pelled to close their branch banks, and thus curtail the
accommodation they had afforded to industry in the
provinces, was conclusive against tampering with a
system which might be injured but could hardly be im-
proved. ' We have the authority/ wrote Miller, ' of the
first men of the country for holding that our cash credits
could not outlive the projected change of Sir Robert for
a twelvemonth/ In a provincial bank he had ample op-
portunities of observing the operation of the Cash Credit
system of Scottish banking ; and as it would be difficult
to find a more lucid and appreciative account of that
far-famed system than Miller's, and the passage, apart
from biographical considerations, is interesting, I shall
here insert it.

SCOTCH CASH ACCOUNTS.

' In at least one department of banking the Scotch
have not yet been imitated in any other country. Hume
published the second part of his Essays, Moral, Political,
and Literary ', in 1752, just ninety -two years ago; and
in this work, in his essay on the balance of trade, we
find the first notice of a Cash Credit Account. He de-
scribes it as " one of the most ingenious ideas that has
been executed in commerce," and as first devised in
Edinburgh only a few years previous. And we see that
Sir Walter, in describing it a second time, seventy-four
years after, had still to characterize it as " peculiar to
Scotland." The description of Hume is singularly happy
and philosophic. " A man goes to the bank," he says,
" and finds surety to the amount, we shall suppose, of a
thousand pounds. This money, or any part of it, he

126 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

has the liberty of drawing out whenever he pleases, and
he pays only the ordinary interest for it while it is in
his hands. He may, when he pleases, repay any sum
so small as twenty pounds, and the interest is discon-
tinued from the very day of repayment. The advantages
resulting from this contrivance are manifold. As a man
may find surety nearly to the amount of his substance
and his bank credit is equal to ready money, a merchant
does hereby in a manner coin his house, his household
furniture, the goods in his warehouse, the foreign debts
due to him, his ships at sea, and can on occasion employ
them all in payments, as if they were the current money
of the country. If a man borrow a thousand pounds
from a private hand (besides that it is not always to be
found when required), he pays interest for it whether he
be using it or not, whereas his bank credit costs him
nothing except during the very moment in which it is
of service to him. And this circumstance is of equal
advantage as if he had borrowed money at much lower
interest." This we deem a very admirable appreciation,
so far as it goes, of the peculiar advantages of the Cash
Credit Account, a mode of transaction, be it remembered,
in which our Scottish banks have invested millions of
money, but we do not deem it a full appreciation. It is
doubtless a great matter to our traders of Scotland that
they should be able to coin, through its means, their
houses, their furniture, their ships, and the debts
owing to them. But it enables them to do much more :
it enables them to coin their characters should they be
good ones, even should houses, ships, and furniture be
wanting. True, the banks must be satisfied that there
is property in every individual case to coin, but the
holder of the account may have none, it is enough that
what he wants his sureties have. He may have character

SCOTCH CASH ACCOUNTS. 127

only, and this character his sureties enable him to trans-
mute into gold. The Cash Credit becomes thus a pre-
mium on integrity. Few men have risen in trade from
the lower walks whose character for honesty and per-
severing diligence some kind friend has not enabled them
thus to coin into money ; but in Scotland alone does
there exist an ingenious system, tested by the experience
of a century, which provides for accommodations of this
nature, as a part of the regular business of the country.
Benjamin Franklin devoted by will two thousand pounds
to be laid out in loan to young industrious workmen of
the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, whose moral cha-
racter was such that there could be found at least two
respectable citizens willing to become sureties in a bond
with the applicants for the repayment of the money so
lent, with interest. " I myself," he says in the same
document, in rendering a reason for the bequest, " was
assisted to set up my business in Philadelphia by kind
loans of money from two friends there, which was the
foundation of my fortune, and of all the utility in life that
may be ascribed to me ; and I wish to be useful even
after my death, if possible, in forming and advancing
other young men that may be serviceable to their ^coun-
try." Now, such was the device of a wise and benevo-
lent man. But our Scottish scheme, though a matter
of mere business, possesses a mighty advantage, both in
wisdom and benevolence, over the device of Franklin,
and this advantage we find admirably indicated by
Hume. A hundred pounds borrowed from the Franklin
Fund would bear interest on its full amount against the
borrower from the moment in which it was consigned
over to him till it was repaid. And if, during some pause
in the commercial world, he suffered it to lie unemployed
beside him, it would be a positive disadvantage to him

128 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

at such a time to possess it. It would be at least,
during the pause, not a means of bettering his circum-
stances, but a means of reducing them ; and this very
conviction would be a spur that, in times of doubtful
speculation, might provoke to the unwise employment of
it. But lent on the Cash Credit scheme, no portion of
it would bear interest save the portion in present use ;
and if not only the whole was relodged with the bank
during some languid interval in which the wheels of
trade moved heavily, but also an additional sum, that
additional sum would bear interest to the holder's ad-
vantage. A few figures, however, arranged in the form
of a Cash Credit Account, may give our readers a much
better idea of the nature of the device so admired by
the philosophic Hume for its ingenuity, than any mere
verbal description :—

Cash Credit for £100, A. B., Dr. to the

1844. Dr.
£

Nov. 1 To 10

„ 3 To 20

„ 5 To 10

„ 8 To 12

i, 10 By

,, 12 By —

„ 14 By —

The nature of the business represented by these simple
figures, — part of the page of a bank ledger, — is as fol-
lows : — A. B. holds in one of our Scotch banks a Cash
Credit Account to the amount of a hundred pounds, for
which C. D. and E. E. are sureties, and on which he
began to operate on the first day of November last, by

C. D. Surety.

kJV_U tldJ

E. F. Surety.

Cr.

Balance Dr.

£

£

Days

—

10

2

—

30

2

—

40

3

—

52

2

40

Dr. 12

2

20

Balance Cr. 8

2

20

Cr. 28

SCOTCH CASH ACCOUNTS. 129

drawing on it to the amount of ten pounds. These ten
pounds were straightway entered in both the " Dr."
column and the " Balance Dr." column, and bore interest
against him in the bank's behalf for two days, when he
again operated on his account by drawing twenty pounds
more, which raised the sum of his debit in the " Balance
Dr." column to thirty pounds ; and thus he continued
operating for nine days, when the balance at his debit
amounted to fifty -two pounds. And of these nine days
he had to pay interest during two of the number for
ten pounds, — during two more for thirty pounds, —
during three for forty pounds — and during two, yet
again, for fifty-two pounds. He then lodged in the
bank forty pounds, which were entered to his credit
in the " Cr." column, and the balance to his debit
in the " Balance Dr." column sank to twelve pounds,
which a second lodgement, in two days after, of twenty
pounds, extinguished altogether, leaving a balance of eight
pounds in his favour, and these eight immediately began
to bear interest in his behalf. Yet another lodgement
raised the eight to twenty-eight pounds ; and thus the
account runs on, on terms immensely more favourable
to A. B., the holder, than if he had been a borrower on
the Franklin Fund. But what the holder of the Cash
Credit gains in this way, the bank, it may be said, loses :
the scheme, though the best possible for the borrower,
must be an indifferent one for the lender. Far better
for the bank it may be said, had A. B. taken out the
hundred pounds at once, and continued to pay full in-
terest upon them. Nay, not so fast. What is best for
A. B. in this case is not by any means worst for the bank.
The account here, as shown by the dates, is actively
operated upon. Though the balance at the holder's debit
must at no time exceed a hundred pounds, many hun-

VOL. IT. 9

130 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

dreds may be drawn upon it in the course of the twelve-
month, and these all in the bank's notes ; and from the
notes kept in circulation through its means, the bank
derives a profit of three per cent. It draws interest for
its money from two distinct sources, — in the first place,
from A. B. for the cash which it advances to him, and,
in the next, from the notes in which its advances to A.
B. are made. In no other part of the world are the in-
terests of borrower and lender so admirably adjusted as
in Scotland under this scheme/

The essential advantage of this Cash Credit system
is that, in the department of trade, commerce, and agri-
cultural enterprise, it puts tools into the hands of those
best fitted to use them. Men of character and brains —
men who can discern openings for capital, and whom other
men can trust in the attempt to avail themselves of those
openings — attain that position in society which nature
has prepared them to occupy. The country is benefited
in many ways, — vitally, incalculably benefited. The right
men do the work, therefore it is effectually done ; the
right men earn the reward of competence and respect,
therefore there is comparatively little grumbling. It is
manifest that such a system promotes that genial circu-
lation of talent from the low places to the high places
of society which does so much to prevent social stagna-
tion, to give geniality and healthfulness to the relation
of class to class, to knit firmly yet freely together the
entire social framework. Hugh Miller knew Scotland,
as few men have ever known her, and it was his deep
conviction that, in certain important particulars, she had
the advantage of England. c Scotland/ he said, ' is still
truly a nation, — not a mere province : her institutions
are diverse from those of England, — her interests dis-
tinct,— her character different/ It is fair to add that

MONEY MAKING. • 131

the system of Cash Credits, with its distinctive feature
of enabling men to coin their character, experience, and
talents, is obviously better adapted to a small country,
where each man may know his neighbour, and where
the possibilities and limitations of enterprise admit of
easy calculation, than to a large one.

It may be an exaggeration to say that it is from a
Bank parlour you can best observe modern society, but
it is the exaggeration of a truth. No one can under-
stand modern society who does "not apprehend to what
an extent every form of romance or enthusiasm peculiar
to other ages is drying up in the intense and scorching
thirst for gold. Our notion of modern society will
always be more or less fanciful, more or less of a morn-
ing dream rather than an afternoon reality, if we do not
appreciate in its fulness of meaning the banker's defini-
tion of ' a good man.' The banker's definition ; and,
with but a half-hearted, ineffectual, semi-honest protest,
the definition of literary, artistic, and clerical society,
We have to remark, also, that though as a Bank
Accountant Hugh Miller had the best opportunities of
witnessing the infinite importance attached by society
to money, he was never conscious even of a temptation
to devote himself to the task of becoming rich, and he
never admitted into his breast that feeling of bitterness
and exasperation, on account of the unequal distribution
of the gifts of fortune, which, according to Mr Carlyle,
instilled its subtle, maddening poison into a heart so
genial, healthy, and generous as that of Robert Burns.

132

CHAPTER VI.

SCIENCE IN THE ASCENDANT.

DURING these last quiet years of his residence in Cro-
marty, when Miller was putting the last touches to
the curiosa felicitas of his style, and choosing irreversibly
the form in which his higher intellectual activity was to
be exerted, the question came often directly or indirectly
before him whether his supreme devotion should be to
literature or to science. Poetry had been as good as
abandoned. He did, indeed, as his wife and one or two
of his most confidential friends were aware, cherish the
resolution to return to verse, and had visions of bringing
even his science ultimately to minister to the Muse.
But for the present his critical faculty in the poetical
department had outstripped his productive faculty, and
he wrote almost exclusively in prose. We find, how-
ever, from his correspondence, that the legendary tales
and biographical sketches to which he had so long de-
voted attention, had ceased to interest him as formerly,
and that he contemplated a transference of his allegiance
from literature to science. Literature has been called
the science of man ; science may be called the literature
of nature. If the hackneyed quotation from Pope as to
man being mankind's noblest study has become hack-

LITERATURE AND SCIENCE. 133

neyed on account of its truth, and if Sir W. Hamilton's
favourite lines about man and mind being the only great
things on earth are not rhodomontade, and if Shakespeare
is higher than Newton among the moderns and Homer
higher than Aristotle or Plato among the ancients, it
would seem to follow that literary art, as displayed in
history, poetry, the drama, and prose fiction, takes le-
gitimate precedence of that inquiry into the sequences of
the physical world, which bears specifically the name of
science. But it was under the influence of no ab-
stract considerations that Miller determined in favour of
the latter. Literature, as it presented itself to his mind,
did not afford scope to his abilities. The traditions, the
legends, the history of his native place, — the characters
of the men he had known since boyhood, — did not
appear to furnish materials out of which important
literary works could be constructed. The vein was
worked out.

It is perhaps surprising that he did not, so far as can
be discovered, think of Scottish history as a field in
which to employ himself. He might, I think, have
written a history of Scotland which the world would
have placed among the acknowledged masterpieces in
this species of composition ; a history in which the dis-
tinctive character of the Scottish race, and the distinctive
contribution of Scotland to modern civilization, would
have been justly defined, and in which the patriotic en-
thusiasm of the writer would have swelled at times into
the grandeurs of epic poetry. The view taken of Scottish
history by Miller was essentially the same as that taken
by Burns, by Scott, by Wilson, by Carlyle, and he was
more profoundly in sympathy with the religious genius
of his nation than any one of these. His strength as a
stylist lay in description, and all his books, particularly

134 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

the Schools and Schoolmasters, and First Impressions of
England and its People, afford proof of his skill in con-
tinuous narrative.

In the history of literature, again, he was fitted to
excel. He could have given us, for example, a critico-
biographical work on Pope, Addison, and their con-
temporaries, which might have been unique and super-
lative of its kind. He knew those men as if he had
lived and talked with them. They were the models
whose chastened beauties appeared to him more worthy of
emulation than the passionate and metaphorical writing
in vogue in his own day.

No such employment of his powers, however, seems
to have occurred to him, and it is certain that neither of
the works indicated could have been produced at so
great a distance from the original sources of literary
information as Cromarty. Science invited him to an
unbeaten path — to an assured originality — and the scene
in which her wonders were to be sought had been his
playground since infancy. That devotion to science
was attaining in his mind the power of a ruling passion
is attested in that chapter of the Scenes and Legends in
which he presents himself to his readers as the ' Anti-
quary of the world.'

There is a curious interest in observing how much
this chapter contains of what, a few years subsequently,
made Miller famous as a geologist throughout the world.
As yet he is groping his way, feeling darkly round a
cave which he surmises to be coated with jewels and
precious metals, but able only to guess vaguely what may
be their nature and their value. He has already noticed
those ' flattened nodules of an elliptical or circular form,'
of which all the world was one day to hear. He has
laid some of them open and found them to contain, one

FIRST GEOLOGICAL IMPRESSIONS. 135

' the remains of a fish, scaled like the coal-fish or had-
dock/ another, ' the broken exuviae of a fish of a different
species, which, instead of being scaled like the other,
seems roughened in the same way as the dog-fish, or the
shark/ a third, ' a confused, bituminous -looking mass
that has much the appearance of a toad or frog/ a fourth,
' a number of shining plates like those of the tortoise/ a
fifth, ' a large oval plate, like an ancient buckler, which
seems to have formed part of the skull/ Such were
Hugh Miller's first impressions of the pterichthys and the
coccosteus.

The tenacity with which ideas and images, once con-
ceived, clung to his mind, is evinced by the fact that
some of the illustrations which we have in this chapter
recur on all subsequent occasions when he touches upon
the subjects here treated. He never tired of explaining
the advantage to the geologist of having strata uptilted
by volcanic agencies by reference to ' the ease which we
find in running the eye over books arranged on the
shelves of a library, contrasted with the trouble which
they give us in taking them up one after one when they
are packed in a deep chest/ The materials of that de-
scription of the structure and aspect of the great Cale-
donian valley, which he subsequently wrought out with
a breadth and a vividness belonging to the highest order
of literary art, may all be discovered in this chapter,
though they as yet lie about in comparative disorder, the
dissevered fragments which the master-hand is one day
to arrange into a symmetrical structure. The imaginative
faculty by which he threw a mantle of beauty over the
scenes that ocular observation, or the restoring processes
of scientific reflection, afforded him, is displayed in this
essay with a delicate splendour of effect which he hardly
surpassed in after-days. ' I remember one day early in

136 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

winter/ he writes, ' about six years ago, that a dense bank
of mist came rolling in between the Sutors like a huge
wave, and enveloped the entire frith, and the lower lands
by which it is skirted, in one extended mantle of moisture
and gloom. I ascended the hill ; on its sides the trees
were dank and dripping; and the cloud which, as I
advanced, seemed to open only a few yards before me,
came closing a few yards behind, but on the summit all
was clear, and so different was the state of the atmosphere
in this upper region from that which obtained in the fog-
below, that a keen frost was binding up the pools, and
glazing the sward. The billows of mist seemed break-
ing against the sides of the eminence ; the sun, as it
hung cold and distant in the south, was throwing its
beams athwart the surface of this upper ocean, — lighting
the slow roll of its waves as they rose and fell to the
breeze, and casting its tinge of red on the snowy sum-
mits of the lower hills, which presented, now as of old,
the appearance of a group of islands. Ben Wyvis and
its satellites rose abruptly to the west ; a broad strait
separated it from two lesser islands, which, like leviathans,
raising, and but barely raising, themselves above the sur-
face, heaved their flat backs a little over the line ; the
peaks of Ben Vaichard, diminished by distance, were
occupying the south ; and far to the north I could descry
some of the loftier hills of Sutherland, and the Ord-hill
of Caithness. I have since often thought of this singu-
lar scene in connection with some of the bolder theories
of the geologist. I have conceived of it as an apparition,
in these latter days, of the scenery of a darkly remote
period, — a period when these cold and barren summits
were covered with the luxuriant vegetation of a tropical
climate, with flowering shrubs, and palms, and huge
ferns ; and when every little bay on their shores was en-

SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 137

livened by fleets of nautili spreading their tiny sails to
the wind, and presenting their colours of pearl and azure
to the sun.'

Nor is it only of his capacity as an observer and
skill as an imaginative describer that this remarkable
chapter gives us an earnest. It reveals with impressive
distinctness the spirit in which he would cultivate
science. Not as a mere collector of facts, or word-
painter of geological landscape, would he work, but in
full view and constant recollection of every momentous
question relating to the nature and destiny of man on
which science might touch. Religion had become the
central and regulating force in his character ; religion
he believed to have been the source of all that was best
and most enduring in the character of his country ; re-
ligion, turning the regards of man to a Divine Father,
and opening the human eye on a pathway of eternal
advance, appeared to him inseparably involved with the
majesty and well-being of man as a species. Inspired
with a passionate devotion both to science and to religion,
he could not but seek to put the hand of the one into
the hand of the other, and to mediate between the two.
The following passage might serve as a preface to that
whole series of works in which he subsequently made it
his effort to interpret the language of the rocks in a manner
which would not contradict the statements of Holy
Writ. ' Let us quit/ he says, as he turns from those
scenes of primeval creation on which he has been expati-
ating, ' this wonderful city of the dead, with all its re-
clining obelisks, and all its sculptured tumuli, the me-
morials of a race that exist only in their tombs. And
yet, ere we go, it were well, perhaps, to indulge in some
of those serious thoughts which we so naturally associate
with the solitary burying-ground, and the mutilated re-

138 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

mains of the departed. Let us once more look round
us and say whether, of all men, the geologist does not
stand most in need of the Bible, however much he may
contemn it in the pride of speculation. We tread on
the remains of organized and sentient creatures which,
though more numerous at one period than the whole
family of man, have long since ceased to exist ; the indi-
viduals perished one after one, their remains served only
to elevate the floor on which their descendants pursued
the various instincts of their nature, and then sunk, like
the others, to form a still higher layer of soil ; and now
that the whole race has passed from the earth, and we
see the animals of a different tribe occupying their places,
what survives of them but a mass of inert and senseless
matter, never again to be animated by the mysterious
spirit of vitality, — that spirit which, dissipated in the air,
or diffused in the ocean, can, like the sweet sounds and
pleasant odours of the past, be neither gathered up nor
recalled ? And oh, how dark the analogy which would
lead us to anticipate a similar fate for ourselves ! As
individuals we are but of yesterday ; to-morrow we shall
be in our graves, and the tread of the coming generation
shall be over our heads. Nay, have we not seen a ter-
rible disease sweep away in a few years more than
eighty millions of the race to which we belong ? and can
we think of this and say that a time may not come
when, like the fossils of these beds, our whole species
shall be mingled with the soil; and when, though the
sun may look down in his strength on our pleasant
dwellings and our green fields, there shall be silence in
all our borders, and desolation in all our gates, and we
shall have no thought of that past which it is now our
delight to recall, and no portion in that future which it
is now our very nature to anticipate ? Surely it is well

SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 139

to believe that a widely different destiny awaits us; that
the God who endowed us with those wonderful powers,
which enable us to live in every departed era, every
coming period, has given us to possess these powers for
ever ; that not only does He number the hairs of our
heads, but that His cares are extended to even our very
remains ; that our very bones, instead of being left, like
the exuviae around us, to form the rocks and clays of a
future world, shall, like those in the valley of vision, be
again clothed with muscle and sinew; and that our bodies,
animated by the warmth and vigour of life, shall again
connect our souls to the matter existing around us, and
be obedient to every impulse of the will. It is surely
no time, when we walk amid the dark cemeteries of a de-
parted world, and see the cold blank shadows of the
tombs falling drearily athwart the way, — it is surely no
time to extinguish the light given us to shine so fully
and so cheerfully on our own proper path, merely because
its beams do not enlighten the recesses that yawn around
us. And oh, what more unworthy of reasonable man
than to reject so consoling a revelation on no juster quar-
rel than that, when it unveils to us much of what could
not otherwise be known, and without the knowledge of
which we could not be other than unhappy, it leaves to
the invigorating exercise of our own powers whatever
in the wide circle of creation lies fully within their
grasp ! '

His literary essays and his legendary tales had drawn
upon Miller the attention of men eminent in the world
of literature ; this chapter of his book constituted his in-
troduction to circles interested in the pursuit of science.
' I may mention/ he says in a letter to Mr Robert
Chambers, ' that a geological chapter in my little volume
of Scenes and Legends has attracted more notice among

140 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

the learned, than all the other chapters put together.

Mrs had a hit at me in Tait for introducing such

a subject ; I could now tell her, however, of Fellows of
the Geological Society and Professors of Colleges whom
my chapter has brought more than a day's journey out
of their route to explore the rocks of Cromarty/ The
Old Red Sandstone was at this time a comparatively un-
known region to geologists, and the palaeontological dis-
coveries to which Miller was feeling his way excited
the keenest interest. Dr John Malcolmson, who had re-
cently arrived in this country from India, visited Cro-
marty, discussed geological problems with Hugh, and
examined with him the geological sections of the neigh-
bourhood. The Cromarty geologist began to correspond
with Sir Roderick, then Mr Murchison, and with M.
Agassiz. Fleming was at this time professor of natural
science in King's College and University, Aberdeen, and
he hastened to Cromarty to look with the only eyes he
ever trusted in matters of observation, his own, into the
wonders of Eathie burn and Marcus cave. It was doubt-
less of great service to Miller at this stage in his geolo-
gical studies to be brought into converse with the au-
thor of the Philosophy of Zoology, and to have his
theories, just beginning to take shape, overhauled by one
of the acutest, most searching, most philosophically
sceptical intellects of the century. His controversy with
Dr Fleming on the old Scotch coast-line, the existence of
which the latter denied to the last, probably commenced
at this period, and twenty years afterwards, when the
eminence and authority of both were acknowledged in
the Geological Society of Edinburgh, the debate re-
mained unfinished. But in none of its stages did it do
anything else than add zest to the cordiality of their
friendship. Miller knew how to value the trenchant

GEOLOGY. 141

logic, sharp analysis, and severe inductive cross-examin-
ation of Fleming ; and to find a worthy antagonist, whom
he might bring under the raking fire of his argument-
ative batteries, was one of the choicest pleasures Fleming
could find in life. He was now in the prime of his
faculties; and his brilliant, incisive talk, touching, often
with caustic humour, on a thousand men and things, is
remembered by Mrs Miller as very pleasantly enlivening
their quiet life in Cromarty.

The following passage from a letter of this period to
Dr Malcolmson, with its critical notes upon the specula-
tions of Agassiz and Lyell, has some interest as showing
Miller's geological whereabouts at the time.

' Mrs Miller has read to me in very respectable Eng-
lish Agassiz' paper on the Moraines of Jura and the
Alps. I have been much interested in it. The pheno-
mena it describes are as new to me as the theory founded
upon them, and both serve to fill the imagination. But
where am I to seek a cause for the intense cold which
would cover Europe with one immense sheet of ice from
the pole to the shores of the Mediterranean ? and why
infer that the earth in cooling down, instead of gradu-
ally sinking in temperature according to the ordinary
and natural process, should sink by sudden fits and
starts, and reach at each leap a much lower degree than
it was subsequently able to maintain ? The theory, I
question not, accounts well for the appearances which
suggested it ; but then, like the tortoise, on whose
shoulders your old friends the Brahmins support the globe,
it seems sadly to lack footing for itself. I have got a
copy of Lyell's late work, the elementary one, and find
that he, too, in accounting for erratics, introduces the
agency of ice. His theory, if I may venture to decide,
seems much less open to objection than that of Agassiz,

142 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

— it is a good feasible theory, with a host of every- day
experiences to support it. I cannot square it, however,
with some of the facts. Why have all the travellers of
this part of the country come from the west, and none
from the opposite quarter ? We have masses in abund-
ance of blue schistose gneiss and micaceous schist from
the hills of Ross-shire, and blocks of basalt even from the
Hebrides, but we have no granites from Aberdeen, no
granitic gneisses or grauwackes from Banff or Moray,
no yellow sandstone from Elgin or Broughhead. The
hills of these countries are nearly as ancient as those of
Ross-shire or the Hebrides, and we have no winds so
violent as those which blow from the east ; but these
winds have failed to convey to us a single block from
those hills. There is another rather puzzling fact. The
conglomeration which in this part of the country forms
the inferior bed of the Old Red Sandstone, contains in
some localities large water-rolled blocks, scarcely inferior
in size to our more modern erratics. Now, there was
surely no ice in the days of the Old Red Sandstone.
But truce with the subject. Lyell's theory seems excel-
lent so far as it goes, though it may doubtless be pushed
too far. Ice was most probably but one of several
agents, — the most ancient of which, such as floods and
currents, must have existed in the earliest eras. As for
the appearances described by Agassiz, do you not think
the glaciers which produced them might have existed
in those comparatively modern times when the greater
part of Europe was covered by forests, and the climate,
even to the coasts of the Mediterranean, was chill and
severe ? Hume, in his Essay on the populousness of
ancient states, tells us that the Tiber was frequently
covered with ice even so late as the days of Juvenal/
From several letters of a geological character, which,

LETTER TO AGASSIZ. 143

as containing information subsequently published by
Miller in a more mature shape, it is unnecessary to print
here, the following is selected as a good illustrative
sample :

' TO M. AGASSIZ.

'Cromarty, May 31, 1838.

1 HONOURED SIR,

' I have just learned from my friend, Dr Mal-
colmson, that you have expressed a wish to see one of
the fossils of my little collection. I herewith send it you,
and a few others, which you may perhaps take some in-
terest in examining.

' I fain wish I could describe well enough to give
you correct ideas of the locality in which they occur.
Imagine a lofty promontory somewhat resembling a
huge spear thrust horizontally into the sea, an immense
mass of granitic gneiss forming the head, and a long
rectilinear line of Old Re<J Sandstone the shaft. On the
south side are the waters of the Moray Frith, on the
north those of the Frith of Cromarty, — the Portus Salutis
of the ancients. The clay-stone beds, which contain the
fossils, occupy an upper place in the sandstone shaft,
covering it saddle- wise from frith to frith. A bed of
yellowish stone about sixty feet in thickness lies over
them, except where they are laid bare by the sea, or
cut into by two deep ravines ; a bed of redder stone of
un ascertain able depth, but which may be measured
downwards for considerably more than one hundred
yards, lies beneath. The beds themselves average from
ten to thirty feet in thickness. They abound everywhere
in obscure vegetable impressions and fossil fish ; but in
some little spots these last are much better preserved
than in the general mass. All my more delicately-
marked fossils have been furnished by one little piece

144 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

of beach, hardly more than forty square yards in
extent.

' Of all the fossils of these beds, the one with the
tuberculated surface seems least akin to anything that
exists at present. I have split up many hundred
nodules containing remains of this animal, for in the
times of the Old Red Sandstone it must have existed by
myriads in this part of Scotland. All the larger ones I
have found broken and imperfect — the nodules in gen-
eral are too small to contain more than detached parts of
these, and, besides, the hard plates of the animal, separ-
ated apparently by open sutures, seem to have offered a
less equal degree of resistance to the accumulating
weight than those continuous coats of scales, which
covered the various fish of the period, and which seem
in consequence to have been thrown less out of their
original forms. It is only the smaller varieties that I
find perfect enough to furnish me with anything like an
adequate idea of the proper shape of the animal. In
these, however, though the general outline be better
preserved, the plates are invariably obscure. In the
larger specimens, on the contrary, they are as well de-
fined as the bits of a dissected map, but" I lack skill to
piece them together. The form of the body seems to
have somewhat resembled that of a tortoise, the plates,
like those of that animal, received their accessions of
growth at the edges which form the fins of the fish, the
body of the creature, as shown by the plates, must have
preserved considerable thickness at the sides. I have
found specimens from which I infer that a transverse
section must have formed an oval. At the shoulders of
the animal there were two arm-like fins or wings. All
my better specimens agree in the form and position of
these. Each terminated in a sharp point, and there

LETTER TO AGASSIZ. 145

was a slight curve in each, like that of an elbow a very
little bent.

' I can say almost nothing regarding the head of the
animal. Almost all the specimens I have yet found
show it variously. In some the fossil has a decapitated
appearance, in others there are faint markings which
merely show that a part of the creature extended above
the arm-like fins, while yet a third kind shows a toler-
ably well-defined head. But even in specimens such as
the last all is obscure. Among the detached plates,
however, I occasionally find one of a peculiar form which
seems to have covered the upper extremity of the animal.
In shape it somewhat resembles the snout of a ray. It
is arched transversely, and a longitudinal depression
runs through the centre, beginning a very little from the
point. All my specimens of this plate are rather too
weighty to send you, but Dr Malcolmson writes me that
one which I picked up for him you have brought with

you to Neufchatel In specimens 5, 6, and

7 you will find the remains of a small fish a contempo-
rary of the tuber culated one. Unlike the fish with a
single large spine in each fin which I find in the same
beds, it was furnished with teeth. The fins, too, were
not scaled like those of the other, and instead of being
fastened to single spines, somewhat like the sails of a
boat to the yards, the membrane of each fin seems to
have been supported in the commoner way by a num-
ber of rays. I find a striking difference, too, in the
appearance of the head ; — the bones are strongly mark-
ed, and the external surface much roughened; whereas
the head of the fish with the spines has always a
smooth, flat appearance, except at the neck, where
what seems to have been the gills, or perhaps rather
a sort of fringe which overlapped these, may be

VOL. II, 10

146 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

traced. In both fishes the scales were ridged longi-
tudinally, but in the toothed one these ridges are
so much more strongly marked that, when examined
through a glass, each scale resembles a little bunch of
thorns. Pardon me, honoured sir, that I am thus minute
in describing these differences to you, who observe better
than any one else, and can make a better use of what
you observe. I have not succeeded in convincing some
of our northern geologists that we have two varieties
of small scaled fish in our beds, and I am now appealing
to you as our common judge, and thus showing the
grounds of my appeal. Besides, as I cannot send you
my specimens by hundreds, I deem it best, though it
may seem presumptuous in one so unskilled, to send
you in this way the result of my examinations of the
whole. One single specimen sometimes furnishes a
characteristic trait regarding which perhaps fifty illus-
trative of the same fossil may be silent. Among all my
specimens of the fish with the spines, only one shows
me that the animal was marked by a lateral line.

' The consistency of style, if I may so express myself,
which obtains among the fossil fish of these beds, is
highly interesting. In no single fish do I find two
styles of ornament, — there is unity of character in every
scale, plate, and fin. In the large glossy-scaled variety,
for instance (Dipterus), the whole external covering of
the animal was marked by minute puncturings, so that
every scale and plate — every ray of the tail and fins,—
presents, when viewed through the glass, a sieve-like ap-
pearance. Another variety of large-scaled fish, ap-
parently of an entirely different family, has its distinct
and consistent style of ornament also. Each scale furn-
ishes a broad ground (faintly lined by concentric mark-
ings crossed by radiating ones) on which there are raised

LETTER TO AGASSI Z. 147

a series of longitudinal ridges, — waved just enough to
give them a sort of pendulous appearance ; and, as if to
conform with this character, the rays of the fins and tail
have a pendulous appearance too. In the fish with the
spines, the silvery smoothness of the fins must have har-
monized well with the smoothness of the head, and the
lightly -marked ridges of the scales with the light fringe
of the neck and the elegant lines of scales which covered
the tail. And the small-scaled toothed fish had its har-
mony of ornament with the rest. Without bearing per-
haps a single thorn, it must have everywhere presented
a thorny appearance. Each scale seems a bunch of
minute prickles; the head and neck present the same
rough appearance, and the rays of the fins are all
jagged at one edge. I find that, unlike at least two va-
rieties of fish furnished by the beds, — the fish with the
larger punctured scales and the fish with the large
ridged ones,— the caudal fin spread equally on both
sides the tail. I am afraid, however, that when thus
communicating the results of my petty observations, I
am but gaining for myself the reputation of being a
tedious fellow.

c Do I ask too much, honoured sir, when I request
a very few lines from you to say whether the formation
in which these fossils occur be a fresh- water one or other-
wise, and whether the small-scaled fish with the teeth
be of a kind already known to geologists, or a new one ?
I am much alone in this remote corner, a kind of Robin-
son Crusoe in geology, and somewhat in danger of the
savages, who cannot be made to understand why, ac-
cording to Job, a man should be making leagues with
the stones of the field ! But I am sanguine enough to
hope that the good-nature of which my friend Dr
Malcolmson speaks so warmly may lead its owner to

148 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

devote a few spare minutes to render these leagues useful
to me. I am, I trust, sufficiently acquainted with geology
rightly to value the decisions of its highest authority.'

It is an illustration of the carefulness of Miller's
habits of study, that he not only rewrote, with minute
verbal emendations, one passage in the preceding letter,
but copied the second as well as the first version into
the book in which he preserved his letters.

The fossils intended for the inspection of M. Agassiz
were forwarded, in the first instance, to Sir Roderick
Murchison. Miller wrote at the same time to the latter,
inviting him to read the unsealed letter to Agassiz, re-
peating his question as to whether the Old Red Sand-
stone was a marine or a fresh-water formation, and stating
his intention to draw up an account of the geology of
the Cromarty district ' for a widely-circulated periodical.'
He received the following reply : —

' London, June 23, 1838.

' Though exceedingly occupied in the effort to bring
out my ponderous volumes with their copious illustra-
tions, I lost little time in opening your box and ex-
amining its treasures as they passed to M. Agassiz. I
invited my friend, Sir Philip de Grey Egerton, who franks
this letter, and is stronger in fossil-fishery than most of
us, to be present at the examination. The result of our
view is, that we have no hesitation in pronouncing your
small-scaled fish to belong to the genus Cheirolepis
Agass.y the most striking character of which is the dorsal
fin being placed far backwards, and immediately above
or opposite to the posterior portion of the anal fin. " The
fins of this genus," says M. Agassiz, " have no spinose
ray on their anterior edge. Small slender ' rayons/ very

LETTER FROM SIR RODERICK MURCHISON. 149

much pressed against each other, and imbricated like
the scales alongside of the great anterior ' rayons ' of
these fins, replace in this case the spinose rays which
support the fins of the two genera, Acanthodus and
Cheir acanthus" We believe that your specimens belong
to the C. Traillii Agass., found in Pomona, Orkney, by
Dr Traill. There may be two species in those you have
sent, but it seems doubtful.

' As to the fossils 1, 2, 3, we know nothing of them
except that they remind me of the occipital fragments of
some of the Caithness fishes. I do not conceive they
can be referable to any reptile, for if not fishes, they more
clearly approach to crustaceans than to any other class.
I conceive, however, that Agassiz will pronounce them
to be fishes, which, together with the curious genus
Cephalaspis of the Old Red Sandstone (described at
length from the Scotch and English specimens), form
the connecting links between crustaceans and fishes.
Your specimens remind me in several respects of the
Cephalaspis.

1 Although my work was intended to be exclusively
devoted to Silurian (or transition) rocks of England and
Wales, I have made a few allusions to other tracts, and
among these to the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland, in
doing which I have, in the descriptions of the organic
remains, briefly alluded to your labours. Now that I
know the fidelity and closeness of your research, I shall
endeavour to introduce another allusion in the Appen-
dix, which is all that remains unprinted.

' I am delighted with your clear and terse style of
description, and beg to assure you that if you could
send us in the course of the summer any general and de-
tailed account of both the Sutors and all their contents,
I shall have the utmost pleasure in communicating it to

150 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

the Geological Society, to be read at the November
meeting.

'You write and observe too well to waste your
strength in newspaper publications, and a good digest
of what you have done ought to be preserved in a per-
manent work of reference. I can give you no positive
answer as to whether the Old Red Sandstone of Scot-
land was formed in a lake or in the sea. I have, how-
ever, strong reasons for believing that it is a marine
deposit, for in England we find marine shells in it to a con-
siderable height above the uppermost beds of underlying
Silurian rocks. Besides, it is so analogous in structure
and component parts to the New Red Sandstone, which
also contains concretionary limestone, spotted marls,
fishes, and marine shells, that I cannot but believe that
the one as well as the other of these great Red systems
were formed beneath the sea, though doubtless, as in the
coal-measure periods, there may have been local excep-
tions and partial lacustrine deposits.

' The oldest lake deposit as yet known (i.e. purely
lacustrine) is in the upper zone of coal, and is described
by myself. Burdie House is another example, but the
deposit seems to be of a mixed character.

' I much long to revisit the shores of Caithness and
Cromarty with my increased knowledge, and with the
conviction that I should learn so much from you, but I
fear it is hopeless/

One of Miller's correspondents at this time was Mr
Patrick Duff, of Elgin, an ardent geologist. In a letter
addressed to Mr Duff in December, 1838, we meet with
the following passage, descriptive of an attack of illness,
under which Hugh had recently suffered : — ' During the
whole of November I was toiled almost to death at the

ATTACK OF ILLNESS. 151

bank with our yearly balance, and I have been confined
by small-pox ever since, with a face doubtless a good
deal less handsome than usual, and surrounded by faces
uglier than even my own. There were faces on the bed-cur-
tains, and faces on the walls, and faces in abundance on
my wife's tartan gown ; and when I shut my eyes to
exclude them, I just saw them all the more clearly. I
strove hard to call up more agreeable pictures. The
tree-ferns and saurians of the lias, or the half-tailed
fish and coccostei of the Old Red Sandstone, it would
be worth while getting into a fever to see ; but I called
upon them as vainly as Hotspur did upon the spirits of
the " vasty deep." I saw faces, faces, faces, and saw
nothing else. The phenomena of mind as exhibited in
disease have, I suspect, been studied a great deal too
little. Can you tell me how a person affected by fever
can be both a man and a magic lantern at the same time,
and marvel exceedingly in his capacity of spectator at
what he exhibits to himself in his character of showman ?
I am as much a geologist as ever, — a huge breaker of
stones ; and I expect, when I have broken up a few
hundred cart-loads more, to know something of the
matter. I am fighting my way, all alone, by main
strength, — the very antitype of Thor and his hammer,
and find that I have not been fourteen years a mason

for nothing I must set myself in right earnest,

sometime next summer, to draw up an account of the
geology of this part of the country. I have picked up
in a desultory way a good many facts, some of them of
value enough to be preserved; and I am of opinion,
besides, that the geology of Cromarty, well understood,
may serve, in part at least, as a kind of key to that of
Moray and of the various localities in which there occur
fish-beds of the same kind with ours. More splendid

152 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

sections are to be found nowhere. The burn of Eathie
is a study in itself/

In a critique on the poems of a local poet, named
MacColl, published by Miller about this time in the
Inverness Courier, there occurs a comparative estimate
of Celt and Saxon, as represented by the Highlanders
and Lowlanders of Scotland. Miller would probably
have agreed with Professor Huxley that physiologically
there is no important difference between the races ; but
it is evident that he considered them as widely differing
in those psychological characters which, though taken
no account of by the physiologist, are of immense im-
portance to the historian. Here is the passage :—
'The Celt is essentially a different person from the
Saxon in the very constitution of his mind. Both are
shrewd, but each in his own way. The Highlander is
characterized by the shrewdness of observation, the Low-
lander by that of inference ; the Highlander is delighted
by the external beauty of things, the Lowlander in
diving into their secret causes ; the Highlander feels
keenly, and gives free vent to his feelings, the Lowlander,
on the contrary, cautiously conceals every emotion,
unless it be a very potent one indeed ; the Highlander is
a descriptive poet, the Lowlander a metaphysician. Our
Adam Smiths and David Humes are types of the one
class, — the Ossian of MacPherson is no unmeet repre-
sentative of the other. The Gaelic as a language is
singularly rich in the descriptive, and comparatively
barren in the abstract. Phrenologists remark nearly the
same thing of the Celtic head ; the reflective organs are
always less prominently developed than the knowing
ones. It may be adduced, too, as a corroborative fact,
that the native literature of the Highlands abounds in
poems which contain nothing but pure description from

CELT AND SAXON. 153

beginning to end. One of MacPherson's acknowledged
pieces, entitled the Cave, which may be found in a well-
known critique on Laing's Ossian, by Sir Walter Scott
(see Edin. Review, No. 13), and MacColl's address to
Loch Lomond, are of this sort of picture-gallery class.
We have nothing quite like them in the poetry of the
Lowlands, where natural imagery is made to hold a sub-
ordinate place to sentiment and narrative, and where
description at its best serves but to mark the scene on
which some reflection is grounded or in which some
action is performed. Perhaps of all our Saxon poets,
Professor Wilson approaches nearest in this respect to a
Celtic one.'

154:

CHAPTER VII.

THE CROMARTY FAST-DAY FRIENDSHIP WITH REV. MR

STEWART.

WHILE science was more and more absorbing the
attention of Miller, a backward glance being now
and then cast upon literature, he did not cease to take
the same lively interest in the affairs of Cromarty
which we witnessed in connection with the ' Cromarty
Chapel Case.' In the summer of 1838 rejoicings
took place throughout the country, on account of the
recent accession of Queen Victoria to the throne. The
day appointed for celebrating the coronation coincided
with that on which the Cromarty Kirk Session had
decided to hold the fast which, in Presbyterian Scot-
land, usually precedes the celebration of the Lord's
Supper. The Church authorities declined to alter their
day, and another was appointed for the loyal demonstra-
tion. An outcry was instantly raised throughout the
North of Scotland on the subject, and the people of Cro-
marty were proclaimed a parcel of old-fashioned bigots,
the slaves of their ministers. A minute clique in Cromarty
took the view of the vociferous remonstrants, and, under
the animating leadership of a gallant major, a small pro-
prietor of the neighbourhood, got up a loyal display

THE CROMARTT FAST DAY. 155

of their own at the time when the majority of the inhabit-
ants were in church. Miller found himself and his towns-
men denounced in prose and verse far and wide. He
took pen in hand, and addressed a letter in their and his
own defence to the Inverness Courier. Adopting a tone
of good-humoured banter, admirably fitted to the occa-
sion, he brought out the extreme absurdity of the trans-
ports of indignation into which the newspaper poets
and tap-room loyalists had lashed themselves. The
major he struck off in a phrase felicitously descriptive of
a large class of men : — ' No one ever spoke well of his
judgment or thought ill of his heart.' Space must be
found for a few sentences from the letter.

' The day of the fast arrived -, and not on the Sabbath
itself do our streets present a more solitary appearance,
or are our churches better filled. There was no music out-
side to disturb the congregations, for the respectable and
talented musicians, who had been so vehemently urged
to lend their aid in desecrating the day, had gone to
attend service in a neighbouring parish, and the old
veteran, who had been so earnestly solicited to parade
his drum through^the streets, had indignantly refused.
There were sounds of distant firing heard by the people
who sat nearest the windows, — the others heard only the
preachers, as they poured forth their fervent and impress-
ive prayers that their Sovereign might reign long and
prosperously over willing and affectionate hearts, — that
she might enjoy all the good of this world and all the
happiness of the next. After Divine Service was over,
the ghost of a forlorn and miserable pageant glided
through our streets. Every door was shut, as if an
enemy had landed ; a glimpse might now and then
be caught of some anxious matron drawing her too
curious urchin from a window ; a few boys had broken

156 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

loose, but they were wonderfully few indeed. The
major walked in front, supported by tAvo placard bearers.
He was neatly dressed in what he had been pleased to
term " the garb of his Queen," with, of course, the sub-
stitution of inexpressibles for the petticoat, and really,
for a gentleman of his standing, looked exceedingly well.
The suit he wore was certainly a very pretty suit ; all
agree, however, that he might have chosen a more appro-
priate cap, and that the addition of a few bells would
have been a mighty improvement. About ten o'clock
there was a bonfire lighted, at which some of the town
children attended, and the major harangued. He was
witty on the clergyman and Kirk Session, and more than
a little severe on the treasonable disloyalty of attend-
ing church. There was much benevolence, however,
shown in his concern for the town ; and much good
nature in his so kindly informing the decent fisher-
women, whom curiosity had brought within earshot,
that the rejoicings were in honour of " a lovely young
queen, just like themselves."

' The people of the procession have been represented
as Liberals, those opposed to them as Conservatives or
Tories. Nothing more untrue. The parish had agreed
to postpone their coronation rejoicings till Wednesday
last ; and on that day, in a procession by far the most
numerous and respectable ever witnessed in Cromarty,
and headed by our magistrates and ministers, I had the
pleasure of walking side by side with one of the most
intelligent and liberal Whigs of the place. At the
demonstration of the evening I had the satisfaction of
drinking to her Majesty's ministers, — a toast given from
the chair. And I, too, am a Whig. I was a Whig
when Major was a zealous Tory, and should we both

THE REV. MR STEWART. 157

live for a few years longer, I shall be a Whig when the
major may have become a Tory again.'

The victory clearly remained with . Miller and the
clerical and magisterial respectabilities of Cromarty.
His friendship with the Rev. Mr Stewart had now be-
come close and confidential. Stewart was no writing
man. Wholly devoid of ambition, shrinking with the
fastidiousness of an intellectual recluse from celebrity on
the one hand and from sustained effort on the other, he
permitted his fine intellect to work in its own way and
at its own time. On one subject he was deeply in earn-
est, and on one only — the subject of religion. When
he spoke to his people from the pulpit every energy of
his soul was roused, and the intense, penetrating, subtle
spell of his genius enthralled the hearer. I heard him
preach once in my boyhood, and no second time ; but
the memory of that one sermon will never fade from my
mind. His manner was in marked contrast to that
which has commonly prevailed among fervid Highland
preachers, to that, for example, of Dr MacDonald of
Ferintosh. There was little action, no ejaculation ; the
fire rose from deep inner fountains, not in a lava torrent,
but in keen, concentrated, high-mounting jets of flame.
He was an evangelical of the old school in his theology,
and it was by a curious combination of qualities that
sermons theologically as old as the Shorter Catechism
were imbued by him with a true originality. He was
biblical, textual, in the highest degree, resting on the
infallible inspiration of the ipsissima verb a of Scripture ;
but his imagination was so vigorous, his inventive faculty
so quick and fresh and fertile, that the words of Scrip-
ture suggested to him what would have occurred to no
other man. The subject on which I heard him preach

158 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

was the flood, and I recollect how, by casting every word
of the Scriptural record into the alembic of his mind,
and melting out of it every possible implication and
suggestion, he realized the scene with a vividness and an
intensity of effect of which I had not previously dream-
ed. ' The Lord shut him in.' This was a very rich
nugget from the Scriptural mine. ' Noah did not close
the door. There are works which God keeps for Him-
self. The burden of them is too heavy for the back of
man. To shut the door on a world about to perish
would have been too great a responsibility for a son of
Adam, — the stress of it would have borne too heavily on
a human heart. Another moment, and another, and an-
other might have been granted by the patriarch, and the
door might never have been shut at all. And would he
have done the work conclusively, even if he had, in the
first instance, closed the door ? Who knows but that,
when the waters rose, and he heard the wailing around,
and friends whom he loved held towards him their little
ones and shrieked to be taken in, he might have relented,
and opened, and a rush might have been made, and the
ship that carried the life of the world might have been
swamped? He dared not open a door which God
had shut ; perhaps he could not open it. We never
hear that he opened the door even when the earth was
drying. God told him when to go. And so it is
in the ark of salvation. It is not the Church, it is
not the minister, that shuts or opens the door. These
do God's bidding : they preach righteousness, they
offer salvation, they gather in ; it is God that shuts
and that opens the door. And what a sound was
that, when, in the listening ominous hush of earth's last
evening, God shut the door! There have been sounds
as well as sights to make the boldest heart quail and the

THE REV. MR STEWART. . 159

flintiest heart melt ; the cry that has gone up from cities
given over to fire and sword, the shuddering throe of
earthquake which hurries myriads to death ; but except
the cry on Calvary, which corresponded to it, no more
solemn and melancholy sound has been heard by human
ears than that which passed into the evening stillness
when the broad green earth was left to be the grave of
mankind, and God shut the door of the ark. Once
again God will shut the door. Man will not do it. Angel
will not do it. But oh, what a sigh and shudder will
pass through the listening universe when God will shut
the door of the heavenly ark upon the lost ! '

Such, or something like such, was Stewart's manner
of preaching. He had brief outlines before him in writ-
ing, and he brought out his picture, touch by touch, as
he went along. His strokes were few, decisive, memor-
able. I shall not say that all I have given above was his ; I
never put my impressions of his discourse into black and
white until now ; but this is my honest attempt to repro-
duce from the fossil bed of memory so much of the living
sermon. And a living word it was. The preacher, speak-
ing in clear, intense, low, yet rich and ringing tones,
held a large congregation, for, I should say, at least an
hour, in attention as fixed and silent as that of a child
hearing a wondrous tale from its mother.

The two men of whom Miller used to speak as having
done most to form his character and powers were
Chalmers and Stewart. It was the general feeling in
the Church of Scotland at this period that these were her
most remarkable preachers ; and considering the remote-
ness of Cromarty, and the shy and retiring nature of
Stewart, this fact must be held to demonstrate that he
was a man of a high and peculiar order. After the
disruption of the Scottish Church in 1843, when it was

160 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT.

proposed to transfer Dr Candlish from his pulpit to a
professorial chair, the common sentiment of the Free
Church settled upon Stewart as best fitted to succeed him
as pastor of the most influential and cultivated congrega-
tion in the Free Church. Stewart's profound conscientious-
ness, finding in the selection a providential indication of
duty, overpowered his reluctance to accept the call ; but
the thought of Edinburgh pressed on him, to use his own
phrase, like his gravestone, and one day, before proceed-
ing to the south, he was found dead in his bed.

BOOK V.

EDITOR.

' And who can say :— I have been always free,
Lived ever in the light of my own soul ?

I cannot

But I have not grown easy in these bonds,
But I have not denied what bonds these were I

Yea, I take myself to witness,

That I have loved no darkness,

Sophisticated no truth,

Nursed no delusion,

Allowed no fear ! '

VOL. II.

163

CHAPTER I.

NON-INTRUSION.

IF we wish to have a correct appreciation of Hugh
Miller, and not to substitute an image of our fancy for
the living man, we must clearly apprehend and perfectly
admit two propositions : first, that he was, in the deepest
foundations of his character, a religious man ; secondly,
that he was, distinctively and with his whole heart, a
Scotchman.

Pew passages in the works of Mr Carlyle have been
more frequently quoted or more justly admired than
that in which, in criticising the cosmopolitan tendencies
of Schiller, he affirms the worth of patriotic feeling.
' Nature herself,' says Mr Carlyle, ' has, wisely, no doubt,
partitioned us into " kindreds, and nations, and tongues : "
it is among our instincts to grow warm in behalf of our
country, simply for its own sake ; and the business of
Reason seems to be to chasten and direct our instincts,
never to destroy them. We require individuality in
our attachments : the sympathy which is expanded over
all men, will commonly be found so much attenuated by
the process, that it cannot be effective on any. And as
it is in nature, so it is in art, which ought to be the
image of it. Universal philanthropy forms but a pre-

164 EDITOR.

carious and very powerless rule of conduct ; and the
" progress of the species " will turn out equally unfitted
for deeply exciting the imagination. It is not with
freedom that we can sympathize, but with free men.
There ought, indeed, to be in history a spirit superior to
petty distinctions and vulgar partialities ; our particular
affections ought to be enlightened and purified ; but they
should not be abandoned, or, such is the condition of
humanity, our feelings must evaporate, and fade away in
that extreme diffusion. Perhaps, in a certain sense, the
surest mode of pleasing and instructing all nations is to
write for one.' During the most active and stirring
years of Hugh Miller's life, he emphatically wrote for
his country ; his literary activity formed part of the
history of Scotland. The sympathies which linked him
to humanity at large were rooted in his native soil.

From the point of view of the philosophical historian,
two principal causes are discernible as having combined
to make Scotland what she has been in modern times.
The first is the assertion of Scottish independence, under
Wallace and Bruce, in the commencement of the four-
teenth century ; the second, the predominance of the Re-
formed Church in Scotland, from the middle of the six-
teenth century downwards. On this point also we may
profitably listen to Mr Carlyle. In Past and Present,
he thus refers to the Scottish war of independence :—
'A heroic Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot
hinder that his Scotland become, one day, part of Eng-
land ; but he does hinder that it become, on tyrannous un-
fair terms, a part of it ; commands still, as with a god's
voice, from his old Valhalla and Temple of the Brave, that
there be a just real union as of brother and brother, not
a false and merely semblant one as of slave and master.
If the union with England be in fact one of Scotland's

SCOTTISH HISTORY. 165

chief blessings, we thank Wallace withal that it was not
the chief curse. Scotland is not Ireland : no, because
brave men rose there, and said, " Behold, ye must not
tread us down like slaves ; and ye shall not — and
cannot ! " '

Among the laws embodied in the moral government
of the world, few seem more clearly legible, and none
more stern, than this, that the nation which inflicts
wrong upon another nation, and the nation which sin-
fully submits to the wrong inflicted, shall both of them,
through long ages of suffering, expiate their crime. The
nation which did not rise and tear its fetters from its
limbs before they were welded on unalterably, has suffer-
ed the pangs of immedicable hatred and of burning thirst
for revenge, pangs which distemper the whole body poli-
tic. The nation which, in mere lust of conquest, tram-
pled its neighbour into the dust, has found its best sub-
sequent efforts to do justice and show kindness frustrated
by the embittered spirit of the vanquished. Infinite,
therefore, is the obligation under which both nations con-
cerned lie to those men who saved them from centuries of
penal animosity. The gratitude due by Scotchmen to Bruce
and Wallace and their heroic compatriots is but one
degree more ardent than that due to them by Englishmen.

The other factor in Scottish history is the Reform-
ation of the Church under Knox. In his enthusiastic
recognition of what the Reformation did for his country,
Mr Carlyle appears to forget for the moment what he
had said of Wallace. ' The history of Scotland,' he tells
us in his lecture on the Scottish Reformer, ' contains
nothing of world-interest at all, but this Reformation of
Knox.' His own words, which we have just seen, are
an eloquent assertion of the world-interest and world-
significance of the Scottish war of independence ; and

166 EDITOR.

what he says of the influence of the Scottish Reformed
Church, he would doubtless permit us to regard as the
complement of his previous statement. ' Scotch Litera-
ture and Thought/ he exclaims, ' Scotch Industry ;
James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns :
I find Knox and the Reformation acting in the heart's
core of every one of these persons and phenomena ;
I find that without the Reformation they would not
have been. Or what of Scotland ? The Puritanism of
Scotland became that of England, of New England. A
tumult in the High Church of Edinburgh spread into a
universal battle and struggle over all these realms ; there
came out, after fifty years' struggling, what we all call
the " Glorious Revolution," a Habeas-Corpus Act, Eree
Parliaments, and much else ! '

No Church has been more thoroughly popular than
the Reformed Church of Scotland, and, if we apprehend
the character and history of that Church, we shall have
no difficulty in understanding how this has been the
case. The Scottish people embraced the principles of
the Reformation with unanimity and ardour ; and from
the time when the Reformed Church gained the ascend-
ant in Scotland down to the period of the Revolution
Settlement, the Church was always identified with the
party of political freedom and national independence.
The prosperity of the Church was coincident with the
vindication of the national honour and the spread of the
national influence ; the humiliation of the Church was
accompanied by the political debasement of the people.
These things go together in the history of those times
with a singular precision and constancy ; the one is to
the other, in the windings of Scotland's fortune, as
the bank is to the stream. The aggressive pride and
self-confident enthusiasm of Scotland never towered so

PATRIOT AND PRESBYTERIAN. 167

high as when the covenanting army marched to assist
the Puritans against Charles I. ; few worse civil go-
vernments have ever existed than that which oppressed
Scotland and the Church of Scotland together under
Charles IT. ; and in the interval between the reigns of
Charles I. and Charles II., when England, Scotland, and
Ireland alike lay prostrate at the feet of Cromwell, the
Church of Scotland had the felicity to represent a pitch
of national hatred against the victor of Dunbar keener
than was ever known in Scottish bosoms against the
race of Stewart. Thus, in Scotland, ' patriot ' and ' Pres-
byterian ' became convertible terms.

It may strike English readers as a mystery that a
Church intensely loved by a nation should have been
a Church of the loftiest ecclesiastical pretensions. Two
reasons make this appear strange to observers south
of the Tweed : first, that the Church of England has
been more willing to sacrifice the nation to its kings
than any Church in Christendom; and, secondly, that
the word ' Church ' has been immemorially connected in
the English mind with the priesthood and not with the
people. Under cover of the theory that the sacraments
can be rightly administered only by men ordained by
episcopal successors of the apostles, the Anglican priest-
hood have had no difficulty in identifying themselves
with the Church, and they have been practically so iden-
tified by the English laity, whenever question arose as
to the spiritual powers of the Church. In the Reformed
communions, the word ' Church ' conveyed no such im-
pression. For them the Church had reverted to her
apostolic acceptation as the assembly of the faithful, not
the members of a sacerdotal caste. The only reformer,
in the strict and complete sense of the word, was Calvin.
Luther, far more amiable and human-hearted, had no

168 EDITOR.

such grasp of principles, no such intrepidly destructive
and constructive genius. Contenting himself with res-
cuing from the Papacy those doctrines which he deemed
essential to human salvation, Luther left the Church to
constitute herself, or to be constituted by princes, as cir-
cumstances might direct. The mediaeval Church of
England became the Anglican Church of modern times
in virtue of one essential fact, that she surrendered,
under the mask of an evasion, her spiritual liberties to
the sovereign of the realm. This has been conclusively
established by Hallam, Macaulay, and others, and has
been treated as a self-evident truth by the highest
legal authorities in the England of to-day. That Henry
VIII. should assume spiritual supremacy need not sur-
prise us if we reflect that he and his generation believed
kings to be divinely endowed beings, capable of working
miracles by their touch. Neither Luther nor the fathers
of Anglicanism, in digging the foundations for the Re-
formed Church, cleared out the debris of Romanism and
of feudalism. They retained enough of Romanism to
change the Christian pastorate into a priesthood, enough
of feudalism to exalt kings, nobles, and ' upper ' classes
generally into an Unchristian pre-eminence and to de-
press the body of the people. Calvin alone went sans
phrase to the Bible and to God, with a view to re-consti-
tuting both the pastorate and the congregation on the
apostolic model. From the authoritative documents of
the apostolic age, he drew the doctrine, the discipline,
the rights, the powers, of the Christian Church. Whether
he fell or did not fall into errors of his own is not now
the question ; it is clear, at all events, that this was re-
formation in a deeper sense than that in which the word
applies either to the Lutheran or the Anglican com-
munions ; and the instinct of the sixteenth century,—

THE REFORMED CHURCH. 169

that vague sense of the general mind which seldom
errs, — both as manifested in the Church of Rome and
beyond her pale, recognized the fact by signalizing the
Church of Geneva, the Church of the Huguenots, the
Church of Holland, the English Churches of the Puritans,
and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, as branches,
not of the Protestant, but of the Reformed, Church.

The Reformed Church claimed spiritual independ-
ence as a right bestowed on her in the Word of God;
but her congregations found in this no cause why they
should dread her ecclesiastical assumptions, since the
Church meant the body of the faithful, not a mystically
endowed sacerdotal order. Recognizing the sacred im-
portance of the congregation as an integral portion of
the Church, the Reformed communions naturally re-
spected congregational rights, and laid it doAvn as a
principle of practical administration that no pastor could
be appointed to minister to a congregation against their
will.

All this was mother's milk to Hugh Miller. From
his earliest years his eye had flamed and his heart beat
quick at the names of Bruce and Wallace, and in the
Scottish Church he saw an institution which incarnated
more of the ancient spirit and freedom of his native land
than any other. Like all sane Scotchmen, he regarded
the union with England as a crown of blessing for Scot-
land ; but he felt that those political questions which de-
rived importance from their bearing on the interests of
the empire at large, had a comparatively remote and in-
direct connection with the welfare of Scottish towns and
villages, Scottish peasants arid artisans ; whereas the
preaching of the Gospel of Christ with purity and fer-
vour, and the influence of a trusted, loved, and genially
earnest pastorate, and the feeling of honest pride and

170 EDITOR.

self-respect with which Scotchmen looked upon their
clergy as not forced on them by the will of man, but
sent by God to bless them, and called by themselves to
minister to them in spiritual things, he believed to affect,
in the closest and most penetrating way, the happiness
and well-being of ten thousand Scottish homes. He
denied with scorn the allegation that the Church of
Scotland gave up, at the time of the union with Eng-
land, her cherished independence. The burst of elo-
quent enthusiasm with which Chalmers asserted, in his
celebrated London lectures in defence of Church estab-
lishments, the spiritual independence of the Scottish
Church expressed his clear conviction. ' It should
never be forgotten/ said Chalmers, 'that, in things
ecclesiastical, the highest power of our Church is
amenable to no higher power on earth for its decisions.
It can exclude, it can deprive, it can depose at pleasure.
External force might make an obnoxious individual the
holder of a benefice ; but there is no external force in
these realms that could make him a minister of the
Church of Scotland. There is nothing which the State
can do to our independent and indestructible Church,
but strip her of its temporalities. Nee tamen consume-
batur ; she would remain a Church notwithstanding, —
as strong as ever in the props of her own moral and in-
herent greatness. And though shrivelled in all her
dimensions by the moral injury inflicted on many thou-
sands of families, she would be at least as strong as ever
in the reverence of her country's population. She was
as much a Church in her days of suffering, as in her
days of outward security and triumph, — when a wan-
dering outcast, with nothing but the mountain breezes
to play around her, and nought but the caves of the
earth to shelter her, — as now, when admitted to the
bowers of an establishment. The magistrate might

SPIRITUAL INDEPENDENCE. 171

withdraw his protection, and she cease to be an estab-
lishment any longer, — but in all the high matters of
sacred and spiritual jurisdiction, she would be the same
as before. With or without an establishment, she, in
these, is the unfettered mistress of her doings. The
king, by himself or by his representative, might be the
spectator of our proceedings • but what Lord Chatham
said of the poor man's house is true in all its parts of
the Church to which I have the honour to belong : "In
England every man's house is his castle." Not that it is
surrounded with walls and battlements. It may be a
straw-built shed. Every wind of heaven may whistle
round it, — every element of heaven may enter it, but
the king cannot, the king dare not/

These views of Chalmers, unchallenged at the time,
are accordant with the constitutional theory of the Church
of Scotland. The decision of Hallam, based on express
and unequivocal provisions of the Treaty of Union be-
tween England and Scotland, is conclusive on the point.
The Presbyterian Church was accepted as an integral
and essential part of the constitution of the United King-
dom, and the Confession of Eaith was enrolled among
the fundamental statutes of the realm. But neither
Chalmers nor Hugh Miller perceived, until the cold iron
of experience sent the death-like truth to their hearts,
that the sardonic smile with which Hallam records that
' the Moderator dissolves the Assembly in the name of
the Lord Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church, and by
the same authority appoints another to meet on a certain
day of the ensuing year,' while the Royal Commissioner
subsequently performs the same ceremony in name of
the sovereign, had a minatory and potent significance.
By the Treaty of Union it was decreed that the spiritual
province and the ecclesiastical province should ' remain
independent of each other in Scotland, and that the

172 EDITOR.

Churcli should, in the spiritual province, be supreme.
But there was one thing which the f miners of the Treaty
of Union omitted to specify. They did not say who
would decide in the event of there being a difference of
opinion between the representatives of the civil power and
the representatives of the spiritual power, as to the limits
of their respective provinces. To leave this point unde-
termined was inevitably to give it on the side of the
stronger. A lady contracts marriage under favourable
conditions. These are inscribed in the marriage settle-
ments, and the swords of her kinsmen, casting their
gleam on the parchment, make it certain that, at the
moment, those settlements have a real value. But they
put their swords into the scabbard, there to rest and
rust, nevermore to be again drawn in the lady's quarrel.
They betake them to their farms and their merchan-
dise, become comparatively indifferent to her affairs,
and dream no longer of risking life or land for her sake.
Then a dispute between husband and wife arises. He de-
clares that he wishes to fulfil with loyalty the provisions
of the marriage settlements. She maintains that he
essentially misinterprets them, that the question affects
her honour in a vital point, that, if he persists, the mar-
riage will, ipso facto, be dissolved. He persists. She
calls on her kinsmen. They are languid and lukewarm ;
are inclined, on the whole, to agree with her ; but do not
recur even in thought to the idea of defending her claims
by force. The husband has the power in his hands ; he
decides in his own sense ; and the lady announces to him
and to all the world that the connection between them is
at an end. Voila, the history of the Disruption of
1843. The Church of Scotland, at the time of the
Union with England, was the lady of our allegory. The
Revolution settlement, the Treaty of Union, secured her
spiritual independence as well as pen, ink, and parch-

THE GROUNDS OF DISPUTE. 173

raent could secure it. To have refused the guarantee
would have been to encounter the risk of a war be-
tween the nations. As old Earl Crawford said at
the time, an army of twenty thousand men would not
have preserved the peace in Scotland if an attempt
had been made to trample on the Church. But the
Union was completed. A hundred and thirty years
passed away. Scotchmen learned to feel that the inter-
ests of Scotland had been drawn into the mighty current
of the interests of the British empire. Scotchmen, side
by side with Englishmen, had defended the common
cause on many a bloody field from Assaye to Waterloo.
Then the dispute between the Church of Scotland and
the Legislature of the empire — for to that it soon came—
arose. The Church interpreted the compact in one way,
the State in another. The representatives of Scotland
in the British House of Commons were, by a majority,
in favour of the claims of the Church. But the State,
with all the power of the empire at its back, insisted on
its view being taken ; resistance by the Scotch members
or their constituents was out of the question ; and the
Church, as represented by the party which had swayed
her councils for eight years, dissolved her connection
with the civil Government.

The battle-field on which the conflict between
Church and State in Scotland was fought out was
exactly that which, since the battle had become inevit-
able, the Church would have chosen. Had the majority
in the General Assembly been checked by the civil
tribunals while engaged in the rigorous enforcement
of Calvinistic doctrine or of domestic morality, — while
deposing some unfortunate Arminian preacher, or sus-
pending some genial divine who in his cups had
not been true to his moderate principles, — the cry of
priestly oppression could hardly fail to have been raised

174 EDITOR.

against them, and it is inconsistent with all we know of
human nature to suppose that they should have been en-
couraged by the plaudits of popular enthusiasm. But in
the struggle which issued in the disruption of the Church
of Scotland, the cause of the Church was the cause of the
people. The spiritual independence of the former was
a shield held forth to defend the congregational privi-
leges of the latter. The jurisdiction of the Church
would have been a poor rallying word even in Scotland,
if it had not been linked with the cause of non-intrusion.
The right of the people to have no pastor forced upon
them was that which the Church brought out all her
artillery of suspension and deposition to protect. It is
unquestionable that if the majority in the Church courts
could have been induced to betray the people, — to make
common cause with the patrons, — to put off congrega-
tions with some plausible make-believe, — they might
have availed themselves of inviting opportunities to
secure their own predominance. But no artifice of
statesmen, no subtle influence of aristocratic favour, no
comfort of pleasant manses and fixed incomes, no pride
of State establishment, dear to the clerical bosom, could
tempt the Church to prove false to the ancient league,
or to abandon that guardianship of congregational rights
which had made her the darling of the Scottish com-
monalty from the days of Knox to the days of Chalmers.*

* It is interesting to observe that Sir Walter Scott, who had a
marvellously exact comprehension of the Presbyterianism of Scotland,
represents David Deans as sensitively anxious on the subject of his son-
in-law's 'real harmonious call' to the parish of Knocktarlity and as
ready to maintain 'the right of the Christian congregation to be con-
sulted in the choice of their own pastor ' as ' one of the choicest and
most inalienable of their privileges.' David Deans is expressly drawn
by Scott as a patriarch of the Kirk, and Dr William Cunningham him-
self could not have defined with nicer exactness the Non-intrusion
claim of the Church, — not that the people should choose their pastors,
but that they should be ' consulted in the choice ' of their pastors, — than
old Davie.

175

CHAPTER II.

LETTER TO LORD BROUGHAM CALL TO EDINBURGH — LEAVES

CROMARTY.

THE most plausible of the make-believes with which
the Evangelical majority were tempted by statesmen
to put off the people was the concession to congregations
of a right to specify certain objections to presentees,
which, if supported by adequate proof, would afford valid
grounds for their being set aside by Presbyteries. If
the pastor or probationer selected by the patron could
be proved to be unsound in doctrine, defective in
literary acquirement, or lax in morals, the rights of the
patron were, in that instance, to lapse. At first sight,
it may appear to many that the liberty of congregations
would thus have been abundantly fenced. What more
could they ask than that their pastor should be accurate
in doctrine, accomplished in letters, irreproachable in
life ? The reply is simple and conclusive. They could
ask that he should be one whom they could personally
love, and from whose preaching and ministering their
souls could derive nourishment; and the reasons why
one man might answer to this description, and another
man might not, are obviously of a nature to evade dis-
tinct apprehension even in thought, and which it might

176 EDITOR.

be quite impossible to set clown in black and white.
Members of the Anglican Church, or of the Episcopal
Church of Scotland, are hardly in a position to appreci-
ate the importance, as conceived by a member of the
Reformed Church, of positive acceptance by a congrega-
tion of its pastor. The Episcopal Church retains, in the
first place, the mediaeval doctrine of a peculiar sanctity
and power of blessing attached to episcopally ordained
clergymen. The Reformed Church in all her branches,
certainly not least in her Scottish branch, discards
the idea of a mystic power inherent in the priesthood,
and rests the value of the clergyman on his personal
qualities. The Anglican Church, in the second place,
has a Prayer Book, and the congregational devotion
does not depend on the clergyman. The pastors of the
Reformed Church of Scotland compose the prayers which
they offer up in the name of the congregation, and
though comprehensive, minute, and admirable directions
for congregational prayer are given them in the formu-
laries of the Church, it is inevitable that the character
of their prayers will be in large measure dependent on
their personal qualifications. But if we would get at
the very heart of that invincible objection to intruded
pastors which the communicants of Scotland have
shown in every age, we must call to mind the intense
personal religiousness of the Scotch. The religious Scot
is not, like the corresponding type in England, demon-
strative and emotional. He shrinks with sensitive dislike
from those effusive recitations of spiritual experience
which Wesley found congenial to large classes in England.
He rejects the notion, practically acted on by a proportion
of the English Congregationalists, and a still larger pro-
portion of the English Baptists, that presbytery or parson,
elder or deacon, has the right or the capacity to investi-

LORD BROUGHAM'S SPEECH. 177

gate a man's religious state before God and to say
whether he is or is not converted. Not the less but the
more, however, for his thus deeming conversion an in-
scrutably sacred process transacted in the secret places
of a man's soul between himself and his Maker, does
the Scottish religionist of the historic type regard con-
version as infinitely important, and desire, as the one
essential thing, that his pastor shall be a man of God.
His judgment on the point may be narrow, uncharitable,
superstitious ; but it will depend mainly upon sympathies
of the soul's life which have never shaped themselves
even to himself in an articulate whisper, and which he
feels it to be utterly preposterous to attempt to express
under specified heads of objection to a presentee. Never,
therefore, for one moment were the congregations of
Scotland beguiled into the belief that the right of
objecting to pastors selected for them by patrons was
equivalent to being certified that no pastor should be
' intruded ' upon them.

It was Lord Brougham's adoption and enforcement
of the view that the right to specify objections to a
presentee was the sole concession made by law to the
congregations of the Church of Scotland, which roused
Hugh Miller from his domestic j-epose in the shadow of
the hill of Cromarty. The patron of the parish of
Auchterarder, Lord Kinnoul, had presented the Rev. Mr
Young to the charge. About forty of the parishioners
abstained from positively opposing him; nearly three
hundred expressly declined to have him as their pastor ;
and only three individuals, two of them not members of
the congregation, signed the call. Under these circum-
stances the Presbytery rejected Mr Young. His soli-
citor, not carrying the case to any of the higher courts
of the Church, turned at once to the Civil Authority.

vox. ii. 12

178 EDITOR.

The case was elaborately and very ably argued in the
Court of Session. Eight of the judges were of opinion
that the rejection of Mr Young by the Presbytery was
illegal. Five were of opinion that the Church had a
right to reject the presentee, and among these were
Cockburn, Jeffrey, Moncreiff, and Glenlee. The decision
of the Court against the Church was pronounced on the
10th of March, 1838. In May, 1839, it was confirmed
by the House of Lords, and on this occasion Lord
Brougham delivered his famous speech on the Scottish
Church question. He dismissed, as wholly untenable,
the proposition that congregations of the Scottish Church
had a right to choose their pastors.

' Could I do nothing/ writes Hugh Miller in de-
scribing his feelings at the time, ' for my Church in her
hour of peril ? There was, I believed, no other in-
stitution in the country half so valuable, or in which
the people had so large a stake. The Church was of
right theirs, — a patrimony won for them by the blood of
their fathers, during the struggles and sufferings of more
than a hundred years ; and now that her better ministers
were trying, at least partially, to rescue that patrimony
for them from the hands of an aristocracy who, as a body
at least, had no spiritual interest in the Church,—
belonging, as most of its members did, to a different
communion, — they were .in danger of being put down,
unbacked by the popular support which in such a cause
they deserved. Could I not do something to bring up
the people to their assistance ? I tossed wakefully
throughout a long night, in which I formed my plan of
taking up the purely popular side of the question ; and
in the morning I sat down to state my views to the
people, in form of a letter addressed to Lord Brougham.
1 devoted to my new employment every moment not

LETTER TO MR PAUL, 179

imperatively demanded by my duties in the bank office,
and, in about a week after, was able to despatch the
manuscript of my pamphlet to the respected manager of
the Commercial Bank, — Mr Robert Paul, — a gentleman
from whom I had received much kindness when in
Edinburgh, and who in the great ecclesiastical struggle
took decided part with the Church.'

This is the letter, addressed to Mr Paul, which
accompanied the pamphlet.

'Crornarty, 13th June, 1839.

c I feel deeply interested in the question which at
present agitates the Church. It is a vital one ; and
unless the people can be roused to take, part in it (and
they seem strangely uninformed and woefully indifferent
as yet), the worst cause must inevitably prevail. They
may perhaps listen to one of their own body, — to one
who combines the opinions of the old with those of the
modern Whig, and who, though he feels very strongly
on the question, has no secular interest involved in it.

' In this hope I have written the accompanying letter,
which I now submit to your perusal. May I request
you, should you deem it fitted in some degree to accom-
plish what I have intended, to put it into the hands of
some publisher interested in the welfare of the Church,
and of influence enough to secure to it an extensive cir-
culation. Humble as my name is, I think it will secure
to me a good many readers in our northern districts ; —
in those of the south I am of course less known, but as
I occasionally contribute to Chambers 's Journal, the
readers of that extensively circulated periodical will re-
cognize me as an old acquaintance, and may be led by
curiosity to listen to what I have to say on the subject.
A fair hearing on the part of the people of the Church,—
of the common people, at least, — is surely all the cause

180 EDITOR.

requires to secure their support. The price, should my
letter suit a publisher's views, may be very low; — the
writer's interest in it will not add to the expense ; — it is
an offering for the altar.'

The circumstances which followed upon the arrival
of the Letter to Lord Brougham in Edinburgh will be
best conceived from an account of them given by Dr
Candlish in a letter to Mrs Miller, dated 3rd December,
1860.

' I remember them,' he writes, ' as if they had
occurred yesterday. Walking along the streets one fore-
noon, I met quite accidentally Mr Robert Paul. After
conversing on general topics, and as I was leaving him,
he said to me, in a sort of casual, off-hand manner, " By-
the-by, I have a manuscript in my pocket which I wish
you wTould read at your leisure. It is on the Church
question. The writer is a friend of mine in a bank in
the north." I suppose he mentioned Mr Miller's name,
but I had not heard of him before. I took the manu-
script home and laid it aside ; intending to give a cur-
sory glance over it in the course of a day or two, and
then return it ; certainly expecting to find nothing re-
markable in it, — nothing beyond what might perhaps
be useful in the writer's own neighbourhood and circle.
That same evening, being alone, — for I recollect that my
family were in the country, — and being somewhat dull
and listless, I thought I might as well look at the manu-
script Mr Paul had given me. I began to read it in a
thoroughly indifferent mood. I never can forget the
rapture, — for it was nothing short of that, — into which
the first pages threw me. 1 finished the reading in a
state of great excitement ; so much so that, though it
was late, I could not rest till I had hastened with the
manuscript to Mr Dunlop, beseeching him to read it

DR CANDLISH READS THE LETTER. 181

that very night. The following day Mr Dunlop and I
met with Mr Paul and a few friends, and either then, or
within a day or two thereafter, it was agreed to ask Mr
Miller to become editor of the Witness newspaper, then
about to be started. We had been looking out for an
editor. Whenever I had read the manuscript, which
was, I need not say, that of the Letter to Lord Brougham,
I came at once to the conclusion that we had found the
man. So did Mr Dunlop when he had read it. The
thing was thus immediately and enthusiastically settled/
The Letter to Lord Brougham was at once published.
Hugh Miller has left behind him no more masculine,
idiomatic, close-knit, or melodious piece of writing, nor
is any of his productions more strongly featured with
the characteristics of the man. He opens with a glow-
ing, yet nowise fulsome, tribute to Lord Brougham.
' I have been no careless or uninterested spectator
of your lordship's public career. No, my lord, I have
felt my heart swell as I pronounced the name of
Henry Brougham/ He then makes an admirable
point by referring to Brougham's prowess as a Par-
liamentary Reformer and the relative capacities of Scot-
tish communicants, on the one hand, to elect members of
the British Parliament, and, on the other, to choose their
parish ministers. ' Surely the people of Scotland are not
so changed but that they know at least as much of the
doctrines of the New Testament as of the principles of
civil government, and of the requisites of a gospel minis-
ter as of the qualifications of a Member of Parliament ! '
His argument on behalf of the Church and her congrega-
tions he bases upon the original constitution and dis-
tinctive character of the Church of Scotland. ' I read in
the First Book of Discipline (as drawn up by Knox and
his brethren), that " no man should enter the ministry with-

182 EDITOR.

out a lawful vocation ; and that a lawful vocation stand-
eth in the election of the people^ examination of the minis-
try, and admission of them both." I find in the Second
Book, as sanctioned by our earlier Assemblies, and sworn
to in our National Covenant, that as this liberty of elec-
tion was observed and respected as long as the primitive
Church maintained its purity, it should be also observed
and respected by the Reformed Church of Scotland ; and
that neither by the King himself, nor by any inferior
person, should ministers be intruded on congregations,
contrary to the will of the people.' His expression of
devotion to his Church may be not uninstructive to those
who cannot conceive of a Church which has a definite
and comprehensive creed, as anything else but a grinding
intellectual tyranny. ' To no man do I yield in the love
and respect which I bear to the Church of Scotland. I
never signed the Confession of her Faith, but I do more,
— I believe it ; and I deem her scheme of government
at once the simplest and most practically beneficial that
has been established since the time of the Apostles. But
it is the vital spirit, not the dead body, to which I am
attached : it is to the free popular Church, established
by our Reformers, — not to an unsubstantial form or an
empty name, — a mere creature of expediency and the
State : and had she so far fallen below my estimate of
her dignity and excellence as to have acquiesced in your
lordship's decision, the leaf holds not more loosely by
the tree when the October wind blows highest, than I
would have held by a Church so sunk and degraded.'

A large part of this masterly tractate is necessarily
devoted to a consideration of the law of patronage en-
actedt by the British Legislature in the reign of Anne.
The incompatibility of that law with the fundamental
principles of the Church of Scotland, the baseness of the

THE PATRONAGE ACT. 183

intrigue, hiding treason to the House of Brunswick under
very genuine hatred of the Presbyterian clergy, by which
it was carried through Parliament, the opposition offered
to it during the earlier part of last century by those
members and ministers of the Church of Scotland Avho
incarnated her ancient spirit, its effect in driving into in-
voluntary exile her most earnest pastors and most pious ad-
herents, are demonstrated and enforced with extraordinary
vigour. But there is one thing Hugh Miller does not
assert in his Letter to Lord Brougham, and the omis-
sion is of importance. He does not say that the British
Legislature, in restoring to the patrons of benefices in
the Church of Scotland those rights of patronage which
the Church, in the plenitude of her power, had swept
away, did not mean to transfer to the patrons what the
Church had conferred on the people. In order to do
justice to the majority of the judges of the Court of Ses-
sion, and to the Moderate party in the Church of Scot-
land, we are bound to admit that the rational interpreta-
tion of a law restoring patronage is that it conferred
upon the patrons real power, and that, by implication, it
disallowed, what the Church was ready to agree to, an
assignment of the income of the parish to the patron's
minister, and the appointment of another minister, ap-
proved of by the people and the Presbytery, to be its pas-
tor. In making this admission, we do not invalidate the
main argument of the Evangelical majority; but we set the
matter in its true historical light ; and we render it in-
telligible that men of eminent ability, men whom it
would be unpardonable, except in the actual heat and
dust of the struggle, to describe in any other way than
as upright and honourable, pronounced the claims of
the Church indefensible. The argument of the Evan-
gelical majority rested inexpugnably on this position, —

184 EDITOR.

that the spiritual independence of the Church and the
non-intrusion rights of congregations were essentials of
the ancient ecclesiastical constitution of Scotland. If this
statement is incorrect, the whole world has mistaken the
character of the Kirk ; Knox, Melville, Henderson have
been totally misunderstood ; and such Presbyterians as
Dr Thomas McCrie and Dr William Cunningham knew
nothing of the subject wilich was the study of their lives.
Whatever version you may give of the proceedings of the
Church, in the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth cen-
tury, in relation to the Patronage Act, you cannot impair
the force of an appeal to the fundamental principles of
the Scottish Reformation. Is your theory that the Church
did her best to neutralize the Patronage Act and to resist
and protest against it ? Then the Evangelical majority
had a right to carry on the contest until it became
hopeless. Do you affirm that the Church failed in her
duty and practically accepted the law of patronage ?
Then the sooner she roused herself and harked back on
nobler days and native principles the better. Will you
admit that the Church, on the whole, shilly-shallied,—
that she was content with laying a thin film of plausi-
bility and compromise over a wound in which lurked
poison ? Once more, the party representing her funda-
mental principles had a clear right to content themselves
with no half-measures, with no prudent evasions, but to
breathe a new spirit into the policy of their fathers, and
to proclaim that the patronage bane was to be removed
at all hazards.

The intention of the Veto Act, passed by the Church
as soon as the Evangelicals took the lead in her councils,
was to annul the Patronage Act of Queen Anne. In
putting the veto into the hands of congregations, the
Church did openly and decisively what, for many years

THE ARGUMENT OF THE EVANGELICALS. 185

after the passing of the Patronage Act, she had attempt-
ed indirectly and irresolutely. Dr Robertson, in initiat-
ing the policy which he pursued during his leadership
of the Church, took this position, that, as the Patronage
Act was law, and the Church did not avowedly resist it,
her consistent and honourable course would be to render
it a frank and complete obedience. The majority of the
judges of the Court of Session, bound to give to Acts
of Parliament the effect which their terms required, were
convinced that it was their duty to enforce the Patron-
age Act. The Church, by her Veto Law, declared, on
the other hand, that, irrespectively of the proceedings of
her own courts for a hundred years, irrespectively of any
statute passed by the British Legislature, irrespectively
of whatever decisions the Court of Session might pro-
nounce, the principles of Knox, Melville, and Henderson
were lier principles, and by her principles she would
abide. It complicated, and did not strengthen, the
argument of the Evangelicals to maintain that the law
of the State as well as of the Church was on their side.
No statesman or legal authority could be expected to
attach weight to the assertion that an Act of Parliament,
which had been on the Statute Book for a hundred and
thirty years, had infringed the constitution of the realm
and was therefore null and void.

The champions of the Evangelical majority in the
Church of Scotland held themselves bound, during the
whole continuance of the conflict, to maintain two theses :
first, that the spiritual independence of the Church and
the non-intrusion rights of congregations were essential
to the Presbyterian constitution ; second, that these
could be secured although the Church maintained her
connection with the State. The theory that the civil
authority must and will, sooner or later, usurp the

186 EDITOR.

powers of the Church which it establishes and endows,
they rejected not without scorn, and the Established
Church of Scotland they pointed to as a visible de-
monstration that a State Church might be free. We
have found Hugh Miller declaring in his Letter to
Lord Brougham, that, if the Church of Scotland had
acquiesced in his lordship's decision in the Auchterarder
case, ' the leaf holds not more loosely by the tree when
the October wind blows highest,' than he would have
held to ' a Church so sunk and degraded/ He ulti-
mately made good his words ; but in his ' Whiggism of
the Old School/ a pamphlet by which the Letter to Lord
Brougham was immediately followed, he vehemently
maintains the Establishment principle against ' Volun-
taries/ and seems to say that, though the decision of the
Courts ' has practically determined the law,' the clergy
ought not to sever their connection with the State. ' The
duty of our ministers ' — these are his words — ' is not the
less clear. They owe it to themselves and to their peo-
ple, to their country and to their God, that they neither
obey this iniquitous law, nor yet quit the Establishment/
The second pamphlet is an inferior performance to the
first. It is more ponderously controversial, and lacks
the racy vigour and stern imaginative glow of the famous
' Letter/

Without question, Miller, now and subsequently, was
a decided maintainer of the State-Church theory. It was
with inexpressible reluctance that he brought himself
ultimately to admit that the Church of Scotland had no
alternative but to sever her connection with the civil
power. Nay, I have a distinct recollection that, in
earnest talk with me after the Disruption, he hinted
a wish that the leaders of the majority had been some-
what less imperious in their dealings with clergymen

THE MODERATES. 187

who obeyed the civil law rather than the law of the
Church, somewhat less fiery and impatient in urging
the matter to an issue. Hugh Miller had seen much of
infidel voluntaryism, and little of that power of religion
in a state of freedom which has in recent times fright-
ened the Pagan party into swift abjuration of the prin-
ciple of a free Church in a free State, and cordial sup-
port of civil establishments of religion. The conception
of a State Church as a bed on which Christianity,
ascertained by cultivated men to be moribund, may
die soft, had not dawned upon the intellect of Hugh
Miller. If convinced that the choice lay between dis-
establishment on the one hand, and a State Church
on the other, which was specially recommended by its
usefulness in controlling the might of free religious
principle, he would with passionate indignation have
declared for the former. He lived and died, however,
a believer in the soundness of the State-Church theory.

Nor was this the only circumstance which might have
disposed him to look with indulgence upon the Moderate
party. His literary sympathies, his pride in the modern
literature of Scotland, must have pleaded strongly in
their behalf. If he could have granted, which he could
not, that the ministers of a Christian Church can claim
approval or applause on any ground save that of preach-
ing, in season and out of season, the Gospel of Christ, he
would have found it difficult to repress his enthusiasm
for that party which placed the Church of Scotland in
sympathetic harmony with all that was refined and
intellectually progressive in the literature, the science, the
art, of Scotland. One knows not where to look in ecclesi-
astical history for a party, of which the nucleus consisted
of clergymen, so loyal to the higher aims of the human
spirit, so ardent in its love of knowledge, so free from

188 EDITOR.

sectarian bigotry, so genial and tolerant in its habits of
thought and feeling, as the Scottish Moderates. Under
their influence the rugged face of old Scottish Presby-
terianism mantled with a smile of calm and bright
intelligence which drew upon Scotland the astonished
gaze of Europe. Robertson was in his own day known
in Paris almost as well as in Edinburgh ; his books had
an honoured place in the library of Voltaire ; and there
is no University in Europe at this hour in which his
name is not held in esteem. He was the friend and
historical rival of Hume, who, except in his specu-
lative philosophy, was a true Moderate. If it is to be
held a disgrace to the party that its chiefs were in
friendly intercourse with the prince of iconoclasts, we
ought to remember that there went out also from the
Moderate camp those champions who, both in the field
of pure philosophy and in that of apologetic divinity,
challenged Hume to the combat, and, in the judgment
of a world certainly not prejudiced in favour of parsons
and against philosophers, put Plume to his mettle. I
allude of course to Principal Campbell and Dr Reid.
The philosophy of Reid assaulted Hume along his whole
line of battle. Interpreted as Hamilton interprets it,
that philosophy is one in fundamentals with every great
constructive system of spiritual thought from that of Plato
to that of Kant. It consists, in one word, of an intelligent
and critical appeal to the common spiritual nature — call
it the communis sensus, call it reason, call it intuition,
call it what you will, — of the human race. This re-
mains and must remain, whatever the dialect in which
you express it, the sole philosophical refuge from
universal scepticism. It is characteristic of the noble
tolerance and candour and high intellectual serenity of
those old Moderates, that Reid forwarded to Hume in

THE MODERATES. 189

manuscript his reply to the philosopher. A finer proof
of a desire to deal fairly with an opponent, and of an
absolute rejection of every weapon of personal or vituper-
ative controversy, cannot be imagined. But the Moderate
party of the Scottish Church can claim not only Camp-
bell, Reid, and Robertson, but one who would now be
placed by many higher than either of the three, the
author of The Wealth of Nations. Smith's Theory of
Moral Sentiments is a thoroughly Moderate book,
moderate in its eloquent and high-toned moralizing,
moderate in its lucidity and logical coherence, and also
perhaps in its want of intensity, enthusiasm, and pene-
trating, exhaustive power. It was under the genial
auspices of the Moderate party that the Scottish Uni-
versities attained to such renown that young Palmerston
and Russell went from England to study in their halls.
It was under the auspices of the Moderate party that
Edinburgh became the Weimar of Great Britain, that
the most important publications of the time in Europe,
the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood and the Quarterly,
arose. When John Murray conceived the scheme of the
Quarterly, his first step was to start for the North, to
confer with Scott and the literati of Edinburgh. The
leaders of Moderation showed a wise and a nobly patriotic
spirit in never trying to exclude Seceders from the
Universities. They indulged the shrewd preference of
the Scottish commonalty for ' college-bred ministers/
and spared their country the stunted and acrid growths
of illiterate Dissent. It may doubtless be argued that
Moderatism was itself but part of a wider phenomenon, to
wit, the prevalence and predominance, throughout society,
not Scottish and English alone, but European, during
the eighteenth century, of literary and scientific tastes
and ambitions as contrasted with those of a religious

190 EDITOR.

nature ; but the truth of this statement does not neu-
tralize the fact that, under the reign of Moderatism, a
literary and philosophical lustre was thrown over Scot-
land for which, in the more earnest epoch of dominant
Evangelicism, we look in vain.

It may be asked how we can hold, first, that ' Scotch
literature and thought' in modern times owed their
superiority to ' Knox and the Covenanters,' and secondly,
that the ecclesiastical party under whose influence the
literature and thought of Scotland have fallen from that
ascendency which they attained under Moderate sway,
were in deeper sympathy with 'Knox and the Covenant-
ers ' than their Moderate antagonists. The answer, if
we will reflect for a moment, is not difficult. Sir Walter
Scott painted a hero in Claverhouse ; Burns was ' the
fighting man ' of the Moderate clergy of his district, and
did not scruple to sneer in his satirical verses at the
' holy folks ' who ' believe in John Knox : ' yet Carlyle
expressly mentions Scott and Burns as having become
what they were through the accomplished work of the
Scottish Reformers and Covenanters. And he is right.
These, under God, made the nation strong of spirit
and proud of heart, capable of producing a Burns
or a Scott. In like manner the Moderatism of Scot-
land, with its mellow splendour of intellectual light,
was a fruit of that tree which had been planted in
the olden time amid the storms of war and the
fierce contendings of faction. It would not be pleas-
ant to think that the good there was in Moderatism
has been lost to Scotland and the world. One may be
permitted to hold loth that the Evangelical majority
which led forth the Free Church in 1843 bore with
them the old Scottish ark of the covenant, — the essential
principles of the Scottish Reformed Church, — and that

THE MODERATES. 191

the cosmopolitan sympathies and high intellectual tastes
of the Moderate party will once again prevail within
the Church of Scotland. A few State cobwebs and
a few abstract propositions are all that prevent the
branches of that Church from again growing visibly on
one stem ; and were this the case, religious Scotchmen
would be able to think, as they ought, with equally
diffused gratitude and pride, of the unrivalled systematic
theology of Hill, the sturdy dogmatism and unconquer-
able logic of Cunningham, the historic fame of Robert-
son, the artistic genius of Thomson of Duddingston,
and the moral grandeur of Chalmers.

In religion Hugh Miller was an Evangelical, but in
literature he belonged essentially to the Moderate school.
His literary ideal was that of grace and elegance, and
quiet glow of imaginative fire ; from declamatory vehe-
mence and the strut and stare and swagger of the
modern 'earnest' school, he shrank with sensitive re-
pugnance. To become what Moderate critics would
have pronounced a classic was an object of ambition
incomparably nearer his heart, than to dazzle with
splendid metaphors, or to produce a temporary sensa-
tion. Hence the satisfaction with which we found him
mentioning that 'Baron Hume, the nephew and re-
siduary legatee of the historian, — himself very much a
critic of the old school/ — had described his Scenes and
Legends as a work ' written in an English style, which
he had begun to regard as one of the lost arts.' The
literary skill with which Hugh Miller was to assail
Moderatism had been acquired at the feet of its own
Gamaliels.

The conclusion that the author of the Letter to Lord
Brougham was the man to edit an Edinburgh non-in-
trusion paper had, as we saw from Dr Candlish's letter,

192 EDITOR.

been speedily arrived at by the Evangelical leaders in
the capital of Scotland, but the proposal was not imme-
diately made to Miller. A note reached him from Mr
Robert Paul, manager of the Commercial Bank in Edin-
burgh, an ardent non-intrusionist, requesting him to
visit Edinburgh 'in the course of the summer,' in order
that he might be ' brought into communication with
some gentlemen/ who thought that his talents could be
employed ' in some literario-Christian objects ' — as Mr
Paul, with cautious indefiniteness, puts it. There is no
hint of a newspaper, no allusion to the Church question,
but, under the circumstances, Miller may have read all
that between the lines.

Mr Ross, his judicious and friendly superior in the
Bank at Cromarty, acquiescing in the arrangement, he
proceeded, in company with Mrs Miller, to the south.
They resided with Mr Paul. It was the third time
Hugh Miller had come to Edinburgh. The first time,
he was in quest of employment as a journeyman mason ;
the second, he wanted to qualify for the post of banker's
clerk; he now (1839) found himself ' looked upon as a
lion — a sort of remarkable phenomenon/ The leaders of
the popular party in the Church welcomed him as a valu-
able ally. ' There was, of course/ writes Mrs Miller, ' a
famous dinner party, at which we were introduced to
Dr Cunningham, Dr Candlish, Dr Abercromby, and
others.' The precise nature of the enterprise in which
it was proposed that Miller should be engaged was now
explained to him, but Mr Paul found that the business
could not be got forward so speedily as might be wished.
Hugh still had his doubts, his hesitations, his fears.
Though his nature was stirred to its inmost depths by
sympathy for the cause of the Church and the people,
and though the success of his Letter to Lord Brougham

LETTER FROM FINLAY. 193

had been splendid, that timidity, that caution, that habit
of despondent brooding and of looking at things on
their dark side, which blended so curiously in his com-
position with a high estimate of his own powers and a
courage which, when roused, no opposition could daunt
or peril dismay, held him back. True prophets have
always shrunk, like Moses, from the work assigned them,
and only the false prophet, intent not on the message to
be delivered but on the rewards and honours to be
earned in delivering it, rushes into momentous tasks with
frivolous hardihood. Miller, however, ultimately accepted
the Editorship of the projected paper, and returned to
Cromarty to resign his situation in the Bank and to
arrange for permanent settlement in Edinburgh.

His mind was far from cheerful. A pleasant episode,
however, occurred about the time of his return to Cro-
marty. His friend Finlay had returned from the West
Indies, and, making a tour through England and Ireland,
bent his steps to the North to revisit the scenes of his
youthful gipsyings with Miller. Erom Stratford-on-Avon,
whither he had gone to do homage at the shrine of
Shakspeare, he wrote to his friend. The letter is so full
of kind intelligence that we must make room for the
greater part of it.

FROM ALEX. FINLAY.

' Stratford-on-Avon, 4th September, 1839.

' I little thought the last time I wrote you that the
next letter should have been dated from this classic spot.
My last was from Jamaica about three years since, in
answer to your excellent letter which I have in my port-
manteau, and which I have treasured most carefully, as-
suring me, as it did, that I had one heart at least in the
world that beat in unison with my own. I have suffered

VOL. II. 13

194 EDITOR.

much sickness since I received it, and am travelling to my
native land to try the climate in removing some chronic
affection of the stomach which causes spasms and cramps
that on occasions nearly deprive me of existence. I
left Jamaica on the 1st June, and in St lago de Cuba
was seized with the yellow fever which happened to rage
there at the time, and was as nearly as possiblrfleft there.
Two died of it in the house I was in, and I was insens-
ible. An American doctor, however, rescued me from the
Spanish Sangrados, and by bleeding and calomel I re-
covered, but was as yellow as a guinea. After visiting
all the principal places in Cuba, I left Havana for Charles-
ton, in South Carolina, and visited Philadelphia, Wash-
ington, Baltimore, and other chief towns in the States,
and sailed or rather steamed from New7 York in the
British Queen on the 1st August. Our departure from
the Hudson was the most enthusiastic scene I ever saw.
The city was emptied of its inhabitants. Upwards of
1 50,000 people lined the banks of the noble river, manned
the rigging of the forest of masts, and crowded about
thirty steamboats, wrhich accompanied us nearly 20 miles
down the river with bands of music, singing, and huzzas ;
when to this was added the beautiful green islands, the
romantic banks, and the unclouded flood of light poured
from an American August sun, and the noble steamship
herself, — it was really singularly pleasing. I arrived at
the Isle 'of Man on the 15th, and at London on the 16th.
The leviathan city confounded me, notwithstanding all I

was prepared to expect, especially in the river

I had an interview with his Grace the Duke of Welling-
ton on West India affairs ; he was pleased to say he was
obliged by my information, mentioned his being intimate
with my father, expressed willingness to serve me, and in-
vited me to pass some days with him in winter at Wai-

LETTER FROM FINLAY. 195

nier Castle. I also saw Lord Normanby. I hope some-
thing may be done for our unfortunate Colonies. I was
in the House of Lords when Lord Lyndhurst, the Duke,
and your friend Lord Brougham gave the wretched min-
istry such a thrashing at the close of the session. I have
not read your Letter to Lord Brougham, but suppose you
take part with the Assembly, in which case I fear you

are on the wrong side

And now here I am within a few yards of the spot where
Shakspeare breathed existence and not far from where
he expired. I have walked over his grave. I have just
returned from the churchyard (10 P. M.), and the wish
was ever uppermost in my mind that you had been with
me to enjoy the half-superstitious awe with which I eyed
the tombstones and the abutments of the handsome old
church as they glimmered in the imperfect light ; and so I
have been constrained to write to you. I do not know
why, but I only half enjoy the pleasure of a scene unless
I have some one I love along with me to show it to. . .

This is a beautiful rural village ; some parts

very like what they were in Shakspeare's time. I passed
a few miles off an old house which has the reputation of
being the scene of the poet's high jinks. Adieu, my dear
Hugh, till I visit Scotland. I do not feel at home al-
though all my family are in England, nor will I till my
eye is blessed by the sight of the mountains of dear old
Scotland, and my hand is grasped by thine/

When this letter was put into Miller's hand, he was
in the act of repelling one of those pieces of insolent
annoyance with which the Radical and semi-Radical
section of Cromarty politicians loved to tease him. Be-
longing as he did to the extreme right of the Whig party,
and seeing, in its half-Radical left, 'the plague-spots

196 EDITOR.

and running sores of the party/ he was naturally to them
an object of hostility. Here is his reply to Finlay.

' I received your kind-hearted letter at a time when I
was in no kind-hearted trim. I was engaged amid the
turmoil of a Court of Appeal into which I had been
summoned at the instance of a political shop-keeper
who indulges in the ambition of becoming great in the
Town Council of Cromarty, and who, regarding my vote as
an obstacle in the path, would fain have swept it away.
I was a good deal annoyed by the fellow and somewhat
angry to boot, for nothing, as the event showed, could
be more frivolous than the objection ; but your letter,
which I first perused amid the hum of the Court,
brought me to myself at once, and made me ashamed
that I could be either. I am less a politician than most
men. I love peace, I love leisure, I love my friends,
and when let alone I never think of my enemies ; but I
have been born under a vile, bustling, political, knock-
down sort of planet, and, like Yorick's starling, can't get
out. Well, I shall be quiet enough one day, and till
then, since fate is fate, I must just try and keep up the
quarrel on the right side.

' And so you are in our own country once more, — in
the country of green fields and temperate suns ; and
after a separation of twenty years I am to have the
pleasure of grasping your hand as of yore. We shall
wander among the woods together, and visit the caves,
and climb the Sutor roadie and MacFarquhar's Bed. The
rowans and blae-berries will be all gone, and the crows'-
apples are a failure this year, but you will be in time for
the brambles and the sloes ; it will go hard, too, if we
won't be able to steal a pocketful of potatoes out of one
of the Square parks, and get them roasted among the
rocks, and we shall at least try whether two old fellows,

REPLY TO FINLAY. 197

on the wrong side of thirty-five, can't be as foolish and
happy for a day or two as when they were twenty years
younger. My wife, whom I dare say you will deem
worth liking, is nearly as anxious to see you as I am
myself. She knows all about our early intimacy. I have
shown her the cave in which we have had so many
happy days' experience of the ease with which man can
lay down the usages of civilized life and take up the
savage. I have told her of the little closet in which
we used to draw vile, libellous landscapes without
knowing they were libellous, and read foolish books ;
and of the deep pit which we dug in one of the thickets
of the hill when we intended becoming robbers, and
were furnishing ourselves with bloody-minded daggers,
fashioned out of table-knives, to frighten the girls who
came to the wood for sticks. You, I presume, are still a
single man, and the married have but one advice for
such ; but I am not a giver of advices, nor a taker of
them neither, and so I spare you. There is little
danger of men becoming too happy in any state. It
was only last week I placed a tombstone over the grave
of my infant daughter, a sweet little girl, who in less
than two years had found means to lay strong hold on
the hearts of both her parents, and who left us when our
hopes for her were at the highest. But we must just
live on, thinking as much of duty and as little of enjoy-
ment as we can ; which, after all, is, I believe, the way
in which most is to be enjoyed. Philosophy, however, is
of no use on such occasions ; it just serves now and then
to point a sentence, and that is all.

' It is probable that in little more than two months I
shall leave Cromarty for Edinburgh, where I am invited by
a most respectable and influential body of men to conduct
a Whig newspaper on the side of the Church. I do feel

198 EDITOR.

somewhat like a shrinking of heart when I think of the
undertaking. There is incessant labour and many a
hard battle before me ; and all my hopes of happiness
have been wrapped up in dreams of some quiet retire-
ment with abundance of leisure to devote to literature
and science. But my present choice is not between
literary leisure and a course of literary agitation. It is
between ceaseless employment of a less, for ceaseless
employment of a more, congenial character ; and I am
just making up my mind for the decision. You fear I
am in the wrong in taking part with the General Assembly
in its present quarrel. I have luckily no such fears for
myself, however ; and as I know you too well to suspect
that you will condemn me unheard, I have some hopes
of yet seeing you on the side of the Assembly too. I
have written two pamphlets on the subject ; — the Letter
to Lord Brougham, to which you allude, and the Whig-
gism of the Old School. The first, after passing through
four editions in as many weeks, has been stereotyped,—
the second, though it contains a larger amount of
thought, is circulating more slowly.

' It is a sad thing to suffer among strangers, — sick-
ness is sickness everywhere, but in a strange land it is
something more, I have experienced just enough of it
to know what it is, and to sympathize with those who
know more of it. Had you died in St lago de Cuba, it
is probable I would have been left to mere surmise and
conjecture regarding your fate ; — it would have been one
of the many sad secrets of the same kind which await
the last day. I trust you will be able to lay in a large
stock of health and strength in Scotland ; — the air of our
hills is keen and shrewish, but the same pair of lungs
may breathe it for a hundred years, and there is no sky

REPLY TO FINLAY. 199

beneath which there are better braced muscles or spirits
of a more vigorous tone.

' But what apology am I to make you for not writing
you on return of post as you wished me ? Just this,
that, as Burns says, " my nose has been held so closely to
the grindstone " ever since, that I have not had more
than time to write you a hurried note, and I was desirous
to write you a letter. I hate Chartists and Radicals in
the gross from my very heart, but I have great sympathy
with the poor Chartists and Radicals who, having to
work sixteen hours per day for a meagre livelihood,
avenge their hard fate on all and sundry when they
break loose. It does not surprise me that a man who
has no other amusement should take a longing to cut
throats/

The visit thus eagerly anticipated proved as pleasant
a translation of hope into fact as is ordinarily experienced.
The friends, it is true, did not reach that climax of resus-
citated boyhood which Miller imagined. No potatoes
were stolen or roasted. Time failed, and perhaps heart
also, even for the kindling of fires in the caves. The men
found, when they engaged in confidential talk, that they
had notes to compare which eclipsed in interest the
memories of their boyhood. Finlay had been engaged
to a young lady who perished at sea, and the tender-
hearted man remained single for her sake. His affairs
in Jamaica had not prospered, — affairs in Jamaica seldom
did in those years. In one word, Hugh also having a
weight on his mind, there was probably as much of
pensive reflection, prospective and retrospective, in the
intercourse of the friends, as of gaiety and mirthfulness.
This was the last meeting of Pinlay and Miller. The
former returned to Jamaica, was elected to the House of

200 EDITOR.

Representatives, advocated a wise and liberal policy,
based on the necessity of educating the Negroes in the
duties of free men and elevating them to the level of the
whites, and died in three years.

Before the arrival of Finlay, Miller wrote to Mr
Dunlop, in answer to a request from that gentleman to
furnish a prospectus for the paper to be started in Edin-
burgh. The letter consists mainly of despondent expres-
sions as to the risk run by the writer in undertaking the
editorship. His situation in Cromarty is, at least, he
represents, a certainty, a permanent certainty, and he re-
quests information as to what he may expect in the event
of the paper proving a complete failure.

Mr Dunlop replied to this letter with assurances
fitted to dispel the apprehensions of his correspondent,
at least on the head of pecuniary venture. ' We shall
in the first place require security for your salary in all
events for three years, so that, whether the plan succeeds
or not, you will have some time to look round for an-
other situation. Then, assuming it to fail, although I
could not point out anything so definite as you might
wish, yet I can scarcely conceive the possibility of our
not being able to procure for you a situation equal at
least to what you possess/ For the rest, he encourages
Miller to ' summon courage to make an advance/ and
concludes in these brave words : — ' I do believe that
when a man has an opening through which to do essen-
tial service to the cause of religion and his country, he
may very generally enter with confidence that he will
not be a loser/

Mr Dunlop enclosed certain resolutions, adopted at
a meeting of the promoters of the forthcoming news-
paper, and embodying the ' leading principles ' which it
was to represent and advocate. It was to be in the

4 CORRESPONDS WITH MR DUNLOP. 201

common sense a newspaper, comprising political and
general intelligence ; to be ' pervaded by a spirit of de-
cided piety ; ' to espouse the cause of no one political
party, but be ' scriptural and constitutional ; ' to main-
tain the spiritual independence of the Church, combat
Erastianism, and 'place the connection of Church and
State upon its true and Scriptural footing.' Of non-
intrusion, or the choice of their pastors by congregations,
there is no express mention in these resolutions. Taking
them as his leading lights, Miller composed a prospectus
for the new paper. The name he suggested was the
* Old Whig,' and by this name he designated it in his
prospectus. He followed his instructors in merging the
special interest of non-intrusion in the more general one of
spiritual independence. The prospectus was ' shortened '
by the Edinburgh Committee before being printed.

In the note which accompanied the prospectus to
Edinburgh, he remarks that the production is ' unique
in one respect, perhaps, as it is not merely the only one
its author ever wrote, but also almost the only one he ever
read. I have set my best leg foremost,' he adds, ' and
made my bow, — a stiff enough sort of bow, I dare say,
as becomes my breeding, but made with hearty good-
will and a great deal of respect.' Though ' as much a
coward as ever,' he has now, he says, ' determined on
making the leap.' He refers to a Pamphlet on the
Intrusion side by the Dean of Faculty, from which he
has seen some extracts. ' If he could have printed his
wig and his silk gown,' thinks Miller, ' it would have
been doubtless a splendid affair ; but bad prose an d
little ill-packed arguments that look for all the world
like bundles of pointless needles are not very serious
matters. It is well that the Dean is no Jeffrey. Wit
would do us a world of mischief; and good wit, unlike

202 EDITOR. *

good argument, can be made to fight on the worst side.'
Having forwarded his prospectus to Edinburgh,
Miller waited with eagerness for tidings from the
South. Day by day, week by week, dragged itself
away, and no answer came. To increase his anxiety
some vague rumour crept northwards that a hitch
had occurred in the newspaper project, and that
it was likely to fail after all. He saw no public ad-
vertisement of the paper, and it was evident that
his prospectus had not been printed. At length his
patience gave way, and on the 20th of September,
exactly two months after the date of Mr Dunlop's last
letter, he wrote to Mr Paul, requesting a few lines of
explanation. Alluding to the ' vague report of some
misunderstanding ' which had arisen, ' I cannot help
feeling/ he proceeds, ' that the elements of such a mis-
understanding exist in sufficient amount among our
friends.' He is ' somewhat uneasy.' Not to be too
severe on 'our friends,' he couches his rebuke in the
terms of a philosophical reflection. ' It is, I am afraid,
a too certain fact that, the more honest any party is, the
surer it is of being ill-organized and full of conflicting
opinions. The Jesuits have but one heart and mind
among them ; — the Evangelicals of the Church of Scot-
land, on the contrary, differ as much among themselves
on minor points as they do from their opponents on the
truly important ones.' He returns to the subject of the
Dean's pamphlet, of which his opinion has not improved.
Its arguments 'have neither the dignity of vigorous
thought nor the charm of elegant expression to recom-
mend them, — they are tedious without the recom-
mendation of being just, and sophistical without the
merit of being ingenious.' How exactly Miller had
at this time caught the tone of the Queen Anne

DELAY. 203

critics ! ' It is a fatal sign/ he adds, ' in a literary
man when he cannot cease being professional. Who
would ever have guessed from his lighter writings that
Currie was a physician, or Rogers a banker, or Sir
Walter a clerk of session, or Jeffrey an advocate ? But
the Dean, a man of a very different stamp, is nothing apart
from his trade ; — he can write law papers, and nothing
else ; — his pamphlet is a piece of mere special pleading ;
—he is a lawyer, and a lawyer only.7

This of course brings a prompt reply. Mr Paul,
deeply grieved, has been trusting to Mr Dunlop to keep
Miller informed; Mr Dunlop, deeply grieved, has been
trusting to Mr Paul. On the main point, however, all
is right. The capital which the publisher who was
to have undertaken the practical part of the enter-
prise could divert from his general business and de-
vote to the paper had been deemed inadequate, and
the affair had hung back. But ' a respectable young
man with a few hundred pounds ' had consented to join
him in part-proprietorship of the paper, and to give his
whole attention to its management. The young man
thus described by Mr Dunlop was Mr Robert Fairly,
bred a printer, experienced in the printing department
of a newspaper, whose steady industry, high moral
character, and eminent common sense had placed him
in a position to make this offer. Mr Fairly was pre-
pared to enter into friendly relations with Miller. He
had seen the Lines to a Dial in a Church-yard, and
was greatly struck with them. From the time when
Miller came as editor to Edinburgh to the day of his
death, Mr Fairly continued his warmest admirer and
most affectionate friend, and now cherishes his memory
with a reverence and tenderness which would satisfy Mr
Carlyle's utmost requirements in the way of hero-worship.

204 EDITOR.

In Mr Paul's letter to Miller on this occasion the
inevitable pamphlet of the Dean turns up. Mr Cun-
ningham, Mr Candlish, Mr Dunlop, and Dr Chal-
mers have set about replying to it. ' The whole sleep'
remarks Chalmers, ' will be overturned upon the Dean/ so
that, as Mr Paul hopefully adds, ' he will be absolutely
stung to death.' It may be stated for the information of
curious readers, that the production of which Miller
spoke so contemptuously, but which raised so fierce and
general a buzz in the non-intrusion hive, was entitled
' A Letter to the Lord Chancellor, on the claims of the
Church of Scotland in regard to its jurisdiction, and on
the proposed changes in its polity, by John Hope, Esq.,
Dean of Faculty.' It has been described as ' a very
leviathan among pamphlets, extending to no fewer than
290 pages.' This fact will, I trust, be accepted as my
apology for not having made its closer acquaintance, or
attempted to estimate the effect of the stings inflicted
by the aforesaid bees upon its extensive surface.

It more concerns us to note that Miller is at last
ready to take flight for Edinburgh. The name suggested
by him for the paper has been discarded, and that of The
Witness adopted in its stead. On the 23rd of Decem-
ber he once more writes to Mr Dunlop from Cromarty,
in answer to a note from that gentleman telling him that
all difficulties have been vanquished, and that the sooner
he appears in Edinburgh the better. ' I still,' he says,
' feel occasional shrinkings of heart when I think of the
untried field on which I am so soon to enter. " Tremble
thus the brave ? " asks one of Ossian's heroes when on
the eve of his first battle. But I think of the past
and take courage, — of the past in my country's history,
with its clear unequivocal bearing on the cause in which
1 am to be engaged, — on the past, too, in my own expe-

ESTIMATE OF HIM IN THE NORTH. 205

rience of life. I have seen much of the goodness of the
Almighty. Twenty years ago I was a loose-jointed boy
in rather delicate health, taxed above my strength as a
labourer in a quarry. It is surely a much better thing
to be employed as an advocate of principles which I
have ever regarded as sacred, and of whose importance
the more carefully I examine I am convinced the more.'
Hugh Miller did not quit the North of Scotland
without some public recognition of his worth and
talents. His name was already well known through-
out the northern counties, and in Cromarty and its neigh-
bourhood he was not only looked upon with pride as the
literary wonder of the place, but regarded with affection-
ate confidence as a judicious counsellor on local affairs
and a ready friend and help in every little business
which his townsmen might have in hand. His friends
were many. He had not sought them, but they had
come, and he had never lost one. Sensible men in the
middle and upper classes are apt to be shy of workmen
who emerge into local celebrity by writing or speechify-
ing. In the vast majority of instances they turn out to
have no real basis of information or talent, and to pos-
sess no better claim to distinction than vehement volubil-
ity in the expression of political or religious opinions of
an extreme type. But Miller's poems were marked by
no extravagance ; his Letters on the Herring Fishery
were full of well-selected facts, and were written with
animation, picturesqueness, and good taste ; his Scenes
and Legends were remarkable for the quiet elegance of
their style and the vigorous simplicity and home-bred
force of their thinking. His scrupulous sense of honour
in money matters and pride of independence were felt
by all who became acquainted with him ; and it is a
painful but unquestionable fact that when a man of

206 EDITOR.

assured position in society finds himself approached
by a person who has been transformed from an in-
competent artisan into a shabby-genteel hanger-on of
literature, he has an instinctive suspicion that the gen-
tleman of the press will beg. No such suspicion in re-
lation to Hugh Miller could hold its place in the mind
of any one who was three minutes in his company.
His keen interest, and considerable acquirements, in
geological science, had brought him into intercourse
with the Messrs Anderson of Inverness, and made him
known to every enthusiast in geological or antiquarian
research in the north of Scotland. Mr Carruthers
will stand well for the literary culture of the northern
counties, and he was not the sole cultivator of literature
in those parts who had formed high expectations of
Miller's future career as a man of letters. He had noAv
been for five years connected with the Bank, and this
sufficed to place him behind the scenes with regard to
all business operations in the district, and to make his
name known to its men of capital. Enough : Hugh
Miller was already a public man in the north of Scot-
land ; and, ere he departed for Edinburgh, a number of
his friends and admirers entertained him at a public
dinner in Cromarty, and presented him with a tea-
service in plate. Seldom has a demonstration of the
kind attested a warmer or more sincere feeling on the one
hand or been more honourably earned on the other.
Those who had watched Miller most closely and who
knew him best stepped forward to declare that they
loved him and considered him a credit to them.

The best room in the best Cromarty Hotel was tastefully laid out
and lighted for the occasion. The dinner and wines gave complete
satisfaction. The chair was taken by George Cameron, Esq., Sheriff
Substitute of the eastern district of Ross-shire, supported by General
Sir Hugh Eraser, Captain Mackay Sutherland of Udale, the Rev.

PUBLIC DINNER AT CROMARTY. 207

Messrs Stewart and Mackenzie of Cromarty, Dr Macdonald, Mr Fowler,
younger, of Raddery, Mr Hartley of the 93rd Regiment, Mr Grigor, bank
agent, Invergordon, Mr Joyner of Cromarty, Mr Murray, Mr Middletori
of Davidston, Mr Taylor of Westfield, Mr D. Ross, merchant, &c. &c.
The croupierswere Robert Ross, Esq., banker,and Mr John Taylor, sheriff-
clerk. On the right of the chairman sat Mr Miller ; near him his friend
Mr Carruthers. After the cloth was drawn, the usual loyal toasts drunk,
and an air played by the musical band in attendance, the silver service
intended for presentation to the guest of the evening was brought
into the room and placed on the table.

The Chairman then called for a special bumper, and spoke to the
following effect : — ' Before calling upon you, gentlemen, to drink your
glasses, it becomes rny duty, as you have done me the honour of placing
me, however unworthy, in this chair, to state that Mr Miller, being
about to leave this, his native town, to enter upon a wider field of
literary labour in Edinburgh, it was deemed fitting to invite him to this
public entertainment, and to present him, at the same time, with some
substantial proof of the high estimation in which he is held where he
is best known. (Cheers.) The articles on your table have accordingly
been procured for that purpose, and procured, I am happy to say, by
means of a contribution as free and cordial as the most sensitive mind
could desire. It is for this reason, rather than on account of their in-
trinsic value, that I now, sir (addressing Mr Miller), in name of this
most respectable company, and of the absent subscribers, request your
acceptance of them, with our best wishes for your prosperity and happi-
ness in that other part of the kingdom where Providence has cast your
lot. As, in the language of the poet, —

" 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,"

we do not anticipate that you will think less frequently or warmly of
this district, or admire its physical or moral beauty the less, because
you cease to reside in it ; but should you, amidst the toils and cares of
business, forget it for a time, these things will recall it to your recollec-
tion, and tend to strengthen the ties by which you must ever continue
bound to a place which you have illustrated by your writings, and the
inhabitants of which, while they contemplate your past career with
pride, will watch your future progress with mingled feelings of interest
and affection. (Loud cheers.) I need only add, in the words of the
inscription, which express shortly the motives that prompted the gift,
that this plate is " presented to Hugh Miller, Esq., by his friends in the
shire of Cromarty and Easter Ross, in testimony of their admiration of
his talents as a writer, • and of their respect and regard for him as a
member of society." Permit rue now, gentlemen, before I sit down, to
request that you dedicate this bumper to the health of our excellent
guest. (Cheers.) For my own part, I feel peculiar pleasure in propos-
ing this toast, because we are assembled not to do honour to a man of
rank or title, however highly we may think of those distinctions, but
to pay the homage of our respect to a man who has been truly desig-

208 EDITOR.

nated by an eminent individual one of Nature's nobles. Fortunately
for me, this subject requires little to be said to ensure to it from you a
hearty reception. Here, where he is so well known, and where his
merits are so justly appreciated, the mere mention of Mr Miller's name
suggests to the mind all that is pure, and honourable, and exemplary
in conduct, associated with talents and acquirements of no ordinary
kind. This has, indeed, been the birthplace and residence of men re-
markable for their intelligence, sound sense, and public spirit. None
can think of George Ross of Cromarty, and of his liberality and patriot-
ism, by many proofs of which we are now surrounded, without respecting
his memory. Nor of William Forsyth, whose enlarged views, commer-
cial enterprise, and active benevolence, extended in their efforts over
the whole of this northern part of the kingdom, without a feeling of
exultation, that this was the scene of so much excellence. But in Mi-
Miller we see kindred qualities combined with gifts of a rarer, if not a
higher order. Passing over his Scenes and Legends, with which you
are all acquainted, his genius and industry have enabled him, without
the aid of a scholastic education, to present to us the history of the
lives of those men in a style as pure, and elegant, and captivating, as
that of similar works by authors better known to fame. The same
genius has enabled him to read the book of nature, and by means of
geological investigations in this locality, to add to the general stock of
knowledge, in a department of the greatest interest and importance.
His recent writings on a debateable subject have attracted a good deal
of attention throughout Scotland. There are now hearing me gentle-
men who concur in his views on ecclesiastical questions, and others
who dissent from them ; but however widely our opinions may differ
on this point, I infer, from our presence here on this occasion, a una-
nimity of sentiment as to the honest earnestness, the originality of
thought, the beauty of composition, and the ability by which those
productions are distinguished. (Great cheering.) These things estab-
lish a strong claim to our respect, and we do but a simple act of justice
in acknowledging it. Gentlemen, you have marked this brief and
feeble expression of my feelings in regard to Mr Miller, by your concur-
rence and approbation, and I shall not detain you longer. It only re-
mains for me to call upon you to drink his health with all the honours,
and success to him in the Scottish metropolis.' Mr Miller's health was
drunk with tremendous cheering.

Mr Miller then rose to return thanks, and was received with loud
cheers. He said, ' Mr Chairman and gentlemen, the vocabulary of feel-
ing is much more limited than that of thought. We have many words
to express what we think, but comparatively few to express what we \
feel, and often, too, the more intense our feelings, those few words be-
come the fewer. Never have I so forcibly experienced the truth of the
remark as this day. There is a fine line in one of our modern poets,
worth whole pages of ordinary poetry —

" The old familiar faces."

PUBLIC DINNER. 209

I feel myself among them, and feel that I am not to be among
them long. My heart is full when I think of the kindness you have
shown me, and the honour you have done me — so unmerited on my
part ; yet I do feel proud and gratified when I reflect that the kindness
and honour I have experienced have been rendered by individuals for
whom I have ever cherished the kindest feelings, and entertained the
highest respect. There is, I believe, no mind, however humble its
powers or its views, that does not cherish some spark of ambition, and
I have cherished my own particular wishes and hopes. They were
not fixed very high. Burns tells us of an ambition which had animated
him from his earliest days — an ambition founded on intense love of his
country — the love which led him when he saw " the rough burr thistle
spreading wide " to " spare the symbol dear." (Cheers.) His character-
istic wish was —

" That he, for puir auld Scotland's sake,
Some useful plan or book might make,
Or sing a sang at least."

My wish was of a more humble kind, and more in accordance with my
powers. Even at that early age when our estimates of ourselves are
highest, and our hopes most sanguine, it rose no higher than that I
might be able to give some name in literature to the interesting dis-
trict of country in which we live, of which scarce any one had written
before. (Cheers.) I found it a new and untrodden field, full of those
interesting vestiges of past times which are to be found — not in the
broken remains of palaces and temples, but in the traditional recollec-
tions of the common people. These traditions formed my earliest
literature. (Cheers.) My humble wish of making this district of Scot-
land known in literature has been but partially accomplished ; but my
enjoyment has been great, if not my success. I have found literature
to be truly its own reward. My advice to every one desirous to
increase, his happiness would be, Cultivate your mind. (Cheers.) It is
natural for man to look beyond his present circumstances. It is no
doubt, in its original integrity, an instinct of his constitution, bearing
reference to his spiritual nature, arid to a future state. Both his
imagination and his hope — and we are all, in some degree, creatures of
hope and imagination — have their seat, not in the present time or the
existing circumstances, but in the past or in the future. In the field
of literature, above every other, this principle finds its fullest scope.
The shepherd in Ramsay boasts that, when tending his flock upon the
hills, he could converse with kings. It is, indeed, no small privilege
to be admitted to the converse of the true kings of the human race,
the men of the most comprehensive minds and the most exalted senti-
ments— to the profundities of a Bacon or a Locke, the high imaginings
of a Shakspeare and a Milton. (Cheers.) There is another principle to
which I would advert. The love of novelty is inherent in man, and it
is natural for him to go on in acquirement, adding idea to idea, and one
species of knowledge to another. This is one of the grand distinctions

VOL. II. 14

210 EDITOR.

between the human intellect and the instincts of the inferior animals.
In accordance with this principle, there are few who would not be
travellers if they could. The great bulk of mankind, however, are tied
down by circumstances to some one particular locality, and it is for-
tunate that there is no locality in which the love of novelty may not
be gratified — in which, however tied down, we may not become
travellers, and enter, time after time, on a new field ; and this, not by
changing place, but by connecting it with some newly-acquired science,
and thus changing, as it were, its nature. I have strikingly experienced
this with regard to this district of the north. Having exhausted it
with respect to its connection with the history of our country and those
remnants of the belief of our forefathers, which let us more thoroughly
into the thoughts and feelings of the past, I have set myself to exhibit
it as a locality in which the naturalist — a White of Selbourne, for
instance — might have delighted : and I straightway found that I had
travelled into a new district. Objects, before unnoticed, or but slightly
regarded, rose into interest. Even the spiky leaves and light florets of
the thirty or forty sorts of the humble family of the grasses, which I
met with in my short walks, every insect that enjoyed itself on the
breeze or the stream, grew into beauty and importance. Still more was
I interested when, passing from the present creation, I found the
locality a rich museum of the remains of former creations. Set your
imaginations to work, conceive the most wonderful and unheard-of
things, and the history of the district in which we now are will go
beyond your extremest conceptions. Would that I could raise the
curtain, as it rises in a theatre, and show you scene after scene as it
arose ! (Cheers.) We are surrounded by the well-known creatures of
the present creation ; and the remains of two older creations, each
different from the other, and both from the present, are under our feet.
Where we now are, in the remote past there existed an immense lake,
more extensive, perhaps, than the Lake Superior in North America,
filled with the strange uncouth creatures of the second age of the
world, creatures whose very type is lost. This state of things passed ;
untold ages went by, and. where we now are there extended a wide
ocean, filled with its peculiar inhabitants. The master reptiles of a
later time and the strangely beautiful plants of a tropical climate
flourished upon its shores. (Cheers.) But enough of this. It has
been well remarked by Burke, that by fixing the mind strongly on any
set of ideas, the sense of present evils may cease to annoy us. This is
one of the great advantages resulting from the pursuit of literature.
It raises the thought above the annoyance of the present time, and
makes those troubles which come to all sit upon us more lightly. I
trust I may say I have had experience of this ; but I have dwelt upon
the subject too long, and shall not further detain you. I have ever owed
much to the kindness of friends, and never before perhaps did I see so
many of them assembled together.' (Cheers.) Mr Miller again ex-
pressed his grateful acknowledgments, and sat down amidst the cheers
of the company.

PUBLIC DINNER. 211

The toast of the Church of Scotland called up the Rev. Mr Stewart,
who, having shortly referred to the Church, added his warmest wishes
for the welfare of Mr Miller. By his departure he would lose a valued
friend and a most enlightened hearer, but he rejoiced that he was to
enter on a more extensive scene of usefulness. (Cheers.)

Mr Carruthers returned thanks for the toast in honour of the press,
and stated the great gratification he enjoyed in being amongst them
that evening. He had early discovered in their respected guest the
germ of those fine talents and moral dispositions which had elevated
him in the scale of society, and rendered his progress in life and the
development of his mind an object of the deepest interest and solici-
tude. In him the manifestations of original genius had not been ac-
companied with any of those debasing and revolting alloys which were
sometimes mingled with it ; he had advanced onwards by a straight
path and a spotless life. There was a fine passage in Pope, where the
reproaches and detractions which envy sometimes throws around
merit were compared to the vapours that rise around the sun ; instead
of obscuring the great luminary of day, they only added to its bril-
liancy, and formed a new temple for its effulgence. In like manner,
the early difficulties of their friend in the acquirement of knowledge,
his solitary hours of study, amidst hardships, toil, obscurity, and neg-
lect, but enhanced the merit of his present position,

' For even those clouds at length adorn his way,
Reflect new lustre and augment the day.'

He trusted his friend was destined to run a long career of usefulness
and honour, and he might rely upon it, that his townsmen and his
early friends could never become indifferent to his future fortunes.

Speeches alternated with songs, and cheers were liberally allotted
to both, until, after an evening spent with utmost hilarity and good
humour, without one jarring word or circumstance, the party broke up
about ten o'clock. Mr Miller next day left Cromarty for Edinburgh,
carrying with him, we need hardly add, the prayers and good wishes
of his friends and townsmen.

Such, very considerably abridged, is the account of
this festivity, surely one of the best of its kind, and that
a good kind, which adorned the columns of the Inver-
ness Courier.

212

CHAPTER III.

AT THE EDITORIAL DESK.

IN the last days, then, of 1839 Hugh Miller proceeded
to Edinburgh to edit the Witness. He stepped into
the arena alone. His wife and infant daughter he left for
the present at Cromarty. Taking lodgings in St Pat-
rick's Square, in the old part of the town, he applied
himself with ardour and assiduity to his task. ' In weak-
ness and great fear,' diffident of his power to maintain
the conflict against ' well-nigh the whole neAvspaper
press of the kingdom,' he was nevertheless ' thoroughly
convinced of the goodness of the cause,' and willing to
devote to it the whole energies of his mind. ' I found
myself,' he was soon able to say, ' in my true place/ The
Witness started with a circulation of about 600, but the
high character of its articles at once attracted attention,
and it became evident in an exceedingly brief period
that an immense accession had been made to the power
with which the majority in the Church acted on the
body of their countrymen. And from the first, the per-
sonality of Hugh Miller was felt to be too massive and
original to be absorbed in the anonymity of journalism.
The voice of the Witness was known to be his voice, and

THE EXCITEMENT OF THE TIME. 213

the name of Hugh Miller was mentioned with affection-
ate enthusiasm, as that of the people's own champion,
who among the laymen of the conflict was what Chal-
mers was among the clergy. I may be permitted to
quote here a few sentences which I have written upon
the subject elsewhere. ' Of the influence exerted upon
the public mind of Scotland by Hugh Miller's articles
in the Witness on the Church question, there are thou-
sands still living who can speak. A year or two before
the Disruption I passed a winter in a Highland manse.
I was too young to form a distinct idea of the merits of
the dispute. But there was a sound in the air which I
could not help hearing. It seems as if it were in my
ears still. Never have I witnessed so steady, intense,
enthralling an excitement. And I have no difficulty,
even at this distance, in discriminating the name which
rang loudest through the agitated land. It was that of
Hugh Miller, — the people's friend, champion, hero ! '
It was appropriate that a self-educated man should
speak for the commonalty of Scotland. It suited the
stubborn independence and self-helping vigour of the
race. The popular imagination, besides, ready always
to be moved by adventitious circumstances, found an
additional charm and pictures queness in his having been
a stone-mason, one who had actually ' bared a quarry '
and hewn in a church-yard. But this rugged plebeian,
who stood forth to fight the people's battle, was not one
who required the indulgence of refined critics. No pen
wielded on either side in the controversy was more classic
than that of Hugh Miller.

He shared the excitement which he contributed so
largely to produce. Not only was he animated by the
clearest sense of duty, and profoundly convinced that the
cause was that of conscience, liberty, and Scotland, but

214 EDITOR.

he was conscious that the fray was not without its spec-
tators. ' The series of events which terminated in the
Disruption ' — the words are his own — ' formed a great
and intensely exciting drama, and the whole empire
looked on/ He shared the excitement of his country-
men ; but he also, it need scarcely be added, suffered
from it. Never did Hugh Miller toil as during these
first three months of his editorship of the Witness. He
wrote not merely the leading articles, but a large pro-
portion of the remarks introductory to the reports of
public meetings, paragraphs on the decease of eminent
men, and so on. The paper was published twice a
week, and Miller would often have more than one re-
gular leader in each number. His brother combatants,
his personal friends, the buzz of applause arising through-
out Scotland, cheered him on. In nothing was his tem-
perament more characteristically the temperament of a
man of genius — of literary genius — than in his suscep-
tibility to the influence of praise. It was once truly
said of him that ' he was like a horse which can be urged
by the voice of encouragement beyond its power of living
exertion/ Soon also the new paper was attacked by
one or other of its many rivals of the opposite side, and
with all his gentleness Miller was, when roused, a ter-
rible foe. Michelet holds that there is a trace of ferocity
in the artist's temperament. ' He is kindly — he is fero-
cious. His heart is full of tenderness for the weak and
little. Give him orphans to watch over, he will watch
over them, and clasp them to his heart;' but set him at
defiance, touch a person or a principle which he honours,
and he glares on you with an eye like Apollo's on Mar-
syas, ' watching how the whetting sped/ Professor
Masson has remarked that Hugh Miller never engaged
in controversial battle without not merely ' slaying,

HIS POLEMICAL SEVERITY. 215

but battering, bruising, and beating out of shape ' his
antagonist. But the moment his enemy was vanquished,
his anger died away. A magistrate of Edinburgh once
awakened his wrath. He thought that the civic digni-
tary had used the power of place to annoy or crush a
more honest man than himself, and there was a pomp-
ousness in his public behaviour, and a meanness in
some of his money-making practices, carefully disguised
from the public eye, which gave Miller advantage over
him. An article appeared in the Witness which made
him the laughing-stock of Edinburgh. Next day, when
Miller stept into the publishing office, some one made
a remark on the severity of his article. ' Ah/ said
Miller, in his calmest tone — a very dangerous tone—
' I have another shot in the locker for the Baillie.'
' Really, Mr Miller,' replied the first speaker, ' I think
you ought to forbear. Baillie - - has had his head
shaved.' Miller left the second shot in the locker.

Occasionally he was hounded on his prey by the
clerical magnates who took interest in the Witness, —
never, I believe, by Chalmers ; and he has been heard,
on becoming acquainted with persons to whom he
had administered the lash, to express his regret, and
to add that, ' if he had known what manner of man
this was, not all the ministers in the Free Church
would have persuaded him to inflict the castigation'/
That his blows should fall sometimes on the wrong head,
or descend with undue momentum, was a necessity of
the case. Among the contradictions and limitations of
our condition none perhaps is more sad than this, that
the very intensity of one's devotion to one's principles
tends to incapacitate him for dealing fairly with men
who deem it their duty to assail them. ' If we clearly
perceive any one thing,' says Coleridge, with fine wisdom

216 EDITOR.

and delicate charity, £ to be of vast and infinite importance
to ourselves and all mankind, our first feelings impel us
to turn with angry contempt from those who doubt and
oppose it. Whenever our hearts are w^arrn, and our
objects great and excellent, intolerance is the sin that
does most easily beset us/ Few controversialists have
erred less on the side of severity than Hugh Miller, none
perhaps with keener contrition when he found that he
had been in the wrong. He told Mrs Miller that he
found it necessary to ' abstract ' men before he could
punish them, and that ' the sight of the human counte-
nance, if it had but a tinge of geniality, so softened and
unmanned him,' that he could not shake off the thought
of the individual, and had no heart to attack him.

It has been said that Miller, as editor of the Witness,
felt himself in his place. The stimulus of a strong ex-
citement was useful in rousing his mind to full exertion,
and in dispelling the meditative, pensive, almost languid
mood in which, in the stillness of Cromarty, he might
have indulged. His style, after he came to Edinburgh,
compared with that of the Scenes and Legends, is
improved in energy and fervour. To do his best, he
required to be moved ; and his most powerful composi-
tions are, I think, his earnest newspaper articles and
the Letter to Lord Brougham. Dr Guthrie said with
reference to the article on the siege of Acre, that he
would rather have written it than taken the fortress.
Doubtless, also, Miller was at this time happy. ' He
drank delight of battle with his peers.' Fervid emotion
bathed the framework of his intellect in flame. The ex-
citement brought its own reward. The additional power
and keener sympathetic joy, which a great agitation pro-
duces, more than compensate for the daintier pleasures of
the intellectual recluse. But of course, in this heroic joy

OVER- WORK. 217

there is a burning which consumes the earthen vessel.
While Miller rejoiced in spirit as a strong man to run a
race, his body and brain gave unmistakeable evidence
that the pace bore hard upon him. Hour after hour he
would sit writing, until the letters danced before his eyes
and every nerve tingled under the strain. Heedless of
exposure, and working deep into the long winter nights,
he caught influenza. No matter ; he would not pause ;
he would not lay aside the pen which he had taken up
in the cause of his Church and his country. The giddi-
ness of mere exhaustion became the semi-delirium which
accompanies inflammatory affections of the lungs and
pleura. Had the intense excitement of the conflict been
suspended, he would probably have fallen into a state of
prostration like that which overtook his father in the
sea-fight,- who, while the guns continued to roar, did the
work of two men, and, when they ceased, fell upon the
deck more feeble than a child. Miller grew haggard in
the conflict, but he never flinched.

The darkest hour, however, was now past, and streaks
of dawn appeared on the horizon. In April, 1840, he
was joined by Mrs Miller, who brought with her his infant
daughter, Harriet. It was a dark and dreary evening
when Mrs Miller saw his figure, in grey suit and plaid,
looming through the mist on Granton pier. Her
presence, she found, was much needed. Miller looked
ill, and his circumstances were comfortless. His sitting-
room was dingy with dust and littered with papers.
The lodgings were kept by a widow, who, with her
family, occupied the rest of the floor. One of the
sons took the style of artist, and sat painting in the
principal sitting-room. Another cultivated poetry. The
only daughter spent a large part of her time in the
practice of singing, with a view to appearing before the

218 EDITOR.

public. She accompanied herself on the piano, and her
shakes and bravuras, on which she industriously lingered,
would not have a soothing effect on Hugh's nerves
while engaged with his articles. The only servant in the
establishment was a ' little maid of all work — a child
some twelve years of age who did not look above nine/
—and who 'had all that passed for cleaning in the
apartments to accomplish by her own little self.' Mrs
Miller did something to alleviate for her husband the
horror of all this, but it is obvious that the sole adequate
remedy was to get out of it.

So deeply had Miller felt the discomforts of his
situation that, before Mrs Miller's arrival, he had taken
a small house in Sylvan Place on the southern or country
side of the Meadows. ' It was No. 5, the house
farthest up the lane. There was a tiny morsel of railed
ground in front, a bit somewhat larger under grass at
the back. A pleasant market-garden surrounded this
enclosure on two sides. A small white-washed dairy
stood embowered in trees at the farther end of the lane/
A short walk through lanes and fields led to the gently
sloping rise of the Braid hills, from which Scott described
and Turner drew Edinburgh. Under these improved
aspects Hugh Miller set up his first household in the
Scottish capital.

To furnish the house was no easy matter. It had
been thought best to dispose of the furniture which had
been in the dwelling in Cromarty, but, owing to a con-
tinuance of heavy rains, the attendance at the sale was
meagre in the extreme, and the household goods, valued
at about £150, had yielded a net amount of £40.
Such was the sum available for the new furnishing.
Miller's salary was £200. He absolutely refused to
permit any article to be bought on credit. The diffi-

HIS EDINBURGH HOUSEHOLD. 219

culty of solving the problem was increased by the Edin-
burgh custom of requiring the occupant of a house to
supply grates and 'fittings ' of all kinds. Nevertheless,
with activity in attending sales of furniture, contentment
with small beginnings, and patient waiting between
purchases, Mrs Miller, to whom, in his entire absorp-
tion in the work of the paper, her husband left the matter,
contrived to make the house first habitable and then
comfortable. After a little time she began to assist in
the editorial department, first with paste and scissors,
then with pen, as contributor of reviews of books, earning
thereby some £20 per annum, which went to the furnish-
ing. Once when Miller returned from breakfasting with
Chalmers, he told his wife that the great man had com-
plimented him on one of the Witness critiques, and that
he had never felt so proud in his life as in saying that
it was by his wife. The business of furnishing, though
difficult, was not without its alleviations.

Capable of existing with perfect convenience in a
cave, one stone serving for table, another for seat, and a
plate, knife, and fork the whole 'plenishing/ Hugh
suffered nothing from the anxiety to put things on a
respectable footing which oppressed Mrs Miller. The
spring leaves opening round him, the blue sky above, the
family of genius with their piteous little drudge at safe
distance, his wife beside him and his little daughter on
his knee, he could feel once more that he had a home.

A daily visitor from the first was the sub-editor, Mr
James Mackenzie, then a student of theology, subse-
quently minister of Dunfermline. Young, ardent, en-
thusiastic beyond measure in the cause of spiritual
independence, proud of Miller as the popular champion,
affectionate in disposition and caressing in manner,
sincere, natural, impulsive as a child, he completely won

220 EDITOR.

Miller's heart. ' I scarce ever/ says Mrs Miller, ' saw
any one get so near my husband as James Mackenzie
did. I often remarked that men of a certain feminine
cast of affection — not intellect — could approach him
more closely than others. - Mr Mackenzie had that
clinging affectionate nature which nestles into a home
wherever it finds space. He brought down to the editor
all the latest pieces of intelligence, accompanied always
with vehement comments of his own. He saved him a
vast deal of personal trouble, and was indeed to him as a
son or younger brother. Ten to one, when he had run
down with some piece of information, and was shouting
it out, our little Ha-ha, whom he loved with a most
intense fervour, would have climbed into his arms, wound
her arms round his neck, prattling her sweet words into
his ear, and his awful epithets would be thundered out
in the interval between kisses and caresses/

The Ha-ha here referred to was Harriet, Miller's little
child. ' Ha-ha, as she styled herself, was an uncommonly
lovely and attractive child. A fair, azure-eyed little
thing, with golden curls which reached to her waist.
Naturally refined, with great elegance of figure, she
glanced about the house like a sunbeam, her childish
voice bursting out in a continual ripple of prattle and
song. Song more often even than prattle — for she was
one of those children richly gifted as children, with a cer-
tain genius blended with infantile graces which sometimes
developes with the growth, sometimes falls away like the
blossom of a too early spring. Such was Scott's pet
Marjory. Little Ha-ha, however, had one gift which I
have never met with in any other child. It was that of
natural improvisation. Every little incident, every phase
of feeling, was embodied in song and poetry, which she
would continue through a long summer's day. The

SOCIETY. 221

music was always full of melody, the poetry a sort of
measured blank verse, sometimes rhyming, sometimes
not. It fell on the ear like the ripple of a

" hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune." '

The section of Edinburgh society which Miller would
probably have found at heart most congenial was closed
to him by the sectarian animosities of the time. Scotch
literature had found him out before the clerical world of
Scotland cast eyes on him, for it was as a literary man that
he had interested Principal Baird, and we have seen
proofs of the cordial feeling with which he was regarded
by Mr Carruthers, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, and Mr
Robert Chambers. But these, with the large majority
of literary men throughout Scotland, viewed the claims
of the Church either with positive disapproval or with
indifference, and would have told Miller that, in be-
coming the fighting man of the non-intrusionists, he was
throwing himself away. . He, on the other hand, was so
fervent in his devotion to the cause he had espoused, so
confident that the best and dearest interests of his coun-
try were at stake, that he could not enjoy any society un-
less it gave him on this point not only tolerance but
sympathy. He did not, therefore, during the early
period of his residence in Edinburgh, mingle in literary
circles. The clerical leaders, with the exception of Dr
Chalmers, with whom he soon grew into warm friend-
ship, did not welcome him to their firesides with the
genial hospitality to which he had been accustomed in
Cromarty. His only intercourse with them in a social
capacity was at an occasional dinner-party given by an
evangelical publisher or lawyer.

His editorial contests in capacity of non-intrusion

222 EDITOR.

man-at-arms, were occasionally so severe, the castigation
he administered so stinging, and the fury it awakened
so conspicuous, that he conceived it possible that he
might be personally assaulted, and, with that constitu-
tional timidity or constitutional pugnacity which charac-
terized him, took means to guard against such a con-
tingency. One evening Mr Carruthers had called for
him in company with a friend at his house in Sylvan
Place, and, not finding him at home, was returning in
the thick dusk by the road across the Meadows. Sud-
denly Miller strode past without recognizing them, and
Mr Carruthers turning round exclaimed with mock fero-
city, ' There goes that rascally editor of the Witness!
Hugh at once faced round and presented a pistol.
Another word and glance of course revealed the mis-
take, and Miller excused himself by saying that it would
not surprise him to be attacked any day. As Mr Car-
ruthers and his friend resisted Miller's request to return
with him, he accompanied them to their hotel, and they
spent one or two pleasant hours together.

Miller never became what printers and newspaper
proprietors call a ready editor. To receive at mid-
night proof-sheets of the report of a long Parliament-
ary debate, or to sit to a still more advanced hour with
attention fixed upon every tedious or wandering speaker
who has taken part in it, — an exercise exhaustive and
distressing in the last degree to soul and body, — and
then to take pen in hand and strike off, as fast as the
letters can be traced, an analysis of the discussion, with
examination of the principal arguments and judgment
upon the whole, in clear and forcible language, garnished
with historical allusions, pointed illustrations, and a
spicing of eulogy or banter,— this feat, accomplished
fifty times a session by practised hands on the London

EDITORIAL CAPACITY. 223

and, mutatis mutandis, the provincial press, was never
attempted by Hugh Miller. Chalmers remarked of him
that, when he did go off, he was a great gun, and the re-
verberation of his shot was long audible, but he required
a deal of time to load.

It was his delight to find the subject of an article
in some topic suggested by a friend, the more if old
and pleasant associations were recalled by it. When a
Danish corvette, for example, appeared in the Bay of
Cromarty, and Mrs Allardyce, widow of a Scottish
clergyman and one of Miller's valued friends, sent him
from his old home a few lines which she had written on
the occasion, the lines were at once felt to be too good
for the mere poetical corner, and were kept back until
they could be presented to the reader in the setting of
an editorial article. For days or weeks the thing would
dwell in Miller's thoughts, and at last the article, with
gossippy speculation as to the relationship between the
Danes and the Scotch, and a copious account of the
friendship of Cousin Walter and young Wolf, and one
more description of the Sutors and the Bay, would charm
all those — and they were not few — who took the Witness
for the sake of the editorial essays of Miller.

The routine work of editing he never so completely
mastered as the routine work of banking ; rather, per-
haps, I should say that he never could feel or affect that
transcendent interest in the petty political questions of
the day, which beseems the man whose function it is to
keep others perpetually interested in them. On Church
questions he viewed things in his own way, and even
when there was no discrepancy of opinion between him
and the leaders, he was apt to surprise them by the
time and manner of his discussing questions or advocating
causes. During the few months preceding the Disrup-

224 EDITOR.

tion, for example, Chalmers was bringing all the energies
of his genius to solve the grave economical problems
with whose practical solution the Free Church would
require to grapple. The religious mind of Scotland,
however, was at the moment deeply agitated by what
may be called the Railway phase of the Sabbath ques-
tion. Hugh Miller's enthusiasm for the Sabbath was as
great as his enthusiasm for the Church, and he appre-
hended national disaster on a large scale as the ultimate re-
sult of the running of railway trains on Sunday. Accord- '
ingly, on the 4th March, 1843, there appeared in the
Witness a couple of columns from his pen, headed,
' A Vision of the Railroad,' in which the possibilities of
the future were delineated in appalling hues. ' Writing
a Vision of the Railroad,' growled Chalmers, ' when we
want money ! ' The Vision is so characteristic, and, as a
piece of literary workmanship, so striking, that I insert
it here. The ' Mr McNeill,' who somewhat spectrally -ap-
pears amid the imagery of the piece, can be understood to
have been some lawyer of the period whose opinions on the
first day of the week seemed to Miller to be latitudinarian.

A VISION OF THE RAILROAD.

, Isle of Skye.

* * * I know not when this may reach you. We are much shut
out from the world at this dead season of the year, especially in those
wilder solitudes of the island that extend their long slopes of moor to
the west. The vast Atlantic spreads out before us, blackened by
tempest, a solitary waste, unenlivened by a single sail, and fenced off
from the land by an impassable line of breakers. Even from the ele-
vation where I now write, — for my little cottage stands high on the
hill-side, — I can hear the measured boom of the waves, swelling like
the roar of distant artillery, above the melancholy meanings of the
wind among the nearer crags, and the hoarser dash of the stream in the
hollow below. We are in a state of siege ; the isle is beleaguered on
its rugged line of western coast, and all communication with man in that
quarter cut off; while in the opposite direction the broken arid precari-
ous footways that wind across the hills to our more accessible eastern

VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 225

shores, are still drifted over in the deeper hollows by the snows of the
last great storm. It was only yester-evening that my Cousin Eacheri,
with whom I share your newspaper, succeeded in bringing me the
number published early in the present month, in which you furnish
your readers with a report of the great Railway meeting at Glasgow.

My cousin and I live on opposite sides of the island. We met at
our tryst among the hills, not half an hour before sunset ; and as each
had far to walk back, and as a storm seemed brewing, — for the wind
had suddenly lowered, and the thick mists came creeping down the
hill sides, all dank and chill, and laden with frost-rime, that settled,
crisp and white, on our hair, — we deemed it scarce prudent to indulge
in our usual long conversation together.

'You will find,' said Eachen, as he handed me the paper, 'that
things are looking no better. The old Tories are going on in the old
way, bitterer against the gospel than ever. They will not leave us in
all Skye a minister that has ever been the means of converting a soul ;
and what looks as ill, our great Scotch Railway, that broke the Sabbath
last year in the vain hope of making money by it, is to break it this
year at a dead loss. And this for no other purpose that people can
see, than just that an Edinburgh writer may advertise his business by
making smart speeches about it. Depend on't, Allister, the country's

fey:*

' The old way of advertising among these gentry,' said I, ' before it
became necessary that an elder should have at least some show of
religion about him, was to get into the General Assembly, and make
speeches there. If the crisis comes we shall see the practice in full
blow again. We shall see our anti-Sabbatarian gentlemen transmuted
into voluble Moderate elders, talking hard for clients without subject-
ing themselves to the advertisement duty, — and the railway mayhap
keeping its Sabbaths.'

'Keeping its Sabbaths! ' replied Eachen, ' ay, but the shareholders,
perhaps, having little choice in the matter. I wish you heard our
Catechist on that. Depend on't, Allister, the country 's/cy.'

'Keeping its Sabbaths? Yes,' said I, catching at his meaning, ' if
we are to be visited by a permanent commercial depression, — and
there are many things less unlikely at the present time, — the railway
may keep its Sabbaths, and keep them as the land of Judea did of old.
It would be all too easy, in a period of general distress, to touch that
line of necessarily high expenditure below which it would be ruin for
the returns of the undertaking to fall. Let but the invariably great
outlay continue to exceed the income for any considerable time, and
the railway must keep its Sabbaths.'

' Just the Catechist's idea,' rejoined my cousin. ' He spoke on the
subject at our last meeting. " Eachen," he said, — " Eachen, the thing
lies so much in the ordinary course of Providence, that our blinded
Sabbath-breakers, were it to happen, would recognize only disaster in
it} — not judgment. I see at times, with a distinctness that my father
* Marked for early death or overwhelming calamity.

VOL. II. 15

226 EDITOR.

would have called the second sight, that long weary line of rail, with
its Sabbath travellers of pleasure and business speeding over it, and a
crowd of wretched witnesses raised, all unwittingly and unwillingly
on their own parts, to testify against it, and of coming judgment, at
both its ends. I see that the walks of the one great city into which
it opens are blackened by shoals of unemployed artizans, — and that the
lanes and alleys of the other number by thousands arid tens of thousands,
their pale and hunger-bitten operatives, that cry for work and food.
They testify all too surely that judgment needs no miracle here. Let
but the evil continue to grow, — nay, let but one of our Scottish capitals,
— our great mart of commerce and trade, sink into the circumstances
of its manufacturing neighbour Paisley, and the railway must keep its
Sabbaths. But, alas ! there would be no triumph for party in the case.
Great, ere the evil could befall, would the sufferings of the country be,
and they would be sufferings that would extend to all." What think
you, Allister, of the Catechist's note ? '

' Almost worth throwing into English/ I said. ' But the fog still
thickens, and it will be dark night ere we reach home.' And so we
parted.

Dark night it was, and the storm had burst out. But it was pleas-
ant, when I had reached my little cottage, to pile high the fire on the
hearth, and to hear the blast roaring outside, and shaking the window
boards, as if some rude hand were striving in vain to unfasten them.
I lighted my little heap of moss-fir on the projecting stone, that serves
the poor Highlander for at once lamp and candlestick, and bent me
over your fourth page, to scan the Sabbath returns of a Scottish rail-
road. But rny rugged journey and the beating of the storm had in-
duced a degree of lassitude, — the wind outside, too, had forced back
the smoke, until it had filled with a drowsy, umbery atmosphere the
whole of my dingy little apartment, — Mr M'Neill seemed considerably
less smart than usual, and more than ordinarily offensive, and in the
middle of his speech I fell fast asleep. The scene changed, and I found
myself still engaged in my late journey, coming down over the hill,
just as the sun was setting red and lightless through the haze, behind
the dark Atlantic. The dreary prospect on which I had looked so
shortly before was restored in all its features ; — there was the blank,
leaden-coloured sea, that seemed to mix all around with the blank,
leaden-coloured sky ; — the moors spread out around me, brown and
barren, and studded with rock and stone ; — the fogs, as they crept
downwards, were lowering the overtopping screen of hills behind to one
dead level. Through the landscape, otherwise so dingy and sombre,
there ran a long line of somewhat brighter hue, — it was a long line of
breakers tumbling against the coast far as the eye could reach, and it
seemed interposed as a sort of selvage between the blank, leaden
sea, and the deep, melancholy russet of the land. Through one
of those changes so common in dreams, the continuous line of surf
seemed, as I looked, to alter its character. It winded no longer
around headland and bay, but stretched out through the centre of

VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 227

the landscape, straight as an extended cord, and the bright white
saddened down to the fainter hue of decaying vegetation. The entire
landscape underwent a change. Under the gloomy sky of a stormy
evening, I could mark, on the one hand, the dark-blue of the Pentlands,
and on the other, the lower slopes of Corstorphine. Arthur's Seat rose
dim in the distance behind ; and in front, the pastoral valley of Wester
Lothian stretched away mile beyond mile, with its long rectilinear
mound running through the midst, — from where I stood beside one of
the inassier viaducts that rose an hundred feet overhead, till where the
huge bulk seemed diminished to a slender thread on the far edge of
the horizon.

It seemed as if years had passed, — many years. I had an indis-
tinct recollection of scenes of terror and of suffering, — of the shouts of
maddened multitudes engaged in frightful warfare, — of the cries of
famishing women and children, — of streets and lanes flooded with,
blood, — of raging flames enwrapping whole villages in terrible ruin, —
of the flashing of arms, and the roaring of artillery, — but all was dim-
ness and confusion. The recollection was that of a dream remembered
in a dream. The solemn text was in my mind, — ' Voices, and thunders,
and lightnings, and a great earthquake, such as was not since men
were upon the earth, — so mighty an earthquake and so great ; ' and I
now felt as if the convulsion was over, and that its ruins lay scattered
around me. The railway, I said, is keeping its Sabbaths ! All around
was solitary, as in the wastes of Skye. The long rectilinear mound
seemed shaggy with gorse and thorn, that rose high against the sides,
and intertwisted their prickly branches atop. The sloe-thorn, and the
furze, and the bramble choked up the rails. The fox rustled in the
brake ; and where his track had opened up a way through the fern, I
could see the red and corroded bars stretching idly across. There was
a viaduct beside me : the flawed and shattered masonry had exchanged
its raw hues for a crust of lichens ; one of the taller piers, undermined
by the stream, had drawn two of the arches along with it, and lay
a-down the watercourse a shapeless mass of ruin, o'ermasted by flags
and rushes. A huge ivy that had taken root under a neighbouring
pier, threw up its long pendulous shoots over the summit. I ascended
to the top. Half buried in furze and sloe-thorn there rested on the
rails what had once been a train of carriages ; — the engine ahead lay
scattered in fragments, the effect of some disastrous explosion ; and
damp, and mould, and rottenness, had done their work on the vehicles
behind. Some had already fallen to pieces, so that their places could
be no longer traced in the thicket that had grown up around them, —
others stood comparatively entire, but their bleached and shrivelled
panels rattled to the wind, and the mushroom and the fungus sprouted
from between their joints. The scene bore all too palpably the marks
of violence and bloodshed. There was an open space in front, where
the shattered fragments of the engine lay scattered ; and here the rails
had been torn up by violence, arid there stretched across, breast-high,
a rudely piled rampart of stone. A human skeleton lay atop, whitened

228 EDITOR.

by the winds ; there was a broken pike beside it ; and, stuck fast in
the naked scull, which had rolled to the bottom of the rampart, the
rusty fragment of a sword. The space behind resembled the floor of a
charnel-house, — bindwood and ground-ivy lay matted over heaps of
bones ; and on the top of the hugest heap of all, a scull seemed as if
grinning at the sky from amid the tattered fragments of a cap of liberty.
Bones lay thick around the shattered vehicles, — a trail of skeletons
dotted the descending bank, and stretched far into a neighbouring
field ; and from amid the green rankness that shot up around them, I
could see soiled and tattered patches of the British scarlet. A little
farther on there was another wide gap in the rails. I marked beside
the ruins of a neighbouring hovel, a huge pile of rusty bars, and there
lay inside the fragments of an uncouth cannon, marred in the casting.

I wandered on in unhappiness, oppressed by that feeling of terror
,and disconsolateness so peculiar to one's more frightful dreams. The
country seemed everywhere a desert. The fields were roughened
with tufts of furze and broom ; — hedgerows had shot up into lines of
stunted trees, with wide gaps interposed ; — cottage and manor-house
had alike sunk into ruins ;— here the windows still retained their shat-
tered frames, and the roof-tree lay rotting, amid the dank vegetation of
the floor, — yonder the blackness of fire had left its mark, and there re-
mained but reddened and mouldering stone. Wild animals and doleful
creatures had everywhere increased. The toad puffed out its freckled
sides on hearths, whose fires had been long extinguished, — the fox
rustled among the bushes, — the masterless dog howled from the thicket,
— the hawk screamed shrill and sharp as it fluttered overhead. I passed
what had been once the policies of a titled proprietor. The trees lay
rotting and blackened among the damp grass, — all except one huge
giant of the forest, that girdled by the axe half a man's height from the
ground, and scorched by fire, stretched out its long dead arms towards
the sky. In the midst of this wilderness of desolation, lay broken
masses, widely scattered, of what had been once the mansion-house.
A shapeless hollow, half filled with stagnant water, occupied its imme-
diate site ; and the earth was all around torn up, as if battered with
cannon. The building had too obviously owed its destruction to the
irresistible force of gunpowder.

There was a parish church on the neighbouring eminence, and it,
too, was roofless and a ruin. ' Alas,' I exclaimed, as I drew aside the
rank stalks of nightshade and hemlock that hedged up the breach in
the wall through which I passed into the interior, — ' alas ! have the
churches of Scotland also perished ! ' The inscription of a mutilated
tombstone that lay outside caught my eye, and I paused for a moment's
space in the gap, to peruse it. It was an old memorial of the times
of the Covenant, and the legend was more than half defaced. I suc-
ceeded in deciphering merely a few half-sentences, — ' killing time,'—
1 faithful martyr,' — ' bloody Prelates ;' and beneath there was a frag-
mentary portion of the solemn text, * How long, 0 Lord, holy and true,
dost thou not judge and avenge our blood ?' I stepped into the in-

VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 229

terior : — the scattered remains of an altar rested against the eastern
gable. There was a crackling, as of broken glass, under ray feet,
and stooping down, I picked up a richly-stained fragment ; — it bore a
portion of that much-revered sign, the pelican giving her young to
eat of her own flesh and blood, — the sign which Puseyism and Popery
equally agree in regarding as adequately expressive of their doctrine
of the real presence, and which our Scottish Episcopalians have so re-
cently adopted as the characteristic vignette of their Service-Book.
The toad and the newt had crept over it, and it had borrowed a new
tint of brilliancy from the slime of the snail. Destruction had run
riot along the walls of this parish church. There were carvings chip-
ped and mutilated, as if in sport, less, apparently, with the intention of
defacing than rendering them contemptible and grotesque. A huge
cross of stone had been reared over the altar, but both the top and one
of the arms had been struck away, and from the surviving arm there
dangled a noose. The cross had been transformed into a gibbet. Nor
were there darker indications wanting. In a recess set apart as a
cabinet for relics, there were human bones all too fresh to belong to a
remote antiquity ; and in a niche under the gibbet lay the tattered re-
mains of a surplice dabbled in blood. I stood amid the ruins, and felt
a sense of fear and horror creeping over me, — the air darkened under
the scowl of the coming tempest and the closing night, and the wind
shrieked more mournfully amid the shattered and dismantled walls.

There came another change over my dream. I found myself wan-
dering in darkness, I knew not whither, among bushes and broken
ground ; there was the roar of a large stream in rny ear, and the savage
howl of the storm. I retain a confused, imperfect recollection of a
light streaming upon broken water, — of a hard struggle in a deep ford,
— and of at length sharing in the repose and safety of a cottage soli-
tary and humble almost as my own. The vision again strengthened,
and I found myself seated beside a fire, and engaged with a few grave
and serious men in singing the evening Psalm with which they closed
for the time their services of social devotion.

' The period of trial wears fast away,' said one of the number,
when all was over, — a grey-haired, patriarchal-looking old man, — * the
period of trial is well nigh over, — the storms of our long winter are
past, and we have survived them all ; — patience, — a little more
patience, — and we shall see the glorious spring-time of the world be-
gin ! The vial is at length exhausted.'

' How very simple,' said one of the others, as if giving expression
rather to the reflection that the remark suggested, than speaking in
reply, — ' how exceedingly simple now it seems, to trace to their causes
the decline and fall of Britain. The ignorance and the irreligion of
the land have fully avenged themselves, and have been consumed, in
turn, in fires of their own kindling. How could even mere men of the
world have missed seeing the great moral evil that lay at the root of — *

* Ay,' said a well-known voice that half mingled with my dreaming
fancies, half recalled me to consciousness ; ' nothing can be plainer,

230 EDITOR.

Donald. That lawyer-man is evidently not making his smart speeches
or writing his clever circulars with an eye to the pecuniary interests
of the railroad. No person can know better than he knows, that the
company are running their Sabbath trains at a sacrifice of some four or
five thousand a-year. Were there not an hundred thousand that took
the pledge ? and can it be held by any one that knows Scotland, that
they aren't worth overhead a shilling a-year to the railway? No, no ; de-
pend on't, the man is guiltless of any design of making the shareholders
rich by breaking the Sabbath. He is merely supporting a desperate case
in the eye of the country, and getting into all the newspapers, that peo-
ple may see how clever a fellow he is. He is availing himself of the
principle that makes men in our great towns go about with placards set
up on poles, and with bills printed large stuck round their hats.'

Two of my nearer neighbours, who had travelled a long mile
through the storm to see whether I had got my newspaper, had taken
their seats beside me, when I was engaged with my dream, and after
reading your railway report, they were now busied in discussing the
various speeches and their authors. My dream is, I am aware, quite
unsuited for your columns, — and yet I send it you. There are none
of its pictured calamities that lie beyond the range of possibility, —
nay, there are perhaps few of them that at this stage may not actually
be feared ; but if so, it is at least equally sure that there can be none
of them that at this stage might not be averted.

We should hardly have known Miller for what he
was without reading this remarkable performance. It
will occasion astonishment to not a few. Puritanism so
austere, confronting us in the middle of the nineteenth
century, shows like a massive boulder, standing, grey
and stern, in the midst of a modern meadow. ' One
man esteemeth one day above another; another man
esteemeth every day alike : let every man be fully per-
suaded in his own mind/ This is Paul's deliverance on
the subject, and Calvin was content to accept it in all
its breadth of Christian liberty. Miller knew, however,
that in Scotland devout religion had for two centuries
been inseparably connected with Sabbath observance,
and he naturally looked upon desecration of the day as
leading to profanity and licentiousness. For the rest,
we are to recollect that, though the concluding words of
the ' Vision' prove Miller to have seriously believed

HIS LEADING ARTICLES. 231

that the running of Sunday trains on the Edinburgh and
Glasgow Railway might bring calamity on the empire,
its colouring is avowedly the colouring of a dream.

In a short preface to a volume of leading articles by
Hugh Miller, selected from the file of the Witness, I have
made some remarks on his capacities as a writer of jour-
nalistic essays which I may be permitted to insert here :
— ' He meditated his articles as an author meditates his
books or a poet his verses, conceiving them as wholes,
working fully out their trains of thought, enriching them
with far-brought treasures of fact, and adorning them
with finished and apposite illustration. In the quality
of completeness, those articles stand, so far as I know,
alone in the records of journalism. For rough and
hurrying vigour they might be matched, or more, from
the columns of the Times ; in lightness of wit and smart
lucidity of statement they might be surpassed by the
happiest performances of French journalists, — a Prevost
Paradol or a St Marc Girardin ; and for occasional bril-
liancies of imagination, and sudden gleams of piercing
thought, neither they nor any other newspaper articles
have, I think, been comparable with those of S. T. Cole-
ridge. But as complete journalistic essays, symmetrical
in plan, finished in execution, and of sustained and splendid
ability, the articles of Hugh Miller are unrivalled/

In short, he modelled his newspaper essays, as he
modelled the chapters of his books, on the productions of
his beloved Addison and Goldsmith, rather than on those
of the ' eminent hands ' whose slashing leaders have made
their reputation on the London press. It was his habit
to fix upon his subject a few days, or even longer,
before the article was to appear, and nothing pleased him
better than to have Mrs Miller as volunteer antagonist,
to maintain against him, at the supper table, the thesis

232 EDITOR.

he proposed to controvert. Supper was his favourite
meal. At breakfast he hardly tasted food, a cup of coffee
and crumb of bread being the limit of his wants. After
working at his desk in the early part of the day, he would
walk out, make his way into the country, saunter about
the hills of Braid or Arthur-seat, with his eye on the
plants and land shells and geological sections, or explore
for the thousandth time the Musselburgh shore or the
Granton quarries. He never clearly admitted the canon-
ical authority of the dinner hour. He expected some-
thing warm to be kept ready for him ; but if the day was
particularly favourable, or if a storm had strewn the coast
with the treasures of the deep sea, or if some new phe-
nomenon struck him in connection with the raised beach
of Leith and required interpreting and thinking out, or
if he met with a brother naturalist and got into talk, the
shades of evening would be falling thick before he again
crossed his threshold. Even at that hour he had little
appetite. It was not until his brain, obeying what his
habits of night-study had made an irresistible law for him,
awoke in its fervour about ten o'clock, that he showed a
keen inclination for food. Porter or ale, with some kind of
dried fish or preserved meat, formed his favourite supper.
On these occasions he conversed with great freedom, and
found it both pleasant and profitable to have his views
and arguments vigorously controverted. There can be
no doubt that the extraordinary success of many of his
articles, — the repeated case of their being the town-talk
and country-talk of the day, — was due, in a considerable
degree, to his having beaten over the ground with Mrs
Miller.

In illustration of his habits of composition as an
editor, I may refer to sundry slips which have been found
among his papers, containing what seem the outlines of

DAILY HABITS. 233

contemplated essays. He first states a question, and
then sets down the heads of an excursive reply to it.
Here is one of these essays in skeleton, — I copy verbatim
from Miller's MS.

'Query — Whether Writing or Painting convey to the mind the
more vivid ideas.

'Original method of transmitting history and communicating
ideas. Egyptian Hieroglyphics — Mexican ditto — North American.
The deaf boy.

* Disadvantages of this method. The operation of mind indescrib-
able,— the achievements of conduct. Causes given for effects and
effects for causes. Winter personified as a Hog. The animals made
symbolical. Idolatry.

' 1st Conclusion, that the field of Painting is extremely narrow, and
that narrow field filled with uncertainty. That of Writing, on the
other hand, wide and clear.'

' Painting in a different view. In one particular province of
description more clear than Writing. A drawing gives a more
minute idea of a person, a building, a landscape, or a machine, than
any written description. To men of common minds it gives more
vivid ideas of things of a different province, but not to men of genius.
The illustrations of the Waverley Novels ; of Milton's Paradise Lost ;
of Shakespeare. — This perhaps a consequence of the painter's inferiority
to the writer. Happy illustration involved in Tarn O'Shanter by Thorn
and the sculpture of the ancients. The Italian school — The Flemish.

' Conclusion 2nd. In one narrow field Painting gives more vivid
ideas than Writing. In another field it almost disputes the palm ; —
but the fields of Writing as extended as human thought or the works
of the Creator. Nay, infinite ; seeing God is a writer.'

We shall take another of these outlined essays or
Debating Society speeches, — they would serve equally
well for either.

' Query — Whether Luxury be advantageous or disadvantageous to
a State.

' A brief view of the history of Luxury from the most remote to
the present times. Assyria. The feast of Belshazzar. Persian
Luxury in its primitive cast. The savage a great drinker, the Persian
so. The boast of Cyrus over his brother Artaxerxes. The men who
live by hunting often obliged to fast for a long time, and in the habit
of gorging voraciously. The Persians ate only once a day. Consola-
tion of the Abderites. The Greeks similar in this respect to the
Persians. Plato's remark on the Sicilians. The Spartans and
Athenians luxurious in the latter days of their respective States.

' Roman luxury very peculiar. Cleopatra's pearls. Esopus the

234 EDITOR.

player had one dish that cost nearly £5000 — the tongues of singing-
birds. Lucullus's suppers amounted to £1600 each. Favourite dishes
were the fat paps of a sow — the livers of scari — the brains of pheni-
copters. Apicius sails from the coast of Italy to that of Africa to taste
a species of oyster — one of the common dishes of Rome the (word
undecipherable) boar.

' Ancient Scandinavian feasts. Intemperate in eating and drink-
ing. As among the Persians, to hold much liquor reputed a heroic
virtue. Drinking to the gods and the souls of departed heroes. Their
heaven that of the Turks. The old English. William of Malnies-
bury's account of them — continuing over their cups night and day.
Saints' days times of festivity. In Scotland the extreme sumptuous-
ness of the feasts at marriages, christenings, and funerals restrained by
Act of Parliament in the reign of Charles II. These great feasts a
proof that the people were not habitually luxurious. Our own recol-
lection of Christmas and New Year's day. Luxury of the monks in the
Middle Ages. Giraldus Cambrensis' anecdote of the monks of St
Swithiu who prostrated themselves at the feet of Henry II., com-
plaining of their Bishop. His decision regarding their suit. Angels,
patriarchs, apostles, prophets in poetry. Luxury of the present age.
Its effects on small farmers, operative manufacturers. Rack-rented
tenants. People becoming extremely poor or oppressively rich.

' Luxury the cause of decline in almost all nations. The Persians
as invaders and invaded. Alexander conquered by luxury. The
Greeks, both Athenians and Spartans. The Romans employ mercen-
aries. Our own country. Goldsmith's apostrophe.'

Hugh Miller conducted the Witness for sixteen years,
and he cannot have written for the paper fewer than a
thousand articles. ' Having surveyed this vast field, I
retain the impression of a magnificent expenditure of
intellectual energy, — an expenditure of which the world
will never estimate the sum. By far the larger portion
of what he wrote for the Witness is gone for ever. Admir-
able disquisitions on social and ethical questions, felici-
ties of humour and sportive though trenchant satire,
delicate illustration and racy anecdote from an inex-
haustible literary erudition, and crystal jets of the purest
poetry, — such things will repay the careful student of
the Witness file, but can never be known to the general
public.'

It was a tragic element in Miller's lot as a newspaper

JOURNALISTIC LITERATURE. 235

editor that he had no particle of enthusiasm for the press,
no confidence in the newspaper as an educating agency.
He has put it on record that the mechanics he had
known whose culture consisted in life-long familiarity
with newspapers were uniformly shallow and frivolous.
Of himself he has spoken as doomed to cast off shav-
ing after shaving from his mind, to be caught by the
winds, and after whirling lightly for a little time, to
be blown into the gulf of oblivion. Perhaps he did
not enough take into account the essentially ephemeral
nature of human productions, or reflect that the longest-
lived book and the newspaper article of the hour are
alike covered up one day.

' The memory of the withered leaf
In endless time is scarce more brief
Than of the garnered autumn sheaf.'

Nay, inasmuch as a powerful newspaper writer lodges
his thoughts in the minds of men engaged in affairs,
and has them thus woven into the web of events and
the fabric of institutions, it might be argued that he
least of all toils without result of his labours. Hugh
Miller, at any rate, looked with fixed distrust upon jour-
nalistic writing, both as culture for a man's own mind
and as a means of influencing his fellows. He regard-
ed science as a counteractive to the deteriorating effects
of this kind of work upon his intellectual powers.

236

CHAPTER IV.

THE DISRUPTION.

IN writing the history o£ any event or series of events
an author is inevitably influenced by the point of
view which he has taken. It would be possible to draw
up an historical account of the French Revolution with-
out mention of the Paris newspapers of the period.
These had no official, formal, technical connection with
the occurrences of the time, and from the dynastic point
of view, or the Parliamentary point of view, or the
official point of view, it would be easy to delineate the
Revolution without naming them. If a just account,
however, of a great historical transaction involves a de-
scription of those agencies which, assisting its progress
and modifying its character, contributed mainly to make
it what it was, the omission of all mention of the Trench
press in a history of the French Revolution, would be a
capital mistake. When the movement which resulted
in the Disruption of 1843 and the creation of the Free
Church of Scotland is contemplated from the ecclesiastical
point of view, it is possible, without any intentional in-
justice, to overlook the importance of the part played
in it by Hugh Miller. The Courts of the Presbyterian
system, though the congregation is represented in them

'THE TEN YEARS' CONFLICT.' 237

by the lay elders, are essentially Church Courts, and the
clergy constitute their preponderating element. It was
in these courts that the battle of the Church, in its
formal and technical aspect, was fought ; and one who
took part in their discussions, and subsequently wrote an
account of the movement, might think that, when he had
detailed what took place in Presbytery, Synod, and Gen-
eral Assembly, with mention of corresponding occurrences
in the Court of Session and the British Parliament, and
occasional glances at the chief public meetings and the
most notable pamphlets, he had presented a just and
adequate view of the historical transaction which he
undertook to depict. Such is doubtless the fair explana-
tion of a circumstance which has often been the sub-
ject of remark, namely, that, in a well-known history,
entitled ' The Ten Years' Conflict/ distinguished on the
whole by lucidity, vigour, and animation, the name of
Hugh Miller is conspicuous by its absence. An eloquent
passage is quoted in that work from the Letter to Lord
Brougham, and the author, Dr Robert Buchanan, has
never hesitated to acknowledge the importance of the
service rendered by the TFitness and its editor to the
Evangelical party ; but Miller nevertheless felt that, in a
history of the origin of the Free Church, he ought to
have been named. The book was put into his hands
for review, and with characteristic magnanimity and can-
dour he reviewed it favourably.

At the time when Hugh Miller undertook the editor-
ship of the Witness, the sympathies of the people of Scot-
land had been td but a comparatively slight extent awaken-
ed and secured for the contending Church. A vague but
potent impression swayed the public mind that the agi-
tation was a mere clerical affair. I can still recollect how
this notion would crop up in the small talk of the day.

238 EDITOR.

1 The ministers wanted power. They would like to put
down patrons with one hand, and to silence with the
other every luckless parson who did not vote in the
Presbytery and preach in the pulpit as the Evangelical
majority were pleased to dictate. Perhaps it was just as
well that the Court of Session should keep these petu-
lant little popes in their own place/ No man did so
much to dissipate these notions, so perilous to the move-
ment, as Hugh Miller. The Church of Scotland, he pro-
claimed, was standing once more, as she had so often
stood, on the side of the people, and he tore to shreds
the flimsy plea that the dogs, valiantly defending the fold,
had an eye only to their class interests. On the other
hand, his influence was mightily exerted to prevent the
mere ecclesiastical element from assuming that predom-
inance which many alleged to be the object of the whole
struggle. Hugh Miller felt with a depth and solemnity
of conviction which converted the feeling into a senti-
ment of duty, that the Witness was to be the organ of no
clerical party, the sounding-board of no Church Court,
but was to represent the movement in all the breadth
and independence of its national characteristics.

He took no vulgarly practical, no merely political
or secular, view of the interests at stake in the Ten
Years' Conflict. His appreciation of the position and
claims of the Church was, in a strictly theological point
of view, masterly. He recurred, as we saw, to the first
Reformed Assembly of the Church of Scotland, its Book
of Discipline and Confession of Faith ; nor did he stop
there, but pressed onward until the principles which he
found in these instruments led him to ' the fundamental
ideaof all Revelation/ that, man's supreme allegiance being
due to God, the ultimate formula of freedom in relation
to his fellows, a formula which he is bound to enunciate

THE NATIONAL ENTHUSIASM. 239

and maintain, is liberty to do his duty towards God. The
ancient standards of the Church of Scotland ' embodied/
he said, ' in all their breadth the Redeemer's rights of
prerogative as sole Head and King of His Church, and,
with these, all those duties and privileges of the Church's
members which His rights necessarily involve and ori-
ginate.' The Church, therefore, owed it to Christ that
she should not surrender either her spiritual independ-
ence or the rights of congregations.

The lofty and ideal conception of the cause he
championed, which animated Hugh Miller, was enter-
tained also by the people of Scotland. A thrill of spirit-
ual enthusiam passed through the heart of the nation more
ardent and elevating than has been experienced in the
United Kingdom since the seventeenth century. I con-
sider it one of the greatest advantages of my life to
have witnessed the excitement of the time. So stead-
ily do the forces at work in modern society tend to
make the possession of money the all-absorbing ambition
of life, — so pallid and ineffectual, in contest with this tre-
mendous power, are the aesthetic and political influences
which act upon cultivated men, — that it is a strengthen-
ing and priceless consciousness to have lived in a society
which in very deed esteemed principle more highly than
gold. More highly than gold ; yes, and more highly
than what to finely-toned minds is of greater value than
gold, to wit, the distinction belonging to an Established
Church, the deference, the social consideration, yielded
to the representatives of a legally recognized and honour-
ed institution.

Within the present century no day has dawned on
Scotland when the heart of the nation was so profoundly
agitated as on that on which the majority in the General
Assembly of 1843 left St Andrew's Church and pro-

240 EDITOR.

ceeded to Canonmills Hall. There had been no intention
on the part of the protesting ministers and members to
form a procession, but when the first exultant shout with
which the emerging figures were greeted had subsided,
the crowd fell back on either side in spontaneous rever-
ence, and formed a lane through which the procession
moved. Dr Welsh, the Moderator of the preceding year,
with Chalmers and Gordon, two men whose appearance,
the one for its massive and leonine manhood, the other
for its severe intellectual majesty, would have attracted
notice in any assemblage in Christendom, led the way.
Cunningham, Candlish, MacDonald of Ferintosh, Camp-
bell of Monzie, Murray Dunlop, men whose names had
become household words in Scotland, followed. As they
headed the long column on its way down the broad swell
of undulation on which the new town of Edinburgh is
built, the Frith of Forth before them, the Bass Rock far
on the right, the blue hills of the north closing in the
distance, there were lookers-on who, although they had
opposed the movement, felt their eyes moisten with proud
joy that they had seen such a day. It was the old land
yet, — the stuff of immortality, the asbestos thread of in-
corruptible national character, the light that struggled
in Falkirk's wood, and beamed out at Bannockburn, and
played in fitful gleams upon the storm-tost banner of
the Covenant, survived in Scotland still.

What to most Englishmen — to those AV!IO have de-
rived their idea of clerical character from the recent his-
tory of the Anglican Establishment — will seem specially
surprising in this event, is that the Scottish clergy who,
in 1843, abandoned their livings, did not find some
plausible pretext, some ingenious sophism, some ' softly-
spoken and glistening lie,' wherewith to lull their con-
sciences and enable them to evade their duty. Such

THE ANGLICAN CHURCH. 241

plausibilities lay round in abundance, — the raw material
of them, that is, requiring only to be woven into webs
and veils. The protesters might, for example, have con-
tinued their protest within the pale of the Establishment.
They might have raised the flag of rebellion, have told
the civil authorities that, let them do what they chose,
the majority would exercise the spiritual government of
the Church, and have declared that, whenever a minister
called himself the pastor of a parish against the will of
the people and in defiance of the Church, they would
let him consume the loaves and the fishes, but would
depose him from the office of the ministry, appoint
another man in his stead, and direct the people to re-
cognize the latter as their pastor. This course of de-
nouncing and defying the State is the highest pitch of
devotion to Church principle to which the typical Angli-
can attains or aspires. Henry, Bishop of Exeter, over-
ruled by the Privy Council in his dealings with one
whom he believed to be a heretic, excommunicated all
men, the Primate of the Church of England included,
who should dare to interfere with his ecclesiastical juris-
diction. When his gesticulations and exclamations, his
protests and pronouncements and anathemas, were treated
as so much amusing pantomime, Henry crossed his legs
in the House of Lords and was content. The gesticulat-
ing and exclaiming, though it had produced no manner
of effect on Mr Gorham, or on the Archbishop of Canter-
bury, or on the Judicial Committee of Privy Council, or
on any other earthly man or thing, possessed the sin-
gular property of calming Henry's agitated bosom, and
setting free his energies for assault and battery upon all
' schismatics ' from the Anglican Church. But in all ages
of the world save ours, and in all countries of the world
save that Eden which lies between the Cheviot hills and

VOL. IT. 1G

242 EDITOR.

the English Channel, the proceedings of the Bishop of
Exeter, when beaten down and baffled in the Gorham case,
would have been considered a mixture of unseemly in-
solence and atrocious humbug. Mr Bennett, of Erome, re-
fuses to plead in what are called the ecclesiastical courts, re-
garding them and their doings as mere imaginary entities
in relation to the Church of which he holds himself to be
a member. How he would name that Church I cannot
tell, but he stands before the public as a minister of the
State-Church of England. The Rev. Mr Mossman of
Wragsby, rejoicing that ' the lurid, murky flame of Pro-
testantism, enkindled in the sixteenth century, is rapidly
becoming quenched, and the true light of the gospel,
which twice before came to England from Rome, is once
more beginning to beam upon us from the Eternal City,'
hoping for the day when ' it will come to pass that Angli-
cans will see that it is God's will that they should sub-
mit to the Holy Apostolic See, and that it is their duty
as well as their privilege to be in communion with that
Bishop who alone is the true successor of Peter, and, by
Divine Providence, the Primate of the Catholic Church/
nevertheless continues an official of the Anglican Estab-
lishment. By the simple process of regarding the doc-
trinal formularies of the Church as meaningless and the
ecclesiastical courts as imaginary — by merely ignoring
the little ceremony of subscription, the preliminary fib
which has to be uttered, the passing of conscience under
the Caudine Forks which has to be undergone — un-
limited freedom is obtained to expatiate in the sweetness
and light of the English State-Church. Thank God, the
clergy of the protesting Church of Scotland in 1843
did not content themselves with rendering it an in-
soluble or even an intricate problem to make them
out to be honest men. They had distinctly defined

THE POSITION OF THE PARTIES. 243

their position, and the popular intelligence apprehended
it ; they said what they would do, and they did it. The
morality of all ages — the instinct of veracity in the
human breast — responds to the declaration of Chal-
mers, perhaps the noblest which ever came from his
lips, that, if the majority in the Church had belied their
position and remained in the Establishment, they would
have made it a moral nuisance. A Church of Christ
which would have perplexed the human sense of truth-
fulness, which would have shuffled out of its promises
and nestled comfortably into its benefices, which would
have given sanctimonious phrases and slippery evasions
for plain deeds, would, God wot, have been a moral
nuisance.

Strange to say, this declaration of Chalmers's has not
only been misrepresented, but has been turned into
something which, while retaining a resemblance to it in
sound, is, as nearly as possible, its opposite. It has been
alleged that he pronounced the Scottish Establishment,
after it was left by the Free Church, a moral nuisance.
Happily he had an opportunity, before the Parliamentary
Committee on the refusal of sites to Free Church con-
gregations, for exposing this malignant falsehood, and
stating what he actually said. In point of fact, the
mere circumstance that the battle had been bravely and
honestly fought on both sides enabled the two sections of
the dissevered Church of Scotland to regard each other,
though with inevitable irritation, yet with a manly and
soldierly respect. Dr Cunningham of Edinburgh and
Dr Robertson of Ellon, the foremost clerical athletes in
the controversial fray, were in their latter years intimate
personal friends. No candid historian of the contest will
refuse to admit that the genuine Moderate party, the in-
heritors of the policy of Robertson, occupied a position

244 EDITOR.

which upright men, of good intellectual parts, could occupy.
They would not grant that they yielded the fundamental
principle of spiritual independence as maintained by the
ancient Scottish Church. Even in respect of the right of
the people to have no ministers intruded on them, they
objected, not to the claims of congregations in themselves,
nor to the sympathy and co-operation of the Church with
the popular efforts to give those claims effect, but to the
means which the Church had taken to express her sym-
pathy and enforce her co-operation, — to the want, to say
the least, of deference to the civil law evinced in the
enactment of the Veto and in the admission of the
chapel ministers to full Presbyterial powers. There was,
they argued, no intention on the part of the State to de-
prive the Church of the privileges recognized as hers in
the Treaty of Union ; but, in definitely bestowing, by the
Veto, a power upon congregations to set aside rights of
patrons which the State legally countenanced, and which
could not practically be distinguished from rights of
property, and in giving chapel ministers the status and
authority of parish ministers, the Church, they maintained,
had dealt arrogantly and domineeringly with the State,
and the natural consequence was that the State put its
back up against the Church. Accordingly the course
prescribed alike by sound policy and by Christian temper
was, they said, that the Church should rescind her ob-
noxious legislation, and take counsel with the allied
State, in a friendly spirit, as to how the fundamental
principles of her constitution could be carried out.

The reply to these arguments might be satisfactory,
but it is impossible to deny that honest and able men
could use them. The majority might say that, since
the principles involved were confessedly fundamental,
since the Church had done no more than guard them

MORAL VALUE OF THE DISRUPTION. 245

in what she deemed an effectual manner, and since she
was willing to let the Civil Courts do what they pleased
with the temporalities, the State was bound to ratify her
proceedings ; that persistence in the course she had
taken was no rebellion, inasmuch as appeal was made
to fundamental principles of her constitution, but that,
if the Church retraced her steps and did the bidding of
the Civil authorities, she would be held by all the
world to have surrendered at discretion, and would, at
best, possess her freedom in future by sufferance of the
State. I humbly hold, with Chalmers and Cunningham
and Hugh Miller, that the reply of the majority was
conclusive ; but the scales of argument were rather
nicely balanced, and perfect respect could be ac-
corded to every man of either party who was ' firmly
persuaded in his own mind.' The essential point was
that word should correspond to belief and that action
should correspond to word. This is the foundation
canon of all morals. Whether a man or a Church stands
morally on a foundation of adamant or on a foundation of
sand is determined by the answer to be rendered to the
question whether said man or said Church conforms to
this canon or does not. The founders of the Free Church
did not ' palter with eternal God.' Whatever was the
persuasion of their opponents, they believed that it was
their duty to sacrifice emolument and position rather
than submit to the Civil Courts. They conferred not,
therefore, with flesh and blood, but did their duty.
Their act was the noblest thing done in Europe in their
time. This, I understand, is Mr Carlyle's estimate of
the Disruption.

Among those who were assembled in Canomnills
Hall to welcome the Free Church, the stalwart form and
great shaggy head, and earnest, thoughtful features of

246 EDITOR.

Hugh Miller, were particularly noticed. One can fancy
how the fire would glitter in his moist eye, and the
enthusiasm glow on his face, as he listened to words like
these in the address of Chalmers : — ' We read in the
Scriptures, and I believe it will be found true in the
history and experience of God's people, that there is a
certain light, and joyfulness, and elevation of spirit,
consequent upon a moral achievement such as this.
There is a certain felt triumph, like that of victory over
conflict, attending upon a practical vindication, which
conscience has made of her own supremacy, when she
has been plied by many and strong temptations to de-
grade or to dethrone her. Apart from Christianity
altogether, there has been realized a joyfulness of heart,
a proud swelling of conscious integrity, when a conquest
has been effected by the higher over the inferior powers
of our nature : and so, among Christians too, there is a
legitimate glorying, as when the disciples of old gloried
in the midst of their tribulations, when the spirit of
glory and of God rested on them, when they were made
partakers of the Divine nature and escaped the corrup-
tion that is in the world ; or as when the apostle Paul
rejoiced in the testimony of his conscience. But let us
not forget, in the midst of this rejoicing, the deep humility
that pervaded their songs of exultation ; the trembling
which these holy men mixed with their mirth : trembling
arising from a sense of their own weakness : and then
courage, inspired by the thought of that aid and strength
which were to be obtained out of His fulness who
formed all their boasting and all their defence.'

It is worthy of mention that the name ' Free Church
of Scotland ' appears to owe its origin to Hugh Miller.
He had made use of it in articles in the Witness months
before the Disruption. Calmly foreseeing that event, he

THE ESTABLISHMENT PRINCIPLE. 247

had meditated profoundly on the position which the pro-
testing Church would occupy, and the course she ought to
pursue. Loving the Church of Scotland with passionate
attachment, his grand anxiety was that the Free Church
should be, in all respects save that of formal alliance
with the State, the old Scottish Church. He dwelt
earnestly on the necessity of separating her cause from
that of political party, and letting it be known that she
was to do the work neither of Whigs, Tories, nor
Radicals. The strength of her foundation was to be
the personal godliness of the Scottish people, and she
was to seek no other basis. The counsel of Hugh Mil-
ler to the Church on this point was as wise as it was
pious, and there can be no doubt that it contributed
largely to secure for him that confidence of the devout,
quiet, solid-minded laymen of the Church, which con-
stituted a power rendering him independent of every
political section as well as of its clerical partisans. ' There
is a call in Providence,' he said, ' to the Church, that she
dissipate not her powers in the political field/

At great length, also, he insisted upon the importance
of Free Church maintenance of ' the Establishment prin-
ciple.' He looked upon that principle as an integral part
of the British Constitution, and his reverence for the
Constitution was such as would have been sympathized
with by Burke or by Johnson rather than by modern
Whigs. ' It would be as impossible,' he said finely,
' for mere politicians to build up such a Constitution by
contract, as it would be for them to build up an oak, the
growth of a thousand summers.' And in the Constitu-
tion he believed that ' the Establishment principle ' was
embodied, whereas ' the Voluntary principle ' was not.
The testimony of the Church of Scotland had, he de-
clared, been ' for the Headship of Christ, not only over

248 t EDITOR.

the Church, but over States and Nations in their charac-
ter as such.' His experience had made him acquainted
with secular voluntaryism rather than with the spiritual
voluntaryism represented by such men as Dr Heugh of
Glasgow and Dr Cairns of Berwick. According to these,
the principle of a free Church in a free State, with
clergy sustained by the free-will offerings of their flocks
on the apostolic model, affords amplest scope for the re-
cognition and performance, both by States and Churches,
of their duty to Christ as King, and is therefore in
strictest consonance with the spirit, if not with the
letter, of the old Scottish testimony. Be this as it may,
the fact must be clearly stated in a biography of Hugh
Miller, that, at the moment when he saw what he con-
sidered the infatuated policy of the State rending the
Church of Scotland asunder, he ' would fain press on
every member of the Free Church the great importance
of the Establishment principle.'

By joining the Free Church, however, he declared in
the most forcible manner that the only Church, estab-
lished or disestablished, to which he could adhere was a
Church exercising every right of self-government. Un-
less ' the Establishment principle ' meant that the State
was to recognize and endow the Church, and the
Church to arrange her affairs and exercise her dis-
cipline in subjection to the law of Scripture alone, he
practically discarded it. All the rights of the Church
— all that constituted her vitality as an institution — had,
he held, been bought by Christ and had descended from
heaven. Speaking as a theologian and a Churchman,
John Henry Newman concentrated his rhetoric of con-
demnation, applied to the State-Church of England, into
the phrase, ' a mere national institution ; ' and Hugh
Miller, as he looked upon the spectacle of the Disrup-

RESULTS OF THE DISRUPTION. 249

tion, could say nothing more sternly sad of the State-
Church of Scotland than that she had become a ' State-
institution/ The difference between the Oxford doctor
and the Free Church champion was this, that, whereas
Anglican Bishops have since Henry VIII. 's time ordained
vice regis, in the person of the king, thus recognizing the
sovereign as sole fountain of spiritual authority for the
establishment, the Scottish layman could point to the
Treaty of Union, expressly exempting the Church of
Scotland from the spiritual supremacy vested in the Eng-
lish Crown, and guaranteeing to her all those rights and
privileges which a century and a half of terrible con-
tending had secured her.

The importance of this distinction became evident in
the sequel. Dr Newman left the Anglican Church more
conspicuously a ' mere national institution ' than before :
the Free Church won not only her own battle, but the
battle of the Scottish Establishment also. The dust of
the conflict having cleared away, the men of character
and power in the State-Church of Scotland, the Macleods,
the Cairds, the Tullochs, and men of like stamp, took
up the position of the old Presbyterian fathers, claim-
ing spiritual independence for the Church, and doing
their best to secure for congregations the election of
their ministers. Nay more, the Court of Session has,
by a recent decision, treated the right of the Church to
exercise spiritual discipline in the suspension and depos-
ition of ministers as unquestionable. Whether the law
lords would have been thus generous, if the Established
Church of Scotland had not become so modest, unassum-
ing, and inoffensive that a wigged gentleman might safe-
ly pat her on the head, were perhaps an ungracious
subject of inquiry.

That an event shall become of world-historical

250 EDITOR.

significance, — that it shall be a grain cast into the seed-
field of Providence to grow and bring forth fruit, —
depends not upon its consequences being foreseen by
those who take part in it, but upon its being, at the
moment of its occurrence, true and right. It is the
branch which sheds its leaves timeously in autumn that
puts forth buds vigorously in spring. Sufficient unto
every day is the work thereof, and no generation ever
trod this world which could exactly measure the shoes of
the succeeding generation. It always happens that the
future is an

' Offspring strange

Of the fond Present, that with mother-prayers
And mother-fancies looks for championship
Of all her loved beliefs and old-world ways
From that young Time she bears within her womb.'

We have already ceased to be particularly moved by the
watchwords of the Voluntary Controversy, or the Non-
Intrusion Controversy, and the Constitution seems to
have survived the disrespect shown to the Establishment
principle in recent legislation on the Irish Episcopal
Church : but the Disruption was a brave, resolute, and
honest piece of work, — a triumph of veracity and pious
courage, — and its fruits are following it. The principle
of the headship of Christ over His Church, which the
whole world heard it proclaim, may be slightly regarded
in its theological aspect, but reasonable men acknowledge
that, when interpreted into the right of Churches and re-
ligious denominations to manage their own affairs, it is
one which liberates the energies of statesmen and lawyers
for their proper duties, and is eminently conducive
to the welfare of the State. Not one man in ten
thousand knows or cares to know the exact difference
between the Voluntary principle and the Establishment
principle ; but the Eree Church has afforded the noblest

HIS PART IN THE DISRUPTION. 251

demonstration the world ever saw of the power of a
Christian Church to maintain an educated ministry
throughout the entire extent of a country, and common
sense drives home the conviction that this is the obvious,
the natural, the expedient, and, from the statesman's
point of view, the economical way of managing the
business. There is not an institution of recent times
from which the world has learned so much as from the
Free Church of Scotland.

It is on the lines of principle laid down by the Free
Church, that the remarkable union which has been pro-
ceeding for many years among the branches of the Re-
formed Communion throughout the world has taken
place. The Reformed Church of the sixteenth century,

—justly so-called because, in contradistinction to the
Lutheran and Anglican Churches, which contented them-
selves with washing the dirty clothes of Rome and put-
ting them on again, she went direct for her Constitution
to Christ and His apostles, — has reunited her broken
ranks in Australia and in America, and there are, as we
have seen, none but circumstantial hindrances to her
reunion in Scotland. Disunion on Christian principles

—disunion at the bidding of conscience and duty — is
the natural prelude to union on Christian principles.

In how far Hugh Miller would have sympathized
with the recent movements for union in the Reformed
Church, I shall not pretend to say. At the time when
he wrote his articles extolling the Establishment prin-
ciple, his views were those of Dr Cunningham and of
others who subsequently shared in the impulse towards
union. Hugh Miller was a man of definite opinions,
and held them tenaciously ; but he was not devoid of
that capacity of growth, which is perhaps the ultimate
characteristic of great minds. Such an intellect as his

252 EDITOR.

could not become a fossil, however exquisitely coloured
and definitely traced might be the markings on it.
As a man of science he kept the gates of his soul grandly
open, and as a churchman and theologian he would as-
suredly have seen ' what main currents draw the years '
and permitted the wind of Providence to fill his sail.
More I cannot say.

There are some who think that, in devoting himself
to the Free Church, Hugh Miller abandoned a higher
career, which might have awaited him if he had given his
undivided energies to science. To this view I cannot sub-
scribe. To take part in founding an important national
institution is a higher and more honourable service to
humanity than to make discoveries in science or to write
eloquent books. So long as the Free Church endures,
she will bear upon her the image and superscription of
Hugh Miller. She is his best monument, — a sound
piece of building, creditable to the journeyman mason.
All things considered, there was no one of her founders
who played a more important part in rearing her than he.
It was at his voice that the people of Scotland awoke to
a perception of what they had to lose or gain in the Church
controversy. ' There does not/ he said, ' exist a tenderer
or more enduring tie among all the various relationships
which knit together the human family, than that which
binds the Gospel minister to his people.' No one pro-
claimed this during the conflict so powerfully as Hugh
Miller, and it was his proclamation of this, with accom-
panying exhibition of the fact that all the tenderness and
all the sacredness of the relation between pastor and
people were at stake in the conflict, which tended more
than aught else to fill the courts of the Free Church
with the acclaiming voices of the people of Scotland.

253

CHAPTER V.

DIFFERENCE WITH DR CANDLISH.

NO company of earnest men in this world, — whether
good or bad, whether as imaginatively delineated by
the true poet, or as described by the historian, — from
Achilles and Agamemnon to the Apostles Peter and Paul,
—have ever been able to agree. An agreeable man—
the definition is Mr Disraeli's — is one who agrees with
you, and the talent of agreeing all round is precisely that
in which men of original and decisive character, keeping
a conscience, are apt to be defective. Hugh Miller, as
we have had occasion to see, had his own convictions as
to what the Free Church, and the Witness as the prin-
cipal representative of the Free Church in the press,
ought to be. He had not derived these from man, and
there was no man living at whose beck he would change
them. On two points his mind was made up with an
impassioned emphasis of determination, first that the
Witness should be kept independent of party, and,
secondly, that there should be no entering into league
with * Voluntaries ' for the purpose of assailing the

254 EDITOR.

Established Churches. He was resolved, also, that the
Witness, under his management, should have a high
character as an intellectual newspaper, by no means con-
fining itself to ecclesiastical topics, but making wide in-
cursions into the realms of literature and still more into
those of science.

We have seen the active part taken by Dr Candlish
in bringing Mr Miller to Edinburgh. In his sketches of
the General Assembly of 1841, the latter expressed en-
thusiastic admiration for Dr Candlish, and for some time
the relations between them were most cordial. At what
date they began to differ it were bootless to inquire, but
no serious discrepancy seems to have occurred in their
views of principle and policy until after the crisis of the
struggle and the formation of the Eree Church. Three
years after the Disruption, Miller felt so deeply aggrieved
by the proceedings of Dr Candlish, that he addressed
a letter to the Committee of gentlemen who had from
the first interested themselves in the paper, repelling the
attacks of which he believed himself to be the object.
The document contains every particular with which it
is necessary for the reader to be acquainted, and the
only preface which it may require is a statement of the
reasons which have induced Mrs Hugh Miller, her family,
and myself to publish it.

I. Although it was formally private and confidential,
Mrs Miller has a distinct recollection that Mr Miller
always held himself at liberty to make it public, and did
not look upon that contingency as improbable.

II. Mrs Miller and her family are convinced that,
since the vindication of Hugh Miller can be trusted to
no pen but his own, the publication of this letter is

REASONS FOR PUBLICATION. 255

necessary in order that justice may be done to his
memory.

III. It is widely known that such a letter was
written, printed, and sent ; and were it either withheld,
or tampered with in any way, this biography would not
secure or deserve the confidence of the public.

IV. Several copies of the letter are certainly known
to be in existence, besides those possessed by Mr Miller's
family. Its publication, sooner or later, therefore, may
be considered as certain ; and it seems best that it should
be published by those who are specially bound to guard
the good name of Hugh Miller.

V. As rumour magnifies all things, the fact that an
important document written by Mr Miller against Dr
Candlish was withheld in this biography would lead
suspicious and scandal-mongering persons to suggest that
the disagreement between the two men was of some
specially dark and terrible character. It is, therefore,
best that the simple truth should be stated.

The copy of the letter from which it is now printed
is that which was sent by Hugh Miller to Dr Chalmers.
Many of its paragraphs have vehemently assenting pencil
marks on the margin, and Chalmers adds one very brief
but characteristic note, which will be found in its place.
The ' send back the money business/ alluded to by
Miller, was the noise raised by sundry enemies of the
Free Church because, when the Churches of the Southern
States of America sent her a civil greeting and a con-
tribution of money, she did not requite the former with
a snarl and throw back the latter in their faces.

256 EDITOR.

[Strictly Private and Confidential '.]
LETTER

HUGH MILLER,

EDITOR OF THE ' WITXESS,'
TO

DR THOMAS CHALMERS ; DR ROBERT GORDON ; DR R. S. CANDLISH ; DR WIL-
LIAM CUNNINGHAM ; DR JAMES BUCHANAN ; THE REV. THOMAS GUTHRIE ;
THE REV. JOHN BRUCE; THE REV. JAMES BEGG J THE REV. ANDREW GRAY
OF PERTH ; THE REV. ALEXANDER STEWART OF CROMARTY ; ALEXANDER
DUNLOP, ESQ. ; ROBERT PAUL, ESQ. ; J. G. WOOD, ESQ. ; AND JAMES BLACK -
ADDER, ESQ.

* GENTLEMEN,

' IT is with much pain, and not without much
serious deliberation, that I avail myself at this time of
this peculiar mode of addressing you. My communica-
tion, however, though a printed one, is strictly con-
fidential : the gentlemen named above are the only in-
dividuals who receive copies ; and such has been the
amount of precaution taken in passing it through the
press, that it is even more, not less, private in its present
form, than if it had been simply engrossed by a clerk.

* In one certain quarter the Witness Newspaper has
of late given extreme dissatisfaction. Influential gen-
tlemen of the Parliament House, and gentlemen whom
the influential gentlemen influence, have indignantly
thrown it up ; and such has been its effect on the nerves
of Dr Candlish, that he never opens it now " without a
feeling of dread lest something untoward should be in
it." The Papers of the editor evince, the Doctor is clear,

PAMPHLET. 257

an entire want of delicacy, — there is no " taste or tact "
shown in the handling of public questions, — and " the
damage done by certain recent editorial articles to the
Sabbath cause is," he holds, " incalculable." In short,
a great crisis has arrived in the history of the Paper ;
and Dr Candlish, to prevent its rapid sinking, can be-
think himself of but one expedient : the individual who
now addresses you must retire forthwith from his place
as Editor of the Witness, to make way for an Editor of
taste, tact, and delicacy, — a gentleman connected with
the Parliament House.

' NOAV, while I entirely agree with Dr Candlish that a
crisis has arrived in the history of the Newspaper with
which I have been so long connected, — may I not add,
identified ? — I differ from him very considerably regard-
ing the means best suited for obviating the danger. On
the policy of my removal from the Editorship I am, of
course, incapacitated from deciding. It may be the
best possible policy in the circumstances, and yet, from
the disturbing influence of personal feeling, may seem
bad policy to me. But on some of the other points my
judgment is, I think, less open to bias. The Doctor
communicated his scheme to my co-partner in the Paper,
Mr Eairly, whom it took somewhat aback; and who,
not exactly seeing at the moment how much it involved,
or perhaps with some tacit reference to my standing as a
bond fide proprietor in the concern, asked him whether it
should be the new Editor or the old whose decision should
be the final one, were we to come to differ on some point
of principle or policy ? The matter, replied Dr Candlish,
might be referred to a Committee. There are thus,
obviously, two elements in the Doctor's scheme, — the
element of a Parliament-House Editor, prepared, doubt-
less, by the peculiar practices of his profession, to take

VOL. II.

258 EDITOR.

his clue from his clients ; and the element of a controlling
Committee ; and either of them would, I am convinced,
be fatal to the Witness. It is with great diffidence that
I in any case oppose my judgment to that of Dr Cand-
lish ; but in this matter I possess peculiar opportunities
of information. The Witness has been not merely an
organ through which I have communicated with my
readers, but it has also led my readers to communicate
much with me. I have received many a hint and sug-
gestion in many a note and letter, signed, initialed, and
anonymous ; and have thus felt, as with a stethoscope,
how the heart of the Free Church has been beating out-
side the disturbing influences of Edinburgh society.
And it is in a large measure from the knowledge thus
acquired — though I am not without other sources of
information — that I derive my convictions regarding the
ineligibility of the scheme of improvement suggested by
Dr Candlish. The Doctor seems convinced that the
Witness, as at present conducted, is in imminent danger
of sinking. I will stake its life any day against that of
a Witness redolent of the peculiarly unwholesome atmo-
sphere of the Parliament House, and under the direct
control of a Managing Committee !

' I must speak ;my mind on this point with the full
freedom which the urgency of the crisis demands. And,
first, let me indulge in a few general observations, which
may, I trust, be found, ere I conclude, not much beside
the mark.

' I remark, then, in the first place, that the destruction,
or even very considerable diminution, of the Sustentation
Fund, would be one of the gravest evils which could
befall the Free Church. The Fund constitutes the
great heart of her material frame, — the all-important
muscle, if I may so express myself, whose propelling

PAMPHLET. 259

energies preserve, as in the body natural, the distant
extremities from torpor, gangrene, and death. And
whatever threatens to injure it from without, or to affect
it as with disease from within, is to be guarded against
with the most sedulous care. The central habitat of this
institution in Edinburgh must of necessity connect, in an
especial manner, with its management and control, the
Edinburgh Free Church leaders ; and the soundness of
its condition, and its consequent measure of prosperity,
must in the future very much depend on two classes of
circumstances, — on the conduct of these men, and their
degree of independence of suspicious secular influence ;
and on the amount of confidence reposed in them, and
of cordiality entertained for them, by the ministers and
people that occupy the Church's great outer area, — all of
Scotland that is not the capital.

' There is one important respect in which the circum-
stances of the Eree Church differ most materially from
those in which the members and ministers that compose
it were placed previous to the Disruption. There has
ever existed in the true Church of Scotland, — that
Church which has ceased to exist as an Establishment,
—a sort of Presbyterian jealousy, not unwholesome when
under the influence of right principle, of what our
country clergy used to term the ' big wig ' influence,
ecclesiastical and lay. And how often has not the
perfect parity of Presbyterian ministers been insisted
upon by the rasher spirits, even in a sense in which
parity does not exist ! In the most important sense
possible Presbyterian ministers are not equal. Their
equality is merely an equality of the letter, appointed, it
would seem, in order that the true episcopacy, which is
of the spirit, may have room to develop itself, and that
the Church may be benefited by the graces and talents

260 EDITOR.

of her true bishops, the good and great men whom God
has given her. But even the jealousy which clung thus
to the dead letter of equality was, when confined within
due bounds, a thing not to be greatly regretted. Our
Church is very differently circumstanced now from what
it wras when the frame-work of the Establishment
sheltered its ministers, and rendered them independent
in their secular affairs, each of all the others. The in-
stitution of the Sustentation Fund is an institution new
to a Presbyterian Church ; and there is the profoundest
prudence and discretion demanded, in order to accom-
modate it to the Presbyterian genius and character.
And, further, the Free Church has, what no Dissenters
ever had, the Highlands of Scotland, where there are not
a few parishes entirely with us which will too certainly
never be self-sustaining ones. There is thus a centre of
comparative wealth in the body, and a large circumfer-
ence of dependency. And to the influence of central
wealth there is, besides, added a centre of official manage-
ment, with a certain amount of patronage attached.
Wesleyism has also its centre of official management, and
its outer circumference of poor non-sustaining Churches.
But the Wesleyism of England — an offshoot from Eng-
lish Episcopacy, and still, to a considerable extent,
marked by the Episcopal character — is essentially
different in its genius from old Scottish Presbytery.
Even among the Wesleyans, however, a reaction on the
centralization system has produced the New Connexion.
A reaction on the analogous tendency in the Eree
Church would be a very different affair indeed. Among
the Wesleyans the reactionists are persons infected by
modern notions and feelings, and, in many cases, sin-
gularly unsound in their creed; while among us the re-
actionists would, on the contrary, be men of the long-

PAMPHLET. 2G1

derived historic type and sternly orthodox school. The
reaction in the one case is that of new liberalism against
old centralization ; in the other it would be a reaction
of old Presbyterianism against new centralization.

' Now, I need scarce remark to any of the gentlemen
whom I have now the honour of addressing, that the
development of a spirit of this character would be one of
the gravest evils which could befall the Free Church.
It would be found mainly operative in those large and
most important tracts of country in which the congrega-
tions are self-sustaining and a little more, and which lie
between the outer circumference of necessity and the
inner focus of influence. And if once developed, it is all
too obvious that it might come to operate with most
disastrous effect on the Sustentation Fund, and, by
consequence, on the very existence of the Church in the
non-sustaining localities. And that this spirit exists in
a semi-latent state, I have the most direct means of
knowing. Sorley's five-edition pamphlet was a mere
straw thrown up by a man of infirm temper, in a moment
of excitement ; but, straw as it was, it indicated the
direction of a current. And be it remembered, that we
are tending, in the natural course of events, to a state of
things that must be greatly more favourable to the
development of the jealous spirit than the present. The
great and good man who now imparts lustre to the Free
Church by the splendour of his name, and ballasts it by
the moral weight of his character, is far advanced in
years ; nor can the eye rest on a successor who will be to
it what he has been. The men of the Disruption will be
dropping away, and leaving their places to others less
under the influence of the kindly feeling of a soldiery who
have fought side by side in the same battle. And as
they are removed and disappear, the scheme of unequal

262 EDITOR.

incomes will be coming into effect. But above all, in an
age in which there are great religious questions arising
among the governed classes, and a singularly temporizing
spirit manifested with regard to them by the classes that
govern, — a suspicion on the part of the Church that the
central body had in any degree lent itself to party
purposes, or was desirous, for party ends, either to mis-
direct or neutralize the Church's proper influence, would
be of a nature peculiarly perilous, reactive, and dis-
organizing. Nothing can be more certain than that,
unless all the greater care be taken, the Parliament
House may prove a most unneighbourly neighbour to
the Sustentation Fund. There is much in prospect,
of a character fitted to foster the natural Presbyterian
jealousy of centralization ; and I must be permitted to
say, that the various schemes suggested during the last
three years for the improvement of the Witness have
been all of a kind suited to add to their effect. The
several courses recommended of steering the Paper have
all been courses, that bore direct upon the rock.

* It is now about two years and a half or so since Mr
M'Cosh of the Northern Warder suggested to Dr Cand-
lish a scheme of centralizing the Free Church Press. I
am unacquainted with the details of the suggestion, but
it at least involved the control of the Witness by a
central Edinburgh body. The scheme met, I am in-
formed, Dr Candlish's approval; and, with the intention,
apparently, of carrying it into effect with regard to the
Witness, I was waited on, at the time, by Mr J. G.
Wood, and sounded as to whether it would be agreeable
to me that Mr M'Cosh should have a share given him in
the Proprietorship of the Paper, and to have him at the
same time as my Sub-Editor. I may mention, that I had
not yet become one of the proprietors of the Witness.

PAMPHLET. 263

The proposal did not take my fancy at all. I did not like
the centralization idea ; nor could I realize what my
position as .Editor would be with a Sub-Editor who, as a
Proprietor of the paper, would, of course, be one of my
employers, and be perhaps backed, to boot, in his cen-
tralization views, by the influence of Dr Candlish. And
as the time had not yet come for proposing that I
" ought not to be Editor " of the Witness, the design was
suffered to drop.

'What, however, I most dreaded in the scheme was, I
must say, the direct control of some Edinburgh Com-
mittee, and the inevitable effect of the arrangement on
the centralization jealousy outside. It is of great ad-
vantage to a purely political newspaper, that it should
be the accredited organ of the Government of the day.
The Ministry, as such, is a standing part of the Consti-
tution,— it is the Monarch in his responsible servants ;
and its choice of a newspaper, as an organ through
which to speak, imparts to the Paper selected not a little
of that weight which the Treasury must always possess.
But it is not according to the constitution of Presbytery
that it should have a central government, analogous to a
King's Ministry, and armed with a sort of secular Trea-
sury influence. Nor, were the peculiar necessities of
some Presbyterian Church to demand that a body of the
kind should be called into existence, would it be desir-
able or prudent to put into its hands any such control
over the newspaper press of the body, as that which a
King's Ministry possesses, and ought to possess, over its
organ. And, further, were the true Presbyterian pulses
to beat vigorously in the body, and were its Presbyter-
ianism to be of the old earnest school, that man might
be well deemed over-sanguine who would calculate large-
ly on the influence and success of a press so controlled

264 EDITOR.

and directed. Mr M'Cosh's centralization scheme would
be fraught with danger, not only to the Free Church
from its inevitable tendency to foment and exaggerate a
feeling to a certain extent inevitable in the Church's
peculiar circumstances, and which every means should
be taken to sooth and allay, but with danger also to the
press which it would centralize. It is peculiarly unsafe
to fasten an undecked skiff to a central pier in a tide-
way, against which it is the tendency of the current to
run strong. Let the stream but reach a certain mo-
mentum, and the skiff is sure always to founder at its
moorings.

' I may remark in the passing, that as the Witness is
already tied down to principle by legal document, the
arrangement suggested by Mr M'Cosh could have but
the effect of tying it down to policy also. So long as
the Paper rests on its present independent basis, the
Editor stands alone. He is an insulated individual,
possessed of no other influence than what he owes to the
degree of confidence reposed by his readers in the
integrity of his principles or the soundness of his judg-
ment. He is not the mere convenient pendicle of a cen-
tralization scheme ; he is a felt check on it rather ; and,
considering the nature of the danger, not wholly useless
in that capacity. If he take a false step, the error is
that of an individual; and its effects, if it have any, are
easily neutralized. But a false step taken by a news-
paper which represented a central body of management
would be in reality the false step of the body itself, and,
in consequence, a greatly more serious affair. What, for
instance, would be the position of the Witness, if thus
tied down, were some such controversy as that of the
year 1837 to arise now ? — a controversy in which a great
majority of the central Edinburgh body would take

PAMPHLET. 265

decidedly the one side, and at least nineteen-twentieths
of the entire Church take as decidedly the other.

' The scheme next originated for improving the
Witness, — a scheme of uniting into one Edinburgh
paper both the Witness and Guardian, — was still more
directly fraught with danger ; and the fact that it should
be at all entertained shows how thoroughly the disturb-
ing influence of the sort of cross eddy which Edinburgh
society in reality forms, prevents some of our leading
Free Churchmen, who live much in the whirl, fromS
taking note of the current outside. What would be the
first effect of an union of the two Papers ? At present
the proceedings of the Edinburgh Presbytery are re-
ported at great length in the Witness, and those of the
Glasgow Presbytery in the Guardian ; but in no single
paper could both be published in a manner equally full.
Even had the Edinburgh Paper a reporter at Glasgow,
for the special purpose of giving the Glasgow Presby-
tery as much attention as it now receives, no set of
newspaper readers would bear, after they had perused
some three or four columns of the proceedings of
the one Presbytery, to set themselves to peruse some
three or four columns more of the proceedings of the
other. The Glasgow Presbytery would assume, in con-
sequence of the curtailment in its. .reports, unavoidable
in the circumstances, a secondary and provincial cha-
racter ; and one mighty step towards the dreaded cen-
tralization would be accomplished. The Church would
come to have its Archbishop Presbytery, associated
with its centre of secular influence. Such was the view
which I could not avoid taking of the intended union of
the Witness and Guardian. I had received very direct
information regarding the matter, but it had not been
formally proposed to me ; an union of the Scottish Re-

266 EDITOR,

cord and Edinburgh Evening Post was opportunely
taking place at the time ; and I wrote such an article on
the sort of marriages through which expiring newspapers
get into a state of coverture and disappear, as rendered
it impossible that, without the most ludicrous inconsist-
ency, the Witness and Guardian should ever be united.

' I may mention, that I received about this time two
several visits from Mr Sheriff Monteith. What the
Sheriff had to suggest on these occasions was a good
deal veiled in that peculiarly delicate kind of phrase-
ology, somewhat professional, which has to a simple man
the effect of casting a misty obscurity over the subjects
which the words envelop. On thinking, however, with
all my might, over his proposals, I came to discover that
they embodied a scheme of salaried censorship for the
Witness, devised, it would seem, for the express purpose
of keeping the editorial articles right ; and I straight-
way intimated, in a note to Mr J. G. Wood, that what I
had succeeded in seeing of the business I did not at all
like. The judgment of the proposed Censor might, I
thought, be scarce worth a hundred a-year to the Wit-
ness : it might be even a judgment not a great deal
stronger or more honestly directed than my own, save
and except, of course, in the matter of Whig elections :
and, besides, if the Censor and I came to differ, we
might quarrel. After communicating with Mr Wood, I
heard no more of the design, nor did I receive, though I
have experienced some kindness at the Sheriff's hands,
any after-visits from the Sheriff. It is perhaps scarce
worth while adverting to this circumstance ; but it may
probably have some bearing on the present state of
matters, and there can be no doubt that it indicated at
least one incipient attempt more to improve the Witness.

1 The next scheme of improving the Witness was

PAMPHLET. 267

originated a few months later, and it was on this occasion
that I became one of the Proprietors of the Paper. I
undertook to repay, by instalments, the thousand pounds
originally advanced by the subscribers to Mr Johnstone,
with the interest, year by year, of the unpaid portion in
hand, until the entire debt should be extinguished. It
had at first been proposed to make the thousand pounds
over to me as a boon ; but I was startled by some of the
conditions attached, and insisted that the terms of the
transaction should be those of ordinary business. Strange
enough, however, though the wish was acceded to, the
terms were not softened ; and the document drawn up
for the signatures of the Proprietors by Mr J. G. Wood
appeared so strange, even to my unpractised eyes, that I
requested my partner, Mr Fairly, to submit it to his man
of business. I found I had not mistaken its character ;
—the man of business had never seen such a document
before. And so a somewhat different sort of document
had to be drawn up by another hand ; and it is this
second document that defines the existing relations of
the Witness Proprietors and the Committee. Nothing
certainly could be more strangely despotic than the terms
of the first. To one of these I must specially refer : it
would have so stringently fastened down upon the Pro-
prietors, Mr Somers of the Scottish Herald, in the ca-
pacity of Sub-Editor, that were they subsequently to be-
come dissatisfied with him (and he was an untried man
at the time), they could not have shaken him off. His
position was to be rendered legally independent, both of
the Editor and the Proprietors of the Witness. I shall
not here inquire whether Mr Somers's after-management
of the Paper quite justified the wisdom of the position
which Mr Wood, in the behalf of his clients, would so
fain have assigned to him ; but I may surely take the

268 EDITOR.

liberty of asking, whether a standing so independent of
the parties within the Witness establishment did not
bear a too obvious reference to the exercise of an influence
from without, and to the favourite centralization scheme ?
I may be permitted to ask further, as the " tact, taste, and
delicacy "of Mr Somers did not prove quite what had
been expected, whether Dr Candlish's proposed Parlia-
ment-House Editor be a man known in the republic of
letters, or one who has yet to give his first proof of liter-
ary ability ? I must speak my mind freely ; — I am on
my trial ; and, be it remembered, that I address myself
not to the public at large, a la Sorley, but to a select few
of the wisest heads and soundest hearts of the Free
Church. I injured no one by the stand which I made
on this occasion ; had I not made it, I would have greatly
injured both my partner and myself, and degraded my-
self to a position which no man of a right spirit could for
a moment submit to occupy. I injured no one ; but I
must say that the part I acted seems never to have been
pardoned me. Are there men among us who, though
they have perhaps principle enough to forgive an enemy,
have not magnanimity enough to forget a disappoint-
ment ? *

* 'The following extract from an outline, by our man of business,
of Mr Wood's document, may serve to illustrate its character : —

'" Clause third provides that arrangements shall be made for the
copartnery publishing the Scottish Herald, or some similar weekly news-
paper in connection with the Witness, at the present price of the He-
rald, viz. threepence, and to engage the present Editor of the Herald
as its Editor, and Sub-Editor of the Witness; and from this obligation
the Company cannot be relieved, until they shall have satisfied the
Committee that the undertaking cannot be continued without certain
loss to the Proprietors of the Witness, after a trial. The Committee's
consent is also declared to be necessary in dispensing with the services
of the Editor of the Herald as Sub-Editor of the Witness ; and the
copartnery are again taken bound, at the sight of the Committee, to
allow a good. and sufficient salary for the Sub-Editor of the Witness ;

PAMPHLET. 269

' I became, I have said, a Proprietor of the Witness
on ordinary business terms. The printing material, in

thereby investing the Committee with the absolute power of determin-
ing what is ' a good and sufficient salary/ without regard to the Com-
pany's idea of the matter. Another obligation laid upon the Company
is, that in the event of their obtaining the consent of the Committee to
discontinue the Herald, they shall be bound to permit the Editor of
that paper to carry it on upon his own account, if he shall be disposed
to do so. [At page 14] it is declared that, for the better regulation
and carrying on of the said business (of printing and publishing the Wit-
ness and Scottish Herald newspapers), the Company * bind and oblige
themselves to implement and fulfil the whole conditions of the above-
quoted minute, and to make payment of the penalty of £500, in the
event of their not implementing the whole or any one of said condi-
tions.'" And the following is the opinion given us for our guidance by
our man of business, regarding the legal consequences of the entire
document : — " The effect of such a contract would be to divest the co-
partnery o£ every vestige of control over their own business, and to
throw it wholly into the hands of the Committee ; whilst the only con-
ditions attached to the loan of the £1000 to Mr Johnstone were, those
which provided for the maintenance of the principles of the Paper and
for the repayment of the loan."

' I must further mention here, that to these strange terms I had
strongly objected by letter, in Mr Fairly's name and iny own, ere they
had yet been embodied in the document, and existed but in a Minute,
said to be that of the Committee ; and that Mr Wood at once sustained
my objections as just and reasonable, but proceeded, notwithstanding,
to frame the document founded on the Minute, without intimating to
me his intentions on the subject, as if no such objections had ever been
made. The following paragraphs form part of my letter : —

' " And, first, with regard to the Scottish Herald : We find it stated
absolutely that it should be published at its present price. Now, it
occurs to us that it could be only necessary to do so, so long as there
is a competing paper in the field at the same price, or so long as the
competitor does not advance his price. Suppose Harthill's paper were
to come down, just because its price proved not remunerative, the
clause binding us not to advance ours might, in such circumstances,
have but the effect of bringing the Herald down too ; and this at a
time when the removal of our rival gave us a chance of keeping it up
by an advance of price.

' " What we desiderate, in the next place, is, that we should not be
held bound to keep up the Herald unless it proved a fair speculation,
in a business point of view. Profit we do not expect, but an unvaried
return of loss we cannot bind ourselves to incur. A simple fact may
place the matter in a strong light. Within the last quarter of a cen-
tury no fewer than eleven papers have been started in Edinburgh, and

270 EDITOR.

which Mr Johnstone had invested the £1000 originally
advanced him by the subscribers for the purpose of start-
ing the Paper, had so far deteriorated, that its value, at
the time I entered on the proprietorship, was estimated,
on the principle usually adopted in such cases, at some-

of these eleven only one — the Witness — has succeeded. The attempts
to establish the others have all ended in disappointment, and have en-
tailed on the proprietors losses in each instance of from a thousand to
fifteen hundred pounds. But how much greater would the losses have
been had the parties been taken bound to maintain their papers, what-
ever the amount of loss sustained ! Some of them could not continue to
be published at a defalcation of less than from eight to ten pounds per
week. Now, the Herald may possibly turn out such a speculation as
the one Edinburgh paper that during the last twenty-five years has
succeeded, but it is as possible it may turn out such a speculation as the
ten that have not : and what Mr Fairly and myself ask, is simply not
to be bound to keep it afloat perforce, should it prove unable to float
itself. We promise to give it a fair trial ; but should it refuse to live
on its own means, as an honest paper ought, it must just be permitted
to die.

' " In the third place, we are not sure that Mr Somers's name should
have been included in the Minute. He is yet in a considerable de-
gree an untried man. He may turn out to be all we wish him, or he
may turn out something else. Suppose a great majority of the sub-
scribers were by-and-by to be dissatisfied with his mode of conducting
the sub-editorial department of the Witness, or the editorial depart-
ment of the Herald! Or suppose we were to find him too much a
Radical, and impracticable to boot ! His name in the Minute, in these
circumstances, might possibly be found a rock a-head. There could
be little danger of our breaking with him so long as we found the
arrangement a good and beneficial one, though his name were not in
the Minute ; and the introducing it there may have merely the effect
of embarrassing, should the arrangement prove not good or beneficial."

' Such were some of the objections which were held reasonable, and
yet suffered to weigh nothing. The Minute on which Mr Wood found-
ed his document was said, as I have stated, to be that of the Witness
Committee ; and the Committee have now an opportunity of knowing
whether it was in reality such. The members are, Dr Cunningham, Dr
Candlish, Mr Begg, Mr Dunlop, Mr Blackadder, and Mr Wood. I may
mention, that none of the meetings on this business were attended by
Dr Cunningham ; and Mr Dunlop I saw but at one meeting, and that
for only a very few minutes. I may further mention, that the names
of both these gentlemen were added to those of the Committee, as re-
appointed on this occasion, at the express request of Mr Fairly and
myself, — Dr Cunningham at Mr Fairly's, and Mr Dunlop at mine.'

PAMPHLET. 271

what under nine hundred. I undertook, however, on its
being made over to me by Mr Johnstone, the whole of
the original debt ; and of course the money -interest of
the Witness Committee in the Paper ceased immediately
on my becoming bound to pay them the sum invested in
it by the subscribers. It was suggested, however, that a
certain yearly sum should be put at the disposal of the
Committee, for securing occasional contributions to the
Paper, in addition to the editorial ones ; and, regarding
the gentlemen that composed it as thoroughly identified
with Free Church interests and feelings, I at once did
what the mere man of business would have declined to
do, — acquiesced in the proposal. I, however, did not at
all like the form which it took in Mr Wood's document ;
and, in consequence, submitted to him, in the letter
already referred to in my note, the following statement
respecting it : —

4 With regard to the second article in your minute, Mr Fairly and
myself feel that we cannot treat with it until it takes a more definite
form. It would be desirable, we think, that a sum for occasional con-
tributions should be specified, which the Committee could in no case
exceed, and that the said sum should be subject to a sort of sliding-
scale reduction, proportioned to any fall that might take place in the
profits of the Paper. There are Papers in Edinburgh -which, though
they have existed for many years, and were at one time highly re-
munerative, yield no profits now, and can scarce pay an Editor. The

— , for instance And yet, at one time the was a

piece of more valuable property than the Witness is now, and could
have afforded more for occasional contributions. But what would be
its present condition, were there an outlay nearly equal to the Editor's
salary rendered imperative on the Proprietors, without reference to
existing circumstances ? I have suggested to Mr Fairly a scheme of
arrangement in this matter which satisfies him, and which, I trust, you
will deem reasonable. He tells me that the profits of the Witness for
the present year promise to amount to six hundred pounds. Let us
assume six hundred as the average profits, and fix the sum to be set
apart for occasional contributions as equal to the one-sixth of these, i.e.
one hundred. Should the profits sink, let the sum set apart sink in an
equal ratio. Let a profit of three hundred pounds per annum yield, for
instance, only fifty pounds for contributions ; but should the profits

272 EDITOR.

sink to two hundred. I trust you will deem it but fair that the claim
should be extinguished altogether, and that the Paper, thus reduced to
the level of what are the lower orders of Scotch newspapers in a busi-
ness point of view, should be restricted, like them, to merely the usual
newspaper staff of Editor, Sub-Editor, and Reporter. Just one word
regarding the occasional contributions themselves. I trust it is un-
necessary for me to stipulate, that I must possess over them, in every
instance, the proper editorial control. I shall pledge myself to exert
it on no occasion, without being prepared to yield a sufficient reason
to the Committee, whether for curtailment or rejection.'

' I regarded this proposal as fair ; the mere man of
lousiness would have perhaps deemed it something more ;
Mr Wood at once admitted it to be at least nothing
les<. The next time, however, that his document was
submitted to me as altered and modified, I found it did
not embody the proposal which he had apparently deem-
ed so reasonable ; but that, without having made a
single objection to the suggested proportion of a one
sixth part of the profits being set aside for the occasional
contributions, he had quietly inserted in his document a
one fifth. And then finding myself treated, not as a
man who would fain have dealt with friends whom he
trusted, in a generous and liberal spirit, but as a mere
simpleton, who, having already yielded much, might be
expected to yield more, I indignantly broke off all
negotiation in the business, resolved that, if the terms
of Mr Wood should turn out to be those of his clients
the Committee, to receive at the hands of such a body
no share in the proprietorship of the Witness on any
conditions whatever.

' Some short time after I had arrived at this deter-
mination, I waited on Dr Candlish at the Doctor's own
request, and we talked over the business alone together
in his study. At this distance of time I can give but
the purport of the conversation, — not the word-
immediately opened to him my intention of demanding

PAMPHLET. 273

of the Committee whether the terms of Mr Wood's
document were in reality theirs, and if so, to have done
with them at once. I was taking, said the Doctor, much
too serious a view of the matter. Wood was my friend,
and a good fellow ; but, of course, a lawyer, who did
things in the stiff, strict, professional style. His con-
ditions were really nothing, — it was with friends that I
had to deal. I stated to the Doctor the terms which
Mr Wood had in so strange a style rejected, and asked
him if they were not fair. Oh, certainly, he replied ;
nothing can be more fair; but the difference between
you and Wood is a mere misunderstanding, and it will
never do to let it come to a serious quarrel, by laying it
formally before the Committee. Now, of course, in all
this Dr Candlish may have acted simply the part of a
peace-maker between Mr Wood and me, irrespective of
the merits of the point at issue. It may have been a
perfectly indifferent matter to him, on at least his own
account, whether I submitted the matter to the Com-
mittee or no. He perhaps sent for me on this occasion,
and borrowed time from his sermon to converse with me
(for 'twas on a Saturday), on Mr Wood's account alone.
At all events, in consequence of what he recommended,
I did not appeal to the Committee ; I merely submitted,
as I have already said, Mr Wood's document, through
Mr Fairly, to a man of business, instructing him at the
same time to draw out another, on what I deemed more
reasonable terms. The man of business did so ; and his
paper, on being submitted by Mr Wood to Mr Dunlop
for his professional opinion, was pronounced by the lat-
ter gentleman to be a not unfair embodiment of the in-
tentions of the Committee. It is with great pain that I
have thus adverted to a transaction, the remembrance of
which still lies heavy upon me ; but circumstances de-

VOL. II. 18

274 EDITOR.

mand that the whole truth should be known to the select
few whom, in now addressing, I constitute my judges.
I sincerely trust there are no such arts employed else-
where in the management of the more secular concerns
of the Free Church, as those which I found all too palp-
able in this intended settlement of the Witness. They
are arts that can lead to but doubtful advantages and
damaging exposures ; they form but short-lived substi-
tutes— hurtful in their life and offensive in their death
— for that broad and massive simplicity, profound in its
wisdom and immortal in its nature, which leads in a Avay
everlasting. And, further, they too strongly savour of
those wily diplomatists — not of the Church, but of the
world — whose achievements and character one of the
English satirists has so pointedly described,—

" Men in their loose unguarded hours they take ;
Not that themselves are wise, but others weak.' '

To one very agreeable incident connected with this affair
I cannot deny myself the pleasure of referring. A report
had gone abroad, I know not how, that I had differed on
business matters with certain individuals connected with
the Witness ; and a gentleman whom I scarce at all
knew, and whose sympathies had been awakened in my
behalf on purely literary and scientific grounds, came
at once forward, and generously offered, through the
medium of a common friend, to place a thousand pounds
at my disposal,

' I may just mention, ere I pass on to something else,
that there has been no call made on the part of the Com-
mittee for money with which to enter the literary market
and purchase articles.

' The fifth and last scheme of improving the Witness
is that which has proved the occasion of this letter. For
the special benefit of the Paper I am to retire, it seems,

PAMPHLET. 275

from the Editorship, and a Parliament-House Editor
(with perhaps a Committee of Control in the distance), is
to take my place. A word or two here on the Parlia-
ment House, and the peculiar position of the Free Church
portion of it. In all my remarks, however, I must be
held to except at least one Edinburgh lawyer. I need
not name him. It may be enough for me to say, that of
almost all the men I ever knew, he possesses a mind the
most exquisitely disinterested and honourable. The
step which I have now taken will, I fear, greatly grieve,
mayhap offend him, — a consideration which would have
so weighed with me against it, could any consideration
not founded in absolute principle have done so, that I
would have adopted, for the sake of his friendship alone,
a more timid and submissive course.

' The adherents of the Free Church may be safely
divided into two classes, the people who belong to the
Parliament House, and the people who do not ; and in
at least matters political, when Whiggism is in office,
there is, I am afraid, no such thing as urging the duties
of the one class without running counter to the interests
of the other. I need scarce say, that there exists no
body of men among whom political feeling is more vi-
vacious than among our Edinburgh lawyers ; nor that
peculiarly on "the legal profession in Scotland the dew of
Government patronage descends, like the dews of heaven
on the fleece of Gideon, when all often is dry around.
Por almost all the higher civil appointments of the coun-
try, gentlemen of the law alone are eligible ; and it must
be admitted at least as a fact, that of these our Parlia-
ment-House friends have, in proportion to their number,
got a competent share. Now, be it remembered, that
these legal Pree Churchmen occupy at the present time,
with reference to the Whig Government, a singularly im-

276 EDITOR.

portant position. The Free Church, ever since the Disrup-
tion, has been giving significant indications of her strength;
and, fairly broken loose from the moorings of party, she is
in circumstances either considerably to damage or consider-
ably to strengthen the cause politic which she may oppose
or adopt. And so, if the Whig lawyers possess much in-
fluence with the Free Church, they must of necessity, on
that account, possess much influence with the Govern-
ment also. For through them exclusively, and some one
or two Free Churchmen high in rank, can the Whigs
alone expect to manage the Free Church, either by
rendering it subservient to Government designs, or by
neutralizing its influence against Government measures..
The only other mode of conciliating our Church is a mode
which the present Ministry are obviously not to adopt.
They might endear themselves to us on the broad ground
of principle ; but the withdrawal of the Sites Bill,—
which certainly would not have been withdrawn were the
Whigs, as a party, disposed to support it, — demonstrates
too surely that that course they are not prepared to try.
I can well understand how, with reference to these
grounds, the Witness should be an exceedingly obnoxious
paper to our Whig Free Churchmen of the Parliament
House, and how it happens that some of the more in-
fluential among them have of late indignantly thrown
it up. Whigs as they are, — and to Whiggism Tory-
ism is naturally opposed, — it must be more decidedly
a rock a-head than all the Tory newspapers of the
kingdom put together. It comes between them and
the Free Church people. It abides firm by the Old
Whiggism, but it warns its constituency against the de-
signs of the New. It prefers Protestantism to Macaulay ;
and might be found exerting a damaging influence on
the coming elections. Hence a large amount of Parlia-

PAMPHLET. 277

merit-House criticism on a want of " tact and taste " in
the Paper ; its views are narrow and its spirit and policy
bad. The real cause of condemnation cannot be assigned,
but condemned it must be.

' There are no doubt ingenious gentlemen among the
Free Church lawyers of the Parliament House, and it is
peculiarly their vocation to plead causes ; but in this
special cause, should the annoyance of insinuation and
inuendo continue, I shall not hesitate to encounter them
one and all. It is, I trust, in no proud or boastful spirit
that I say so ; and that my confidence is rather in the
character of the men whom I shall have to address, than
in any peculiar ability of my own. I shall have the
ministers and the people of the Free Church of Scotland
for judges and jury in the case, — a class not particularly
remarkable, mayhap, for " taste, tact, or delicacy," but
certainly not wanting in the characteristic shrewdness of
their country, and most assuredly not devoid of solid
principle. If compelled to lay open the policy of our
Parliament-House friends to the landward readers of the
Witness, the good men will, I fear not, with all their
bluntness and rusticity, be quite intelligent enough to
understand it. Nor do I despair even of Edinburgh.
There has been a strong disposition evinced of late to
count heads in our metropolitan Free Kirk-Sessions, and
no high satisfaction evinced at finding the lawyerly heads
so numerous.

' It is not by mere tact and management that differ-
ences consequent on the position of Parliament-House
Free Churchmen with regard to the Government, and the
peculiar duties of the Witness with regard to the
ministers and people of the Free Church, are to be
reconciled. So long as the Whigs continue what they
are, and our Free Church lawyers persist at all hazards

278 EDITOR.

in supporting them, the difference must, in many points,
be irreconcileable. The Parliament-House Editor who
produced a Witness suited to satisfy them, would fail most
egregiously in his duty to the Free Church and its
people. I may here state, as not quite out of place, that
I entertain no factious dislike of our Whig members of
Parliament. I am not Tory, Conservative, Radical,
Chartist. I am a Whig, and have been so ever since I
was able to form an opinion. When many of my
respected friends in the north country, alarmed, some
ten or twelve years ago, by the Whig measures of the
day, were casting their influence into the Conservative
scale, I remained a Whig still ; nor have I yet laid down
any one of the political principles which I then held.
That I am now no thorough supporter of the Whig
Ministry, is a consequence, not of my having changed
my Whiggism, but of my being more a Protestant than
a politician, and that my real party principles are those of
the Free Church of Scotland.

' I have of late heard much regarding the faults of the
Witness, and I am, I trust, not blind to them. It may
be well known, however, — for on scarce any other topic
do newspaper Editors so frequently insist, — that what
one reader deems a fault, another does not deem a fault
at all ; and that a Paper thoroughly to the mind of one
class, would be in utter discordance with the taste of
another. The Witness has many faults which Dr Cand-
lish has observed, — it has perhaps some others which he
has not discovered yet. There are occasional complaints
made at the Witness Office, which at certain times bear
on a particular point ; and the following extract from
a letter dated the 21st November, which I received in
Cromarty from my partner Mr Fairly, ere the present
storm arose, indicates its nature very directly : — " You

PAMPHLET. 279

will observe," says Mr F., "from the state of the Paper
to-day, that it was impossible to find room for the
twentieth chapter of your Impressions. I am sorry that
our efforts to please, by giving a full report of the Com-
mission, have had a very different effect. There have
been a good many grumblers about the Publishing Office
to-day, who say they would like an outline of the busi-
ness much better than a full report, and would willingly
wait the publication of the Monthly Statement for such
documents as Dr Candlish's speech [Report] on Educa-
tion. I suspect that now, when the great excitement is
over, a succinct outline of ecclesiastical affairs, in a well-
selected general newspaper, would be more acceptable to
the greater part of our readers, than a Paper almost
entirely filled with heavy reports. A question may
occur occasionally to fill the public mind, and it would be
well to give full scope to all such ; but I have found
that our very full reports of the ordinary Church busi-
ness have, for some time back, attracted no notice except
to be grumbled at for their length, and have failed to
defray the extra expense of getting them up."

' Now, there is a meaning in this little bit of fact,
which the proprietors of the Witness cannot afford to
disregard. Dr Candlish, in his present scheme for im-
proving the Paper, suggests that "occasional Supple-
ments ought to be given, if required." Certainly the
necessities of the Paper require them : in the course of
one fortnight I reckoned up no fewer than nineteen
columns of ecclesiastical reports and intelligence, which
appeared in no other Edinburgh Paper.* And the

* ' In the two last Witnesses alone, that of Saturday the 9th and that
of Wednesday the 13th instant, there are upwards of fourteen columns
of Free-Church-speech reports, which are to be found in no other
Edinburgh newspaper.

280 EDITOR.

other Edinburgh Papers, possessed of an equal breadth
of surface, had, of course, instead, their nineteen columns,
filled with the staple news of the day. But though in
this sense the Witness very much requires Supplements,
the public, it seems, does not require them at all ; a
single half-sheet Supplement costs £16, and £16 worth
of speaking, given often away, for which we, the Pro-
prietors, would not receive the thanks of those who
got it gratis, and which those who did not would not
buy, though it might be sport to the speakers, would be
death to us. Free Churchmen, in Edinburgh and else-
where, must not fall into the mistake of reckoning on
what is by what has been. The series of events which
terminated in the Disruption formed a great and
intensely exciting drama, and the whole empire looked
on with an interest much more than commensurate with
the ability of the men who spoke or the men who wrote.
The speeches and motions were pregnant with a trans-
action of vast historic importance. But we are now
thrown more on our own resources, and are simply
speakers and writers of a certain definite calibre. The
curtain has fallen on the master drama, and the after-
piece resembles, in comparison, that unfinished play of
Bayes in the " Rehearsal," which was complete, said the
poet, in all the dialogues, and wanted only the plot.

' There is obviously some grave difficulty in the way
of rendering the Witness a good general newspaper. It
has now had in succession no fewer than six Sub-
Editors, and all of them have failed to satisfy. And for
eight months it had the incessant attention of Mr Eyfe, a
gentleman for many years connected with the Scotsman,
one of the best sub-edited newspapers in Scotland, — and
who, thoroughly a master of his profession, had found no
difficulty in giving order, interest, and an air of lightness

PAMPHLET. 281

and intelligence to the columns of that Paper. The very
superior ability of Mr Fyfe attracted the notice of the
Times, and he was lost to us, through an arrangement
with that journal which no Scotch Paper could afford to
make. I requested him to state, when leaving us, why
it was he could not make the Witness what he had pre-
viously made the Scotsman, and he did so, assigning
three distinct reasons, — first, our long and heavy reports,
the weight of which the Scotsman and every other Edin-
burgh newspaper escape ; second, the insertion of docu-
ments, such as the Reports of Committees, &c., which,
though highly important in themselves, are unsuited to
the columns of a newspaper ; and, third, disturbances
from without, of a kind which he had never before ex-
perienced : — time after time, at a late hour, when the
order of the paper had been completed for publication,
Mr Fyfe found that some document, or article, or report,
had to be inserted, agreeably to instructions, and that the
news of the day had in consequence to give place, — to
be inserted in some succeeding number, when no longer
fresh. Such was the decision of a practical man, long
conversant with the getting up of a newspaper ; and I
submitted it, among others, to Dr Candlish. And the
Doctor no*w tells the Proprietors that "on passing topics"
the Witness " is often silent or tardy," and that he
" attaches no weight to the excuse of long reports having
to be inserted." With regard to what Dr Candlish
deems the still more serious faults of the Paper, — those
of the writer of this letter, — such as " a want of taste and
tact in the handling of public questions," — faults of so
grave and hopeless a character, that the Doctor is con-
vinced " Mr Miller ought not to be Editor " any longer,
but reduced to the standard of a mere subordinate con-
tributor of articles, — I shall go direct to the point at

282 EDITOR.

once. The scheme in view is simply that of a censor-
ship ; and the Censor, assisted by the nice taste and
tact of the Parliament-House Editor, is to be Dr Cand-
lish.

' There are important questions on which the Doctor
and I entirely differ ; and one of these I must be per-
mitted to adduce, that it may be at once seen how such
a censorship would work. The opening article in Loives
Magazine for the present January, — that on the " Duty
of Electors," — is, I have the most direct means of know-
ing, from the pen of Dr Candlish ; and it contains an
advice, entirely practical in its nature, to the Free
Churchmen of Scotland. It earnestly urges them, if they
wish effectually to prevent the endowment of Popery,
to join the Voluntaries in a vigorous attack on all the
existing religious Establishments of the empire.

' Now, this advice I deem so singularly unwise and
dangerous, that on no account could I be induced to
second it in the Witness. Whether right or wrong in
my convictions, I am at least thoroughly convinced that
it would have the effect, if acted upon, of placing the
great Protestant front of the empire in a fatally false
position, and would, besides, be peculiarly injurious to
the Free Church. In the first place, a war with Estab-
lishments would have the inevitable effect of cutting
off the earnest Protestantism of our own body from
the earnest Protestantism of the English and Irish
Churches ; and, be it remembered, that in these
Churches, notwithstanding their signal faultiness as
Establishments, there are very many truly excellent men
who are doing what the Voluntaries have long since for-
gotten to do, — honestly maintaining a consistent protest
against Popery, In the second place, it would have the
effect of arraying on the side of Popish endowment a

PAMPHLET. 283

numerous class who now stand neutral, — men who, like
the ministers of the Scottish Establishment, and the
men, clerical and lay, of a corresponding character in
England and Ireland, have a large secular stake in-
volved in the question, and who, much rather than that
Establishments should fall altogether, were they to find
them assailed in the mass, would unite in calling in to
their assistance and support the seven millions of Popish
Ireland. In the third place, we have, I think, direct
evidence, that though the war against Popery is, in its
effects on those who prosecute it, an eminently safe war,
the war against Establishments is not ; — never, at least,
was the Church more spiritual than when she was war-
ring against Popery ; — never did any Church, in any
controversy, become more thoroughly secular than the
Voluntaries of Scotland when warring against Establish-
ments. In the fourth place, while the war against
Popery would be strictly constitutional, the war against
Establishments would not : it would of necessity endan-
ger, with the assailed institutions, not a few precious
remnants of the Revolution Settlement, in which no class
have a larger stake than we ; and it is, besides, a grave
question, whether the Eree Church would not lose im-
mensely more by forfeiting the esteem of all solid men,
hostile to a position so decidedly revolutionary, than she
could possibly gain through any consequent accession to
the number of her allies, from the ranks of the restless
and the dissatisfied. In the fifth place, such a war as the
Doctor desiderates would justly lay our Church open, if
waged ere the present generation had passed away, to a
charge of gross and suspicious inconsistency ; seeing he
recommends it should be a war carried on not simply on
mere consideration of expediency, which may lead at
various times to various courses of conduct, but also on

284 EDITOR.

a strictly religious principle, — a principle which, if sound
at all, must have been as much so ten years ago,
during the heat of the Voluntary controversy, as it is
now ; and seeing, further, that though since that time
the Scottish Establishment has been revolutionized and
degraded, no change has taken place in the constitution
and government of the English and Irish Establishments,
both of which we in the course of the controversy strenu-
ously defended. And, in the sixth and last place, I deem
it all too obvious, that the Voluntaries would not, as a
body, be heartily our allies in the conflict. A vast
majority of their number in Scotland lost their hearty
dislike of the Scottish Establishment when we left it ;
and it is to us, — as manifested in the " Send back the
money'* business, and several other transactions of re-
sembling character, — that the dislike now points. When
the vast majority of the old Dissenters of the country
put the slave-having Churches of America so emphatic-
ally under the ban, it was a clear proof, to my mind at
least, that the Voluntary controversy was fully over. A
State never dismisses its auxiliaries until its wars are
ended. Dr Candlish's scheme, if promulgated from
the platform in the Music Hall, would, I doubt
not, elicit the hollow hosannahs of Edinburgh Vol-
untaries ; but I am equally clear that it would do in-
finite mischief to the cause of Protestantism, by lower-
ing its spirit and dividing its forces. It seems all too
characteristic of a mind greatly more adroit in prelimin-
aries and details, than sagacious in the master businesses
to which the preliminaries should lead and the details
belong, — a mind skilful in coasting along shallow bays
and miniature promontories, but that, when it launches
into the open sea, lacks both compass and rudder, and
carries with it no nicely graduated sextant, by which

PAMPHLET. 285

to determine lines of bearing or points of position.*
' Nay, even on considerations of expediency, in the
lowest sense of the term, I entirely differ from Dr Cand-
lish regarding the policy of what he recommends. His
proposed means of check and counteraction are ludi-
crously inadequate. Great bodies of men can be moved
by but the lever of great interests or great principles ;
and there is no possibility of awakening a nation to
enact a stratagem. " Let the demand," says the Doctor,
" for the removal of all existing Establishments, on the
ground of those two principles, be as clear and unequivo-
cal as the cry for new Popish or miscellaneous endow-
ments. Let statesmen of all parties know, that they
have to deal with a firm and compact body of men,
opposed to all Establishments as now constituted, on
religious considerations, and determined, on every oc-
casion, when new endowments are talked of, to move the
previous question of confiscating of the old for public
exigencies of the State." Ingenious, but surely not very
wise. The people are to be made earnest and energetic,
it would seem, on the strength of splitting hairs and
drawing distinctions, and a weak-minded Ministry to be
appalled and arrested by the manoeuvre of " moving the
previous question." Does Dr Candlish in reality hold,
that a country is to be aroused, or a Government over-
awed, by the exercise of the same kind of arts through
which a Kirk-Session is to be managed, or a Deacons'
Court held in check ?

' Now, here is exactly one of the sort of matters on

* 'In the entire article in Lowe's Magazine for January, — very
unworthy of its November precursor, — the trumpet gives an uncertain
sound. Independently of the fatal advice which it tenders, it is of a
character suited to give the Protestant cause no help, and the policy of
the most secular-minded Whig that walks the Parliament House, be
he who he may, no hindrance.'

286 EDITOR.

which the proposed censorship would be brought to bear.
But though it seems natural enough that on so difficult
a question Dr Candlish and I should differ, it is perhaps
not quite so obvious on what principle his judgment
should invariably control and over-ride mine. Such,
however, is the principle which a censorship involves.
It might be all quite well that Dr Candlish should keep
me right ; but, pray, who is to keep right Dr Cand-
lish?

' I must speak my mind freely ; — much better now, in
secret conference, ere matters have yet gone too far, than
from the house-top. I complain that the most justifiable
stand which I made regarding Mr Wood's document has
never been forgiven me by the Doctor. " How comes it
that you have offended Dr Candlish ? " I was asked, a
considerable time since, by a friend ; " have you quar-
relled ? " " Not at all," I said ; " what can have led
you to think so ? " " The marked change in his mode of
addressing you in the Witness'' was the reply; "you
once used to be his dear Sir ; you are now simply Sir."
" Oh," I rejoined, " the Doctor never thinks of his mode
of addressing people ; he has something else to do." " I
beg your pardon/' was the reply ; "in matters of that
kind Dr Candlish is always wide awake." Let me not
be misunderstood : I solicit no man's friendship ; I
merely advert to a circumstance that has attracted notice.
I complain, further, that disadvantageous criticisms have
been dropped into circulation regarding the Witness,
which, had the real interests of the Paper been consulted,
should have been addressed direct to myself. A remark
let fall in the hearing of the pliant officials of No. 38,
York Place, flees far without losing its original character.
I have been cognizant of what was going on in certain
quarters, in this way, for a considerable time past.

PAMPHLET. 287

" For wherever he went, he was 'ware of a sound,
Now heard in the distance, now gathering round,
And it irked him much that that sound should be,
But the soul of the cause of it well guessed he."

I yet further complain of the part acted by Dr Candlish
in the Edinburgh Presbytery, when he stood up to say
he had detected a sophism in an article of mine on com-
munion with the slave-having Churches. Did the
Doctor really imagine that, by casting the Witness as a
tub to the whale on that occasion, he could neutralize the
bitter hostility evinced by the Establishment and the
Voluntaries on the slave-having question, to the Free
Church ? Alas ! the hostility lies too deep. I build
nothing on the fact that, for the article to which Dr
Candlish so pointedly and so publicly referred, I had al-
ready received, in an exceedingly kind note, the thanks
of Dr Chalmers ; and that he, in consequence of seeing
either worse or better than the critic, had failed to detect
the sophism. Nor did it in the least move me that the
criticism should have furnished Mr M'Beth of Glasgow
with a text on which to deliver himself, in a pamphlet,
of a little of his superfluous nonsense. The article did,
perhaps, contain a sophism, though I have yet failed to
see or Dr Candlish to show that it did. I shall, how-
ever, take the liberty of asking the Doctor whether it
was wise, — I shall not say friendly, — to strike thus, as if
from behind, at a humble but devoted man-at-arms, en-
gaged in fighting in the same front of battle with him-
self against the same common enemy ? I ask him,
further, if he thinks it was from a sense of fear, or from
a lack of materials for criticism in his productions, spoken
or written, or from any other cause than simply a
sincere regard to the interests of the Free Church, that
I made no reprisals ? This I shall dare say, — that were

288 EDITOR.

I disposed to make sport to the Philistines, I could find
in the recorded thinking of Dr Candlish not a few mag-
nificent immaturities with which to amuse them. There
are some minds that, from a certain structural idiosyn-
crasy, lie peculiarly open to animadversion ; and were I
as regardless of general as of personal consequences, — of
my Church as of myself, — I might perhaps find exercise
for ingenuity in the dissection of one special intellect of
this character, that, like a summer in the higher lati-
tudes, produces much, but ripens little, — that is content
often to acquiesce in its first hasty conclusions, without
waiting for what the second cogitations may produce,—
and that bears on its incessant stream of thought, ever
copious and sparkling, many a fragile air-bell, that,
though it reflects the rainbow hues of heaven on its
surface, owes all its dancing buoyancy to a lack of
weight, and is singularly hollow within.

' Of the more elaborate articles on the Sabbath
question which lately appeared in the Witness, three
were of my writing, and the others by the Assistant-
Editor, Mr Wylie. I may mention, that Sir Andrew
Agnew, in writing to the office, deemed them at least
worthy of thanks ; and that immediately on the appear-
ance of my first paper, — the one with the reference to
Bishop Gillis, — I was requested by Mr Hanna, son-in-
law of Dr Chalmers, to furnish him with an article on
Sabbath Observance, "more in its social than its
peculiarly religious aspect," for the North British Review.
Now, on these articles Dr Candlish founds one of his
urgent reasons for my retirement from the Editorship of
the Witness. " The damage done," he says, " to the
Sabbath cause by certain recent articles is incalculable ;"
and I have learned from Edinburgh,* through more

* This letter was written in Cromarty.

PAMPHLET. 289

than one channel of communication, that he has been
unsparing in his condemnation of my assault on Bishop
Gillis. I shall not defend myself in this matter. It has
perhaps been my misfortune that, somewhat curious in
my reading, I have lived too much in the past, when
even the best of men were unconscious of fault in taking
liberties equally great with Jesuitical bishops, extreme
unction, and the wafer ; and I have, I am afraid, failed
to note that the atmosphere of the present time has been
materially changed by exhalations blown aslant, over the
face of even the Evangelic Churches, from the bogs and
fens of a hollow liberalism, that professes to respect all
religions, and believes none. I make no defence. I am
convinced, too, that were all the errors to which man is
liable of the especial character of mine, Dr Candlish
might with a clear conscience cast at the peccant Editor
the first stone.

'I have thus stated my views on the general question,
in its bearings on the Witness newspaper ; and I must
now be permitted to say a few words regarding myself. I
am neither in the mood nor the circumstances to act
rashly. My health and strength, though gradually im-
proving, are not what they have been. I have several
poor relatives dependent on me for support. I have a
wife and family. I have been doing what little I could
for the Church ; and as I have not yet touched a farthing
of the profits of the Witness, — and, until the debt to the
Committee be honourably discharged, never will, — I am
a poor man.* But though not in a condition, and cer-
tainly not in a frame, to act rashly, I trust, with God's
help, to be enabled to act firmly, and in a manner not
unworthy of the Church of the Disruption. I need not

* Should not refuse that money — subscribers are willing to give
up. — Note by Dr Chalmers.

VOL. II. 19

290 EDITOR.

remind some of the gentlemen whom I now address, that
the place which I occupy as Editor of the Witness was
not of my seeking, and that I entered upon its duties in
weakness and great fear, thoroughly convinced of the
goodness of the cause, but diffident indeed of my own
ability to maintain it as it ought to be maintained,
against the hostile assaults of well-nigh the whole news-
paper press of the kingdom. Little did I think, after
reading Lord Brougham's speech in the Auchterarder
case in my house in Cromarty, and then passing a sleep-
less night, brooding over the state of great peril in which
the Church that I loved was placed, that the result of
my cogitations should have had the effect of leading me,
by a " way which I knew not," into so peculiar a position.
Once there, however, I found myself in my true place ;
and I trust I may be permitted to say, that I have striven
to perform its duties not without reference to the Pro-
vidence whose hand I recognized in the entire transaction.
I have been an honest journalist. During the seven
years in which I have edited the Witness, I have never
once given expression to an opinion which I did not con-
scientiously regard as sound, nor stated a fact which, at
the time at least, I did not believe to be true. My faults
have no doubt been many ; but they have not been faults
of principle ; nor have they lost me the confidence of
that portion of the people of Scotland to which I belong,
and which I represent. And possessing their confidence,
I do not now feel myself justified in retiring from my
post. Dr Candlish and his Parliament-House friends
are not the ministers and people of the Tree Church of
Scotland; nor do I recognize the expression of the
Doctor's will in this matter as a call to me in Providence
to divest myself of my office, in order that the Free
Church Press may be made the subject of a centralizing

PAMPHLET. 291

experiment, or that the Tree Church itself may be laid
open to the temporizing influences of the Parliament
House. I shall at least, ere I yield, carry my appeal
from one minister of the Free Church to all the others,
and from the Sheriff's to the counties.

' I may, however, cease to be Editor of the Witness.
Dr Candlish and Mr Wood I consider as parties in this
business, and so I do not put myself into their hands ;
but with regard to the other gentlemen whom I address,
I do so with the fullest confidence. The Witness is
property ; it belongs bond fide to Mr Fairly and me. If,
however, the friends whom I now consult think I should
cease being its Editor, the course is obvious. Let it be
valued by persons mutually chosen by the Witness Com-
mittee and the Proprietors ; and immediately on the
Committee's coming under the necessary obligations, it
shall be made over into their hands, and I as its Con-
ductor, and Mr Fairly and I as co-Proprietors, shall close
our connection with it for ever. Permit me to state
further, that if there is to be war between Dr Candlish
and me, it must be open war. " Of wiles, more inex-
pert, I boast not." The true springs of the under-cur-
rent of " hinted faults" and "hesitated dislikes" must be
fairly uncovered, should the stream continue to flow.
The difference must either close entirely, or the people
of Scotland must be made fully acquainted with the
grounds on which it rests.
1 1 am, GENTLEMEN,

1 With sincere respect,
' Your most humble,

' Most obedient servant,

' HUGH MILLER.'

292 EDITOR.

POSTSCRIPT.

* ' The above was forwarded from Cromarty in MS. to
Mr Fairly, who, with his own hands, assisted by my
brother, a printer in the. Witness Office, set it into type.
On my arrival here I found it awaiting me in proof, and,
with the proof, a note from Dr Candlish, in which the
Doctor states that, having come to learn from a letter he
had received from Mr Stewart of Cromarty, that his
" well-meant interference in the affairs of the Witness "
had been wholly misunderstood both by Mr Stewart and
me, he now wished, in consequence, all his communica-
tions on the subject to be " superseded, set aside, burned,
and held as non-existent." The request comes too late ;
— / take the present step ; it will of course be the Doc-
tor's turn to take the next. If my views regarding the
danger to be apprehended from a system of Free Church
centralization, and the influence of secular politics on our
Edinburgh leadership, possess any measure of sound-
ness, it would be well, surely, that they should be soberly
discussed by our wiser and cooler heads, so long as Chal-
mers is still with us. Dr Candlish' s written communica-
tions have, I may here state, been marked " private ; "
but neither Mr Fairly nor I were the proper depositories
of the secret which they embody. The man who has let
his neighbour understand in strict secrecy that he intends
bleeding him for his benefit, by sending a bullet through
him in the evening, has no reason to complain that his
neighbour betrays his confidence by blabbing to the
police. I understand from various quarters, that there
is to be forthwith another Free Church paper started in
Edinburgh. Assuredly one special class of Edinburgh
Free Churchmen shall by-and-by greatly need such an
organ ; for so long at least as I edit the Witness, it shall

THE QUARREL. 293

never be the representative of their views, or the advo-
cate or apologist of their policy. I would fain advise
them to term their vehicle " THE FREE CHURCH CEN-
TRALIZATION JOURNAL, and Parliament- House Gazette;"
and I shall have very great pleasure indeed in contribut-
ing the Prospectus.

'EDINBURGH, 14th January, 1847.'

In a biography of Hugh Miller an opinion on the
merits of this quarrel may be expected, but I am not
sure that I am qualified to form one with impartiality,
because, on the most important matter in dispute, the
duty of the Free Church to take her place in line of
battle with the Nonconformists of the realm, in order
to strike their bonds from the ' State institutions ' and
change them into Free Churches, my humble opinion
coincides with that of Dr Candlish. I have also had the
opportunity of taking note, in quite unguarded moments
when we happened to meet at Kilcreggan on the estuary
of the Clyde, and were sometimes together alone in a
little boat on Loch Long, of Dr Candlish's feelings
towards Hugh Miller in the last years of his life. Clear
acknowledgment of his intellectual power, satisfaction
with the part played by himself in bringing him to
Edinburgh, and a regretful, not angry, feeling that he
could not forget and forgive and let by-gones be by-
gones,— these are the impressions which remain with
me of what I heard from Dr Candlish in 1856 respect-
ing Hugh Miller.

If the readers of these pages have formed the same
conception of Miller as I have, they will not fail to
understand how offence, and just offence, might be
taken by him at the conduct of Dr Candlish, although
the latter was imperfectly conscious, or not conscious at

294 EDITOR.

all, of the offence he was giving. Miller was a man of
exquisite sensibility, and his life in Cromarty, the ad-
mired of all admirers, the delicious incense of Miss
D unbar 's worship ever in his nostrils, was not adapted
to fit him for those rough collisions of man with man
which are every-day occurrences in political and eccle-
siastical life. Not only was he personally sensitive,
he was filled with a devotion more than knightly to the
cause of the Church, and anything like a hint, direct or
indirect, that he had not served her efficiently wounded
him to the quick. Dr Candlish has lived in the eye of
the public for more than thirty years, and every one who
has either watched him or worked with him knows that,
in carrying out a public object, in giving effect to an
idea which has taken possession of him, he consults no
sensibilities, is reckless of minute proprieties, and hur-
ries to his mark in conspicuous disregard of the ribs
he may elbow or the toes he may crush. There can,
also, I think, be no doubt that the conception formed
by Dr Candlish as to what the Witness ought to be
and to do differed in essential particulars from Hugh
Miller's. Dr Candlish may never have said as much in
words, or even brought the thought to distinct conscious-
ness, but fundamentally his notion was that it should be
more exclusively a Church paper, and more emphatic-
ally a Whig paper, than its editor could or would make
it. Miller felt that he had a right to put his own image
and superscription on the Witness. Throughout Scot-
land he was identified with it ; the acclamation of Scot-
land justified him in the belief that the splendid success
which had attended it was due to him. Surely this was
no more than that honest pride, that manly independence,
which. prompts a colonel to resent interference with him
in fighting his regiment or a captain in sailing his ship.

HIS VICTORY. 295

It was, of course, in no sense or degree incumbent on
Dr Candlish to think that the Witness was faultlessly
conducted ; but, presuming Miller to be correct in
believing the Doctor to have considered his positive
removal from the editorship necessary, most of us pro-
bably will think the decision surprising, and no one
will be astonished that Hugh Miller should regard it
with indignation. For the rest, opinion will be divided
upon the views taken by him and by Dr Candlish
respectively on many of the questions which crop up,
somewhat in the manner of geological strata through
fields bearing the corn and the weeds of to-day, in
this pamphlet. Miller appears as the representative of
Free Churchmen ' of the long-derived historic type and
sternly orthodox spirit.' Bishop Gillis was simply a
Jesuitical bishop, to be unmasked; the Sabbath was
to be maintained in all strictness, without regard
had to ' exhalations blown aslant, over the face of even
the Evangelic Churches, from the bogs and fens of a
hollow liberalism, that professes to respect all religions,
and believes none ; ' and the splendour of Macaulay's
genius, the energy of his political Whiggism, the bril-
liancy of his Parliamentary career, were to be made of
no account by the citizens of Edinburgh in electing a
member of Parliament, if only he adhered to his deter-
mination to vote in favour of the Maynooth grant. Ex-
halations, whether of the fen or of the dawn, have
assuredly been dimming the glory of this ' long-derived
historic type ' of Scottish Presbyterian religion ; but it
has been the faith of many a brave heart and strong brain,
and never of a braver or a stronger than Hugh Miller's.

The triumph of Miller was instant, absolute, final.
Dr Chalmers, having perused the letter, lost not a mo-
ment in convoking the Committee. He addressed it

296 EDITOR.

with great animation on behalf of Miller, dwelling on
the absurdity of officious meddling with such a man,
and asking, with peremptory, leonine glance, ' Which of
you could direct Hugh Miller ? '

There seems to have been a kind of understanding
among the members of the Committee who were present
at the meeting that the copy of the letter which each
possessed should be destroyed. Dr Begg tells me that he
c went honestly home and destroyed his ;' but the under-
standing must have been vague, or several of the mem-
bers of Committee were absent, for there is no doubt that
a plurality of copies exist, and Dr Bruce is known to
have declared, with characteristic emphasis, that he set
far too high a value upon his to think of burning it.

No accurate information as to what had occurred
reached the general public ; but an indistinct conviction
pervaded the Free Church that Hugh Miller had vindi-
cated the independence of the Witness against Dr Cand-
lish, and the lay element in the Church against the clerical.
It was clearly understood that the opinions of the Witness
would be those of its editor, and that the weight and
worth of his independent judgment were guaranteed
against all extraneous influence. After being shaken a
little by Parliament-House defection, the paper pursued
its career of prosperity.

Though Miller triumphed, the memory of the fray
rankled deep in his heart to the last, and its result on
the whole, even to the paper, was melancholy. He
had imbibed an invincible repugnance to handling
the Free Church questions of the day. Resolute to
speak no man's mind save his own, and shrinking from
the bitter necessity which he knew to be entailed upon
the frank utterance of his own sentiments, he became
shy of Church matters altogether, made it his aim to

ISOLATION OF THE "WITNESS." 297

afford scope, in the columns of the paper, for an expres-
sion of opinion, in speech and letter, by rival parties,
rather than to influence either in leading articles, and
sought for himself a more congenial sphere in science
and literature. In these views his partner, Mr Fairly,
entirely acquiesced, and held it, after Miller's death, not
only to be due to his memory, but to be advisable on
other grounds, to maintain the same policy in the con-
duct of the paper. The independence of the journal had
been vindicated, once and for ever; the clergy never
came near the Witness Office ; but, after all, it was iso-
lation rather than independence that was attained, and
there was a gaunt and desolate feeling about it. What
it must have been to Hugh Miller is not easy to realize.
Mrs Miller thinks that about the sum of it is that it
broke his heart. But even the successor of Hugh
Miller in the conduct of the Witness, for whom I am
qualified to speak, found the position sometimes peculiar.
A brief illustration will show what is meant.

The liberty of every Free Church in the United
Kingdom was directly or indirectly threatened by the
attempt of Mr MacMillan of Cardross to induce the
Court of Session to punish the Free Church of Scotland
for excluding him from her ministry. The most in-
fluential Edinburgh newspaper tried to make it appear
that Mr MacMillan's plea against the Free Church was
strictly analogous to Sir William Dunbar's plea against
Bishop Skinner, Primate of the Free Episcopalian Church
of Scotland, when the Bishop visited, or attempted to visit,
Sir William with ecclesiastical censures. The question
was the key of the Free Church position in a legal point
of view, for if the Reverend Sir William Dunbar, on the
one hand, and the Primate of the Free Episcopalian
Church of Scotland, on the other, had consented to plead,

298 EDITOR.

and had been accepted as pleaders, at the bar of the
Court of Session, how could the Free Presbyterian Church
claim exemption from their jurisdiction ? A perusal of
the report of the Dunbar trial in the records of the Court
of Session showed, what any one acquainted with the
historic position of the Sir William Dunbar section
of Scotch Episcopalians might have guessed before-
hand, that the cases were essentially distinct. Sir
William Dunbar and his section claimed relations with
the Church of England, and repudiated the jurisdiction of
the Scottish Episcopal Church. This independence con-
stitutes, in Scottish ecclesiastical history, the very mean-
ing and ratio essendi of the little knot of Episcopalian
congregations referred to. In relation, therefore, to
the Primate of the Scottish Episcopalian Church, Sir
William Dunbar was a layman ; and the plea of
Sir William, when the Bishop flung his ecclesiastical
net over him, was substantially that the latter had no
more right to meddle with him than with the editor of
the Scotsman. To determine the question of fact,
both parties came, and rightly came, before the Court of'
Session. Mr MacMillan, appearing in his character as a
Free Church minister, demanded that the Court of
Session should compel the Eree Church to remove the
ecclesiastical censures which she had pronounced upon
him. On the question whether she owed him money,
or the question whether she had masked a private
attack under ecclesiastical forms, or any other question
involving the civil rights of Mr MacMillan, the Eree
Church declared herself ready to plead : but she main-
tained that, if Mr MacMillan admitted her ecclesiastical
jurisdiction over him, which he did, and if his claim was
not for money, which it was not, and if the proceedings
against him were allowed to have been ecclesiastical,

ISOLATION OF THE " WITNESS." 299

which they were, then she could not be compelled to
answer to the Court of Session at his complaint, save on
grounds which would subject to the Court of Session
the internal discipline of every unendowed denomination
in Scotland.

The first articles in the Scotsman attempting to
mystify the public as to the relation between the Sir
William Dunbar Case and the Cardross Case may have
been contributed, for what I know, by some sleek
Edinburgh parson, whose hatred of the Free Church
was an illustration of the infinitely great, and whose
love of truth was an illustration of the infinitely little.
The busy, careless public were ready enough to take the
view suggested by the Scotsman. The editor of the
Witness, having read the report of the Dunbar trial,
perceived that the matter was one on which it was im-
possible for men who took this trouble to hold two
opinions. He said so in the columns of the Witness,
stated the evidence, told people to satisfy themselves by
turning for an hour into the Signet Library and reading
the report, and, with a simplicity quite primeval and
lamb-like, argued that the Scotsman ought to retract a
demonstrated error. The misleading articles continued
to appear. Hereupon the virtue of our Nathaniel took
fire, and he inveighed against the dishonesty of his con-
troversial opponent. Whether the editor of the Scots-
man had previously interfered, or had not, he now came
upon the field, cudgel in hand, and with the experienced
fury of one who had fought many newspaper battles,
showered his blows upon the head of the ingenuous young
man. Upon the merits of the controversy, the cudgel-
bearer said little ; what nerved his arm for vengeance
was the preposterous idea that, if black is black and
white white, and a gentleman of the press, knowing

300 EDITOR.

black to be black and white white, calls white black and
black white, it is consistent with the usages of society to
tell said gentleman of the press that he is not a gentle-
man in the ordinary sense. What I had to remark, how-
ever, was that, all the time the Witness was striving, amid
the most virulent opposition, to defend a vital point of
the Free Church position, not one syllable of recognition
of the Witness as taking part in the defence, was uttered
by any minister, or in any Court of the Free Church.
The matter at length came up in the General Assembly.
Speaker after speaker, lay and clerical, among the
leading Free Churchmen, took the same view of the
Sir William Dunbar Case as had been taken by the
Witness, and the essential importance of disabusing
the public mind of the fallacy of comparing it to the
Cardross Case, except by way of contrast, was amply
acknowledged ; but not one syllable betrayed that the
Witness had done the work beforehand, or that the
Free Church had any manner of connection with a paper
called the Witness.

The experience of the proprietors and the editor
on this occasion enabled them to realize with vivid-
ness the isolation, which, under circumstances incom-
parably more agitating, pressed upon the soul of
Hugh Miller. In times of danger and of difficulty he
had been the eye of the fleet, keen to discern the ap-
proach of peril, ready always to draw the fire of the
enemy upon himself and his ship ; and now, when
smoother waters had been reached, all the services of
the night, and the tempest, and the fray were forgotten,
and uniformed captains of the fleet, waiving him a cold
adieu, held on their way without acknowledging that he
or his ship were in existence. He never flagged in his
service. While he continued to breathe, his name was

HIS PROTESTANT ZEAL. 301

a tower of strength for the Free Church, and had he seen
her in danger, he would have rushed to the rescue as in
those days of young and proud enthusiasm when he
addressed his Letter to Lord Brougham ; but his mind
dwelt with brooding anguish upon the isolation into
which he had been thrown, and on the whole, in its
incidents and its results, we may pronounce this quarrel
with Dr Candlish the unhappiest occurrence of his life.

One word must be added, to obviate misconception.
Though Hugh Miller belonged to the school of sternly
anti-Popish Scottish religionists, and had no mercy
for Roman Catholic Bishops, he recoiled from the
acrid extravagance and toothless bigotry of those self-
elected representatives of Protestant zeal, who band
themselves into associations, publish hateful prints, make
Protestantism a laughing-stock in Parliament, and on the
whole render considerable, though contemptible, service
to Archbishop Manning and the Pope. Miller honoured
the intention of these poor creatures, and went with them
as far as he could. Though few of the anti-Popish ar-
ticles in the Witness were from his pen, he permitted a
great number to be inserted by an eloquent and popular
contributor, and any one who glances over the old files of
the paper must be surprised that even Miller's genius
could render it acceptable to readers with those perpetual
doses of anti-Popish harangue. Nevertheless the bigots
were not satisfied. The Witness was pronounced luke-
warm in the Protestant cause. A new paper, called the
Rock, — Miller called it a trap rock, — was started, and
for a limited number of weeks or months the craziest
Protestant champion in Edinburgh could not complain
that ' the banner ' was not held high enough. Miller
had that hatred of Popery which seems constitutional to
Scotchmen of strong religious instincts, — it has always

302 EDITOR.

characterized Mr Carlyle, for instance, — but he had no
fellowship with those bigots who, having lost that fervour
which made the intolerance of the seventeenth century
respectable, retain that intolerance which cast over the
fervour of the seventeenth century a ghastly and ensan-
guined glare.

And now, not without satisfaction, we can turn the
leaf upon this Sturm und Drang — storm and stress-
chapter in Hugh Miller's history.

BOOK VI.

MAN OF SCIENCE

Thus you see we maintain a trade, not for gold, silver, or jewels ; nor for silks ; nor for
spices ; nor any other commodity of matter ; but only, for God's first creature, which was
Light.

305

CHAPTER I.

THE OLD RED SANDSTONE LETTER TO A CHILD FIRST IM-
PRESSIONS OF ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE.

AMID the stormful enthusiasm of a great popular
conflict, Hugh Miller had not forgotten the serener
if not more lofty devotion which had inspired him as a
servant of science. ' Of Bacon/ he once wrote, ' I never
tired ; ' and often, probably, when the excitement and
sword-clashing of polemical battle filled the air around
him, would that vessel rise before the eye of his imagina-
tion which Bacon saw, speeding on, age after age, across
calm ocean spaces in search of light, horizon after hori-
zon opening before her, constellation after constellation
kindling in her skies. And now, when he had been for
the better part of a year editor of the Witness, he
ventured to yield to the prompting of his heart, and to
recur to those geological studies which had been his
delight in the quiet days of Cromarty.

On the 9th of September, 1840, there appeared in
the Witness the first of a series of articles under the
title, The Old Eed Sandstone. There were seven in all,
each occupying two or three columns. The last was
published in the Witness of October 17th, 1840. The
moment was propitious. Hugh Miller could state in

VOL. ii. 20

306 MAN OF SCIENCE.

the outset that the Old Red Sandstone formation had
been hitherto considered as remarkably barren in fossils ;
that a continental geologist, in tabulating the various
formations, had appeared to omit this one altogether ;
and that Lyell, whose standard work on the Elements
of Geology had been issued two years previously, had
devoted but two and a half pages to its description.
He could add that he had ' a hundred solid proofs '
lying close to his elbow, that the fossils of the system
are ' remarkably numerous/ Nor were they less strange
than they were abundant. ' The figures on a Chinese
vase or an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike what
now exists in nature than the fossils of the lower Old
Red Sandstone/ They seemed to be products of
' nature's apprenticeship/

The importance of the Old Red Sandstone, as part
of the geological record, had begun to be surmised by
naturalists ; and remarks like these were fitted to
awaken the curiosity of the general public. The ear of
the world, therefore, was open for the word which Hugh
Miller could speak. Before September had closed, his
reputation as a geologist was made. On the 23rd day
of that month the British Association for the Advance-
ment of Science held its annual meeting.. In the
Geological Section, Mr Lyell in the chair, Miller's dis-
coveries were brought under the attention of leading
geologists. Mr Murchison, now Sir Roderick, spoke in
terms of high eulogy of his perseverance and ingenuity
in the geological field, declared that he had raised him-
self to a position which any man might envy, pointed to
the specimens forwarded by him to London, and invited
M. Agassiz to describe the class to which they belonged.
The distinguished Erenchman followed in a similar
strain, and proposed to name one of the most remarkable

HIS WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF SCIENCE. 307

specimens Pterichfhys Milleri. Dr Buckland's enthu-
siasm knew no bounds. He ' had never been so much
astonished in his life by the powers of any man as he had
been by the geological descriptions of Mr Miller. That
wonderful man described these objects with a felicity
which made him ashamed of the comparative meagreness
and poverty of his own descriptions in the Bridgewater
Treatise, which had cost him hours and days of labour.
He would give his left hand to possess such powers of
description as this man.' It was, in Dr Buckland's
view, ' another proof of the value of the meeting of the
Association, that it had contributed to bring such a man
into notice.'

There is something fine in this spectacle of the
magnates of science welcoming with glad acclaim a
brother who, coming at one stride from the quarry,
makes out his title to rank as one of them. Men of
letters were almost equally astonished at the performance
of the Cromarty stone-mason. The benefit which Miller
had derived from his long discipline in literary com-
position was now evident. Into the description of bare
and rigid organisms, he could throw a fascination
which charmed every lover of literary form. Here was
a self-educated man who had educated himself not to
mere copiousness of glittering words, but to the chastened
strength, the subtle modulation, the placid-beaming
clearness, of a classic. Every page spoke of ripe thought
and confirmed intellectual habits.

The Old Red Sandstone, which, in the following
year, appeared in the form of a book, was the first
literary work executed by Miller in the maturity of his
power. It stands at the head of a series of unique and
remarkable books with which he permanently enriched
English literature ; books in which the results of face to

308 MAN OF SCIENCE.

face inspection of nature in the quarried hill-side or on
the ribbed sea-shore, are interwoven with fresh, racy,
sagacious judgments on men and manners ; books in
which observations distinguished by exquisite scientific
accuracy furnish the ground -plan for landscapes over
which is poured the softest, ruddiest glow of imaginative
colouring. The nature of Hugh Miller's imaginative
power is characteristically exhibited in this work. His
imagination is bold, yet its audacity is always restrained
by reference to ascertained fact. Its pictures are never
vague. If, as one critic remarked, his fossil fishes ' swim
and gambol,' they do so as the mind's eye of Hugh
Miller, after severe inspection and long gaze into the
past, had seen them swim and gambol in primeval seas.
If the stone branch budded like a rod of Aaron on his
page, and forests, breaking from their sepulchres in the
rock, grew green again in the sunlight and rustled in the
wind, it was not that an oriental fancy delighted in
clothing phantom hills with visionary foliage, but be-
cause the science of the West had put into his hand a
lamp which lighted for him the long vistas of bygone
time. This species of imagination is the most valuable
which a scientific man can possess, and without it no
man, however accurate his observation, however just his
conception of individual facts, can be great in science.
True workers in science are of three kinds, in ascending
order of excellence, — the accurate observer and com-
piler; the sound generalizer; and the seer of nature,
who first observes, then generalizes, and lastly illuminates
his generalizations so that they become visions. There
were many geologists of his time who, having devoted
themselves exclusively to science for nearly as many
years as Hugh Miller lived, traversed wider fields of
observation and attained a greater acquaintance with fact ;

THE < OLD RED SANDSTONE: 309

but not the most distinguished of his contemporaries sur-
passed him in those august operations of the mind, which
may be claimed indifferently for science and for poetry.

Viewed in relation to the dimensions of the field it
covers, the Old Red Sandstone of Hugh Miller is a
comprehensive account of the formation as it appears in
Scotland. The journeyman mason presented to the world
of science a monograph on one of the chief rock-systems
of his country, and it proved to be an imperishable
masterpiece. On that division of the Old Red which is
exhibited at Cromarty, and to which Miller had special
access, it was almost exhaustive. He added little after-
wards to his discoveries in the Cromarty beds, and no
other eye has been keen enough to detect in them any-
thing else of importance. Subsequent research has proved
that what he regarded as the Lower Old Red is the
Middle division of the system. In relation to the Old
Red Sandstones of the southern shores of the Moray Frith
and of Fife, Perth, and Forfar, the book was necessarily
less complete at its first appearance, but even of these it
presented a distinct, and, in the main outlines, a correct
account, and when Miller put his finishing touches to it
in later editions, it could claim to be the standard work
on the Scottish Old Red. Sir Roderick Murchison
has since demonstrated that the geological position of
the conglomerate of the Western Highlands is in the
Silurian system. But this would not have surprised
Hugh Miller, who entertained doubts upon the subject.

With every year of his life his skill and care as a
geological observer increased, but the keen and exquisite
discernment he had already attained may be illustrated
by a fact which can be stated in his own words. ' After
carefully examining many specimens/ he wrote in 1855,
' I published a restoration of both the upper and under

310 MAN OF SCIENCE.

side of pterichthys fully fifteen years ago. The greatest
of living ichthyologists, however, misled by a series of
specimens much less complete than mine, differed from
me in my conclusions ; and what I had represented as
the creature's under or abdominal side, he represented as
its upper or dorsal side ; while its actual upper side he
regarded as belonging to another, though closely allied,
genus. I had no opportunity, as he resided on the
Continent at the time, of submitting to him the specimens
on which I had founded ; though, at once certain of his
thorough candour and love of truth, and of the solidity
of my data, I felt confident that, in order to alter his
decision, it was but necessary that I should submit to
him my evidence. Meanwhile, however, the case was
regarded as settled against me ; and I found at least
one popular and very ingenious writer on geology, after
referring to my description of the pterichthys, going on
to say that, though graphic, it was not correct, and that
he himself could describe it at least more truthfully, if
not more vividly, than I had done. And then there
followed a description identical with that by which mine
had been supplanted. Five years had passed, when one
day our greatest British authority on fossil fishes, Sir
Philip Egerton, was struck, when passing an hour among
the ichthyic organisms of his princely collection, by the
appearance presented by a central plate in the cuirass of
the pterichthys. It is of a lozenge form ; and, occupy-
ing exactly such a place in the nether armature of the
creature as that occupied by the lozenge-shaped spot on
the ace of diamonds, it comes in contact with four other
plates that lie around it, and represent, so to speak, the
white portions of the card. And Sir Philip now found,
that instead of lying over, it lay under, the four con-
tiguous plates ; they overlapped it, instead of being over-

LETTER TO A CHILD. 311

lapped by it. This, he at once said, on ascertaining the
fact, cannot be the upper side of the Pterichthys. A
plate so arranged would have formed no proper pro-
tection to the exposed dorsal surface of the creature's
body, as a slight blow would have at once sent it in
upon the interior framework ; but a proper enough one
to the under side of a heavy swimmer, that, like the flat
fishes, kept close to the bottom; — a character which, as
shown by the massive bulk of its body, and its small
spread of fin, must have belonged to the Pterichthys.
Sir Philip followed up his observations on the central
plate by a minute examination of the other parts of the
creature's armature ; and the survey terminated in a
recognition of the earlier restoration, — set aside so long
before, — as virtually the true one ; — a recognition in
which Agassiz, when made acquainted with the nature of
the evidence, at once acquiesced.5 This is the kind of
fact which proves consummate practical ability of that
character which cannot be derived from books.

We may here take in a letter written by Miller,
about the time when the Old Red Sandstone was getting
into circulation as a book, to a little boy whom he had
known in Cromarty. It contains a few details as to his
history at the time which cannot be presented to the
reader so pleasantly in any other way, and it adds one other
illustration to the many we have already had of his
gentle, playful, sympathetic manner with children.

'Edinburgh, 5, Sylvan Place, Sept. 8, 1841.
'MY DEAR AlJE MUNRO,

' I will tell you how it was that I did not reply
to your kind letter last spring. It was all in consequence
of another letter which I received only two days after I
received it, and which entirely put it out of my mind for

312 MAN OF SCIENCE.

the time. This other letter was a Cromarty letter ; and
it informed me that my poor mother was very, very ill,
and that unless I hurried north to see her, I might never
see her more. And so I did hurry away north, with the
very first coach that set out, and was one day and two
nights on the road. I found my mother much better
than my fears had anticipated, for the disease that
threatened her life had taken a favourable turn ; and ere
I parted from her, which was in about a week after, she
was well-nigh recovered. Meanwhile, however, I had
forgotten your letter. Now I know, my dear Alie, you
will forgive me when you take all this into your grave
consideration. My journey was a very unpleasant and sad
one, so sad and unpleasant that one might almost make
an agreeable story out of it. Wrecks and battles, you
know, make good subjects for stories ; and the worse
and more unpleasant the wreck or battle, just all the
better is the story. So long as I was with the coach I
had nothing worse than sad thoughts and very bad
weather to annoy me. From Fortrose to Cromarty,
however, I had to grope my way as if I had been play-
ing all the way at blind man's buff. Never yet have I
been out in so dark a night. I had to feel for the road
with my staff, and I discovered on two or three occasions
that I had got off it only by tumbling into the ditch.
It was at least three hours after midnight ere I reached
my journey's end.

' I saw Aunt and Uncle Ross in Cromarty, and Cousin
Mora. Cousin Mora is a smart, pretty little girl. But
I dare say you will deem my news of the north somewhat
old, and there is no denying that it is less new now than
it was six months ago. It is not so old, however, by a
great deal, as the news you gave me about the battle of
Hastings ; and I of late have been giving much older

LETTER TO A CHILD. 313

news to the public in a book on the Old Red Sandstone.
You remind me, dear Alie, of the stones and fossils
which I used to point out to you on the shore of Cro-
marty. I have written a whole book about them, with
curious-looking prints in it, — the portraits of fish that
lived so very long ago that there were no men in the
world at the time to give them names. But they have
all got names now, stiff-looking Greek names, which
only scholars can understand. One of them has been
named after me, PtericMhys Milleri, which means Mil-
ler s ivinged fish, and I send you prints of it that you
may see what a strange-looking creature it was. By
the way, have you not great chalk cliffs at Hastings ?
There are very curious fossils found in chalk, sea-eggs,
of a kind no longer found alive, spindle-shaped stones,
called Belcmnites, other stones called Ammonites, that
resemble coiled snakes, cockle-like shells with spines on
their backs, and a great many other curious things
besides that were once living creatures.

' I trust you will remember me to Aunt Munro,
whose kindness to me in Cromarty I very often remem-
ber, and who has since been very kind to my sister
Jane. I dare say that by answering your letter, though
at this late time, I have made her lose her wager. You
know lose it she must, if there was no particular time
specified. I am very, very busy in these days, thinking,
reading, writing, beating one day, beaten the next ;
called a blockhead at one tune without believing it,
believing it at another without being called it ; living,
in short, a hurried, bustling, fighting sort of life. It is
very seldom I can command leisure enough to write
letters, and sometimes when I have the leisure I want
the will. But you see I have at length written to you,
and had it not been for one circumstance, of which I

314 MAN OF SCIENCE.

have already told you, I would have written you six
months ago. I have a little daughter who helps me at
times in putting wrong my papers, books, and fossils.
She has got language enough to call a dog boivwow, and
a cat mew ; and when she sees a fossil she points to it,
and calls it " papa's fish." She had a philosophical
desire long ago to ascertain whether the flame of a candle
might not taste and feel as pleasantly as it looked ; but
she is no longer curious on this head. I sometimes sing
to her, and she seems much pleased with my music, a
thing no one ever was before. I am afraid, however,
that her mother will spoil her just and simple taste in
this matter ; but knoAV not how to prevent it. And
now, my dear Alie, I have come to the close of my
letter. It is not long, you see, but there is a good deal
of nonsense in it, for all that. I would like very much
to be a little boy once more, but, alas, I am a big man,
and cannot play myself so much or so often as I could
wish. Some of my reddish-brown hair is actually get-
ting grey. I am, my dear boy,

' Your affectionate friend,

4 HUGH MILLER.'

There is perhaps no work of Miller's by which the
general reader can better judge him than his First Im-
pressions of England and its People. The subject has
the look of being hackneyed beyond all chance of
effective writing ; yet the book, I venture to say, is one
of the most fresh and charming in the language. The
materials were gathered in eight weeks of autumnal
wandering through England in 1845, and the composi-
tion occupied the leisure hours of a hard-worked editor
for six months. Yet how admirable is the style ! With
what subtle felicity does it combine the dignity of ela-

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND. 315

borate literary form with perfect ease and freedom !
And how completely do we feel, as we read, that we are
in converse with a cultivated mind ! The treasures
which Miller had been accumulating since he was six
years old, — the impressions, facts, reflections, fancies of
life-long observation and study, — flow out upon the page
in stintless yet chaste abundance, absolutely without
straining or parade. There is no gaudy metaphoric
daubing, no wearisome drawing out of similitudes, but
the right illustration, brief and happy, always comes in
at the right place, and the nice bright word of metaphor,
like the honey-touch on the lip of Jonathan when he was
weary, never fails.

The skill in which Miller has to this day no rival,
the skill of bringing poetic hues and musical tones out
of the stony tombs of geology, is in this book exquisitely
exhibited. In Dudley glen, for example, he finds him-
self surrounded with rocks containing Silurian fossils of
remote antiquity amid and upon which stand the ordinary
trees of English woodland. This is enough to awaken his
fancy. ' I scarcely know,' he says, ' on what principle it
should have occurred ; but certainly never before, even
when considerably less familiar with the wonders of geo-
logy, was I so impressed by the appearance of marine
fossils in an inland district, as among these wooded soli-
tudes. Perhaps the peculiarity of their setting, if I may so
speak, by heightening the contrast between their present
circumstances and their original habitat, gave increased
effect to their appeals to the imagination. The green
ocean depths in which they must have lived and died
associate strangely in the mind with the forest retreats,
a full hundred miles from the sea-shore, in which their
remains now lie deposited. Taken with their accom-
paniments, they serve to remind one of that style of

316 MAN OF SCIENCE.

artificial grotto-work in which corals and shells are
made to mingle with flowers and mosses. The
massy cyathophyllum sticks out of the sides of grey
lichened rocks, enclasped by sprigs of ivy, or overhung
by twigs of thorn and hazel ; deep-sea terebratulae
project in bold relief from amid patches of the delicate
wood sorrel ; here a macerated oak leaf, with all its
skeleton fibres open as a net, lies glued by the damps
beside some still more delicately reticulated festinella ;
there a tuft of graceful harebells projects over some
prostrate orthoceratite ; yonder there peeps out from
amid a drapery of green liver-wort, like a heraldic
helmet from a mantling, the armed head of some trilo-
bite : the deep-sea productions of the most ancient of
creations lie grouped, as with an eye to artistic effect,
amid the floral productions of our own times/

He lies down on an English hill-side, and as he
gazes musingly upon the landscape spread below, and
thinks of the time when it was the bottom of a broad
ocean sound washing the rocky island that was one
day to constitute the Highlands of Wales, rises into
this serene flight of prose poetry : ' Was it the sound of
the distant surf that was in mine ears, or the low moan
of the breeze, as it crept through the neighbouring
wood? Oh, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent
since time first begun, — where has it not been uttered !
There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless
desert, where no spring rises and no streamlet flows,
and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the
blinding glare of the sand, and the red unshaded rays of
the fierce sun. But once and again, and yet again, has
the roar of ocean been there. It is his sands that the
winds heap up ; and it is the skeleton remains of his
vassals, — shells and fish and the stony coral, — that the

OCEAN. 317

rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall
mountain peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where
the panting lungs labour to inhale the thin bleak air, —
where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where
the eye wanders over multitudinous hill-tops that lie far
beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep on to the
distant horizon, and along long hollow valleys where the
great rivers begin. And yet once and again, and yet
again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The effigies of
his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on the
crags, where they jut out from beneath the ice into the
mist-wreath ; and his later beaches, stage beyond stage,
terrace the descending slopes. Where has the great
destroyer not been, — the devourer of continents, — the
blue foaming dragon, whose vocation it is to eat up the
land ? His ice-floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes
of Siberia and the rocky flanks of Schiehallion ; and his
nummulites and fish lie embedded in great stones of the
pyramids, hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in
rocky folds of Lebanon still untouched by the tool. So
long as Ocean exists there must be disintegration, di-
lapidation, change ; and should the time ever arrive when
the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep
within their profound depths, to awaken no more, and
should the sea still continue to impel its currents and to
roll its waves, every continent and island would at
length disappear, and again, as of old, when " the
fountains of the great deep were broken up,"

" A shoreless ocean tumble round the globe." '

Of Miller's power as a critic, the passage in this book
recounting his visit to the birth-place of Shakspeare, as
well as several others, furnish ample proof, and the sketch
of the younger Littleton is managed with great adroitness
and lightness of touch. There is too much of Shenstone

318 MAN OF SCIENCE.

and the Leasowes. Comparing the notes Miller gives us
of his visit to Stratford-on-Avon with those on Shenstone's
landscape-gardening, we cannot but regret that his
modest avoidance of fields whence the ' originally luxu-
riant swathe ' had been ' cut down and carried away/
prevented him from journeying to the shrines of Eng-
land's great men and detained him so long beside the
work of one of her ingenious versifiers.

The Scotchman is, of course, seen peeping from
beneath the plaid of Miller as he journeys through Eng-
land. ' To my eye/ he says, ' my countrymen, — and I
have now seen them in almost every district of Scotland,
—present an appearance of rugged strength which the
English, though they take their place among the more
robust European nations, do not exhibit ; and I find the
carefully-constructed tables of Professor Eorbes, based
on a large amount of actual experiment, corroborative of
the impression. As tested by the dynamometer, the
average strength of the full-grown Scot exceeds that of
the full-grown Englishman by about one-twentieth, — to
be sure, no very great difference, but quite enough in a
prolonged contest, hand to hand, and man to man, with
equal skill and courage on both sides, decidedly to turn
the scale. The result of the conflict at Bannockburn,
where, according to Barbour, steel rung upon armour in
close fight for hours, and at Otterburn, where, according
to Eroissart, the English fought with the most obstinate
bravery, may have a good deal hinged on this purely
physical difference/ But if he dearly loves to put in a
good word for Scotland, he can do justice to England.
' Scotland has produced no Shakspeare ; Burns and Sir
Walter Scott united would fall short of the stature of
the giant of Avon. Of Milton we have not even a re-
presentative. A Scotch poet has been injudiciously

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 319

named as not greatly inferior ; but I shall not do wrong
to the memory of an ingenious young man, cut off just
as he had mastered his powers, by naming him again in
a connection so perilous. He, at least, was guiltless of
the comparison ; and it would be cruel to involve him
in the ridicule which it is suited to excite. Bacon is as
exclusively unique as Milton, and as exclusively English ;
and though the grandfather of Newton was a Scotch-
man, we have certainly no Scotch Sir Isaac. I question,
indeed, whether any Scotchman attains to the power of
Locke ; there is as much solid thinking in his Essay on
the Human Understanding, greatly as it has become the
fashion of the age to depreciate it, and notwithstanding
its fundamental error, as in the works of all our Scotch
metaphysicians put together.' Few people, to whatever
school of philosophy they belong, would now agree with
Miller in setting Locke above Hume ; but we cannot
read these words without feeling that, though he loved
Scotland much, he loved truth more.

An apology may, perhaps, be thought necessary for
quoting from a book which you see, beside the popular
novels of the day, at London Railway Stations ; but
Miller's acknowledgment of what he owed to the litera-
ture of England, suggested by his visit to Poet's Corner
in Westminster Abbey, is so beautiful and so strictly auto-
biographic, that I must take liberty to insert it. ' I had
no strong emotions,' he says, with signal honesty, 'to
exhibit when pacing along the pavement in this cele-
brated place, nor would I have exhibited them if I had.'
But the reader will feel that deep and true emotion per-
vades the words which follow. ' There was poor Gold-
smith ; he had been my companion for thirty years ; I
had been first introduced to him through the medium of
a common school collection, when a little boy in the

320 MAN OF SCIENCE.

humblest English class of a parish school ; and I had
kept up the acquaintance ever since. There, too, was
Addison, whom I had known so long, and, in his true
poems, his prose ones, had loved so much ; and there
were Gay, and Prior, and Cowley, and Thomson, and
Chaucer, and Spenser, and Milton ; and there, too, on a
slab on the floor, with the freshness of recent interment
still palpable about it, as if to indicate the race at least
not long extinct, was the name of Thomas Campbell. I
had got fairly among my patrons and benefactors. How
often, shut out for months and years together from all
literary converse with the living, had they been almost
my only companions, — my unseen associates, who, in
the rude work-shed, lightened my labours by the music
of their numbers, and who, in my evening walks, that
would have been so solitary save for them, expanded my
intellect by the solid bulk of their thinking, and gave
me eyes, by their exquisite descriptions, to look at
nature ! How thoroughly, too, had they served to break
down in my mind at least the narrow and more illiberal
partialities of country, leaving untouched, however, all
that was worthy of being cherished in my attachment to
poor old Scotland ! I learned to deem the English poet
not less my countryman than the Scot, if I but felt the
true human heart beating in his bosom ; and the intense
prejudices which I had imbibed, when almost a child,
from the fiery narratives of Blind Harry and of Barbour,
melted away, like snow-wreaths from before the sun,
under the genial influences of the glowing poesy of Eng-
land. It is not the harp of Orpheus that will effectually
tame the wild beast which lies ambushing in human
nature, and is ever and anon breaking forth on the
nations, in cruel, desolating war. The work of giving
peace to the earth awaits those Divine harmonies which

HIS POWER AS A GEOLOGIST. 321

breathe from the Lyre of Inspiration, when swept by
the Spirit of God. And yet the harp of Orpheus does
exert an auxiliary power. It is of the nature of its
songs, — so rich in the human sympathies, so charged
with the thoughts, the imaginings, the hopes, the wishes,
which it is the constitution of humanity to conceive and
entertain, — it is of their nature to make us feel that the
nations are all of one blood, — that man is our brother,
and the world our country.'

Though this book is less geological than most of his
other works, there is none, I think, in which his power
as a geologist is more characteristically displayed. As
a naturalist, as a paleontologist, he has been often ex-
celled; but as a geologist, in the strict sense of the term,
as one whose aim it is to see the rocky bones of a country
beneath its robe of broidered green, he will not easily be
matched. For this his work in the quarry, his fifteen
years' journeying through various geological districts,
had been an education, potent and precious, before he
thought of formally studying geology. England was
new to him, and he had but a few weeks in which to
make himself acquainted with its geological aspects ; yet
he apprehended every essential feature of English land-
scape, and sets before us, in brief, rapid, vivid outline,
the geological anatomy of the country. The breadth of
his handling is superb, revealing the artist and the
master. And when he deals with intricate and com-
plex matters, when he gets among the coal-measures
and the salt-works, his lucidity is as remarkable as his
breadth. The light never is so dazzling as to obscure
the object on which it falls ; and yet we feel that the
light itself is pleasant to the eyes, and that its touch
lends beauty to that which it illumines.

' Sir, you have an eye/ Pope's friends in need, when

VOL. II. 21

322 MAN OF SCIENCE.

they wanted to get something out of him, used to
observe. Thanks, by the way, to them, for so doing,
since they would not, even for purposes of adulation,
have ventured on the remark, if there had not been con-
spicuous splendour in the orb. ' Sir, you have an eye,'
was what English critics said when Miller's chapters, de-
tailing his impressions, were published in the columns
of the Witness. A Birmingham editor, ignorant as to
Miller, and fancying, for what reason I know not, that he
was a ' dominie/ quoted passages descriptive of Birming-
ham and its district, and said that the writer must be a
very remarkable man, since he had seen a great deal
which had escaped the observation of the natives, but
which, on its being pointed out to them, they also could
see. Mr William Drummond, then sub-editor of the
Witness and an esteemed friend of Miller's, showed him
the article in the Birmingham paper, and he had a
hearty laugh at it. Truth to speak, he had an eye
that was worth its place in a man's head; searching,
inevitable, keen, swift, sure; which gathered informa-
tion at every moment and in all places, to be hoarded
up in the cells of a memory which seems never to have
lost an atom of the store.

His judgment on those two grand English institu-
tions, the Church of England and Dissent, is shrewd.
He discerns the incommensurable strength of the one,
and the ineradicable vitality of the other, representing
as each does a separate phase of the individualism of
English character. While pronouncing the Englishman
distinctly superior to the Scot as an asserter of civil
independence, he recognizes that, for all religious ends
and aims, the Scot is gregarious, the Englishman in-
dividual. The Anglican Church does not, for all its
Bishops and Convocations, hide from him the fact that

CHURCH AND DISSENT IN ENGLAND. 323

it is essentially a huge, amorphous, loosely-rolling mass
of congregational units, the rector king in his own
castle, the parish a little realm in itself only vaguely
related to other similar realms. Religious Dissent in
England he believed to have sunk wholly into politi-
cal Dissidence. Alliance between religion and politics
always excited his jealousy, and the time when he
visited England was perhaps unfavourable for under-
standing the character and estimating the prospects
of English Nonconformity. The Puritan watchwords
had fossilized; but they had hardly yet visibly begun
to be formed into a concrete for the foundation of
Free Churches.

It is impossible not to see that Miller's heart warmed
to England every day he continued within her borders.
He was surprised with the frankness, the ready hospitality
and generosity of the people. The fact clearly is, broad
as was his accent and plain his garb, that he had in
England as elsewhere an irresistible charm for every one
who came near him. The old lady who, after a chat in
a railway carriage, astonished him by an invitation to
visit her, had perceived in that little time that he was
gentle and good. Readers of the First Impressions
will recollect the Temperance Coffee-House of Dudley,
with its eight-year-old orator, who savagely denounced
every one that tasted wine or strong drink. No preface,
therefore, is required to the following, with which I have
been favoured by an intelligent correspondent : ' It
was about 1849 that I arrived one afternoon in Dudley,
and took up my abode in the Temperance Coffee-
House there. It was a very unpretending hostelry,
but clean and comfortable. The thing that soon
arrested me was that though I had never before been
in this town, yet the tile-paved kitchen, the elderly

324 MAN OF SCIENCE.

hostess, her daughter, the little boy drawing at table,
in fact, the whole establishment and its dramatis
personce seemed known to me. What kind of new
optical or mental illusion was this ? At last the idea
dawned upon me that my memory was reproducing one
of Hugh Miller's graphic descriptions in his First Im-
pressions "of England and its People. The story of the
spinet-player, the account of the boy before me who
spoke at Temperance Meetings, and other living touches
came fast upon me. On my asking the head of the
house whether a Scotchman had once lived there, she
eagerly took up the theme, and in one almost incessant
flow ran on thus : " Oh, he was such a nice man. But
then he had odd tastes. Eliza there used to take
him to quarries and out-of-the-way places all round
the town, and there he chopped and chopped away with
a hammer till he filled a bag with stones. 1 never knew
such a man. What could he ever do with all these
bits of stone ? But he was so kind to us all. Then
after he had gone away who should come to our door
one day but the schoolmaster, with a book in his hand.
' Here's a fine description of you all,' said he. ' The
Scotchman has been writing about you/ So there, to be
sure, was such a nice account about my son playing
upon the spinet, and Eliza, and Tommy, and me.
Who'd 'a thought that he would write about us ? Do
you know him, sir, and can you tell me what he does in
Scotland?" " I can't say," I replied, "that he is an
acquaintance of mine, but, like many people in the
North, I know a good deal about him. He has
raised himself from being a workman to be a writer of
remarkable books, and he is Editor at present of the
Witness, the organ of a body called the Free Church of
Scotland." " La, now, sir, do you say so ? " was the

THE DUDLEY COFFEE-HOUSE. 325

overpowering reply. " Well, do you know, my eldest son
plays the organ at Penkridge ? " More followed that
need not be repeated, about the patronage which fol-
lowed the son thither', but my efforts to conceal the
tendency to laughter produced by the two organs may
easily be imagined/

326

CHAPTER II.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

SUCH is the state of progression in geological science
that the geologist who stands still but for a very
little must be content to find himself left behind.' The
words are Hugh Miller's, — they occur in his preface to
the first edition of the Old Red Sandstone. Their ap-
plication is of course peculiarly forcible to the geologist
whose activity has been arrested by death. No man
can do more than his own piece of work in science, and
the question on which our estimate of the merit of a
scientific worker must depend is not whether he pene-
trated to the limits of any one province in nature, or
uttered the final and absolute truth as to any one of
nature's laws and processes, but whether he did the
work he professed to do faithfully, honestly, and, to the
point to which he carried it, thoroughly.

As science continues to advance, the several positions
taken up by Hugh Miller, in prosecuting the sublime
enterprise of proving the existence, and illustrating the
character, of God from His works, may or may not
prove tenable. Without question some of them would
now be abandoned by the most eminent geologists.
On taking the chair as President of the Royal Phy-

THEORY OF SUCCESSIVE CREATIONS. 327

sical Society of Edinburgh, in 1852, he enunciated
the following proposition : ' There is no truth more
thoroughly ascertained than that the great Tertiary,
Secondary, and Palaeozoic divisions represent, in the
history of the globe, periods as definitely distinct and
separate from each other as the modern from the
ancient history of Europe, or the events which took
place previous to the Christian era from those that
date in the subsequent centuries which we reckon
from it. All over the globe, too, in the great Palaeozoic
division, the Carboniferous system is found to overlie
the system of the Old Red Sandstone, and that, in
turn, the widely developed Silurian system/ Having
spoken thus without evoking one dissentient symp-
tom in his audience, he could expect an affirmative
answer to the question which he proceeded to put : c I
would ask such of the gentlemen whom I now address
as have studied the subject most thoroughly, whether,—
at those grand lines of division between the Palaeozoic
and Secondary, and again between the Secondary and
Tertiary periods, at which the entire type of organic
being alters, so that all on the one side of the gap be-
longs to one fashion, and all on the other to another and
wholly different fashion, — whether they have not been
as thoroughly impressed with the conviction that there
existed a Creative Agent, to whom the sudden change
was owing, as if they themselves had witnessed the
miracle of Creation ? ' Professor Huxley now declares
without contradiction that it is ' admitted by all the
best authorities that neither similarity of mineral com-
position, nor of physical character, nor even direct con-
tinuity of stratum, are absolute proofs of the synchron-
ism of even approximated sedimentary strata : while,
for distant deposits, there seems to be no kind of

328 MAN OF SCIENCE.

physical evidence attainable of a nature competent to de-
cide whether such deposits were formed simultaneously,
or whether they possess any given difference of antiquity/
In the same historical tone, as of one referring to what
is no longer open to dispute, Mr Huxley continues : —
' For anything that geology or palaeontology are able to
show to the contrary, a Devonian fauna and flora in the
British Islands may have been contemporaneous with
Silurian life in North America, and with a Carboniferous
fauna and flora in Africa. Geographical provinces and
zones may have been as distinctly marked in the Palaeo-
zoic epoch as at present, and those seemingly sudden ap-
pearances of new genera and species, which we ascribe
to new creation, may be simple results of migration.'

The tendency of scientific research throughout every
province of nature has been to obliterate lines of demarc-
ation, and to show, stretching beyond us into the in-
finitude both of time and space, immeasurable curves
and undulations of unity. The definite proof afforded
by spectrum analysis of the sameness of matter through-
out the solar and stellar expanses marked a stage
of sublime advancement in our conception of the har-
mony of things ; and correspondences, indubitable though
mysterious, between terrestrial magnetism, the spots
of the sun, and those systems of aerolites which have
recently attracted so much of the attention of philo-
sophers, suggest that the unities of nature are as in-
timate and as wonderful as her diversities. I venture
to throw out the suggestion that a key lately put into
our hands by Professor Tyndall may possibly unlock for
us the secret that there is unity of life, as well as unity
of matter, throughout space. Germs of life, Professor
Tyndall has taught us, are of what may be called in-
finitesimal smallness ; and what proof have we that, if

DEVELOPMENT THEORIES. 329

aerolites can traverse space, life germs cannot traverse
space likewise ?

The unity of life throughout even the solar system
may be no more than a speculative guess, but something
not far short of authoritative unanimity in the scientific
world supports Professor Huxley in maintaining the
unity of succession in the vital organisms of our planet,
against the theory of an indefinite number of creations,
each preceded by a cataclysm destructive of all the life
upon earth. There is no paradox, however, in the
assertion that, at the time Miller wrote, and with the
facts Miller possessed, the genuine service which it was
his part to render to science implied and required that
he should controvert the popular theories of develop-
ment. To refuse to believe on insufficient evidence, —
to point out in what respect the evidence is insufficient,—
this is the most effective preparation that can be made
for the discovery of truth upon any subject. If philoso-
phers had been content, twenty-five years ago, to accept
as conclusively established the theories of Lamarck,
Demaillet, and the * Vestiges/ those researches by which
more light has been thrown upon the history of living
things in our planet than had been cast in ten pre-
ceding centuries, might never have been undertaken.
The highest service that can be rendered to science is
the discovery of new truth ; the next highest is the ex-
posure of false pretensions to the discovery of new truth.
In pointing out the unsoundness of the development
theories in vogue in his day, Miller was in the same line
of battle with his ablest scientific contemporaries. How
he would have comported himself if he had lived to see
the publication of Mr Darwin's work on the Origin
of Species, to witness its reception throughout the
world of science, to follow the lines of research and

330 MAN OF SCIENCE.

speculation to which it pointed the way, we need not in-
quire. This, however, I will venture to say : first, that he
would have distinctly declared, as, indeed, he did with
reference to the old theory of development, that Mr Dar-
win's doctrine has no necessary affinity with atheism ;
secondly, that he would have subjected the facts and
reasonings of Mr Darwin and his followers to a scrutiny
more searching than they have yet received ; and thirdly,
that, if he had found them incontrovertible, he would,
without a moment's hesitation, have proclaimed his as-
sent to them. His reverence for God's truth was infi-
nitely deeper than his regard for his own conceptions of
it. That truth he would accept, howsoever and when-
soever it was revealed, conscious that the wilful misread-
ing of nature is a sin against Him whose ordinance
nature is. Strange imagination, that the Ineffable One
is less honoured by reverent caution and hesitation, — ,
"by child-like fingering among the letters of His name
and child-like diffidence in spelling it out, — than by
vociferous dogmatism on the subject ! Hugh Miller
dared not force his conscience to lie to God by brib-
ing his intellect to lie for God. His writings on
those high questions which belong to the border-land
between science and theology have a perennial value,
not because of the finality of their matter, but be-
cause of the Tightness of their manner. With true
reverence and sterling integrity, he discoursed of the
relations between physical and moral law in this uni-
verse, and the reciprocal bearings of God's revelation of
Himself in matter and by matter — His Works; and
His revelation of Himself in mind and by mind — His
Word.

It is to be noted that Miller, while contending against
the inadequate and erroneous theories of development

NO DOGMATIC THEORIST. 331

which presented themselves to his notice, did not pro-
pound a cut-and-dry rival theory, or profess to have
formed a scheme of his own upon which to map out and
explain every mystery of organized being. With no fixed
principle except that the Earth is the Lord's and the ful-
ness thereof, that the laws of life and of death, of matter
and of mind, are His laws, and that, on the whole, the
procession of existence, moving at times through breadths
of gloom and masses of shadow, tends onwards and up-
wards, he recognized all facts, admitted all difficulties,
and preferred to state them honestly and contemplate
them deliberately rather than bind them together with
logical formulas. The fact of the degradation of
races, for example, — of the startling delight which
nature appears occasionally to take in eccentric and
asymmetrical types, — of the production of what, to
human apprehension and sensibility, look mere master-
pieces of the horrible and repulsive, ' worm-like creatures,
without eyes, without moveable jaws, without vertebral
joints, without scales, always enveloped in slime/ like
the ' glutinous hag ' of the Moray Frith, — had evi-
dently awakened the deepest feelings of wonder in
Hugh Miller. ' An ingenious theorist/ he said, ' not
much disposed to distinguish between the minor and
the master laws of organized being/ could get up
' quite as unexceptionable a theory of degradation as
of development/ But the relation of the ' minor laws/
to which presumably we owe the glutinous hag, and the
' master laws/ to which we owe the gazelle and the night-
ingale, the rose and the wheat-plant, he did not at-
tempt to define, contenting himself with the denial
that either are mere processes of physical nature, and
with the assertion that both are parts of His govern-
ment who is wonderful in working, and whose ways

332 MAN OF SCIENCE.

are past finding out. Familiar as Miller was with
the tremendous reasonings of Hume's Dialogues on
Natural Religion, he was not one to take refuge in
the amiable platitudes of the Rosa Matilda school, or
to wrap himself from the lightnings in garlands of
flowers. He would not have shrunk from admitting, in
all that width of extension and precision of application
which Mr Darwin and his school have shown to belong
to it, the law of pain throughout the world of life.
Survival of the stronger, with extermination of the
weaker by famine and anguish, he would, I think, have
allowed to be the law of physical nature. He would,
at the same time, have maintained that ' a gradual pro-
gress towards perfection,' though, as Mr Huxley points
out, it forms no necessary part of the Darwinian creed,
is revealed in nature. He would have dwelt with Goethe
on the fact that death itself is but a subtle contrivance
by which more life is obtained. Above all, he would
have insisted, as neither Hume, Goethe, nor Darwin
have insisted, upon sin as an explanation of misery,
and upon the promise of redemption and immortality
through Christ, as sending a stream of celestial radiance
far up into the hollow of the terrestrial night.

It was a heart-rending experience for Miller that the
erect, fearless, friendly attitude which he felt ought to
be that of religion towards scientific truth gave offence
to religious people. He would have been so glad, in
his visit to England, if he could have convicted the
Anglo-Catholics, and them alone, of distrust and alarm
with regard to science, and could have left them to
nurse their childish Mediasvalism in all departments,
while the sturdier sons of the Reformers welcomed
every revelation of science as Divine. His Evangelical
Religion was of that early and vigorous type which,

THE OLD EVANGELICAL PARTY. 333

having complete faith in truth, had no fear that there
might turn out to be heresy in science. He belonged
to the great old Evangelical school, and was perhaps its
last representative to whom the title great can be
accorded. Whatever that school may have become, it
is a fact of history that no religious school of recent
times has been so great a power among men. It can
lay claim to Cowper ; and Cowper is acknowledged to
have been one of the quickeners of English poetry from
formal correctness and frosty elegance into the freshness
and luxuriance of its recent period. It was before its
fervid inspirations that the thin, plausible, infinitely
clever and witty scepticism of the eighteenth century
gave way. To it, directly or indirectly, that missionary
movement of recent times, which seems destined to exert
a mighty influence on the history of the world, owed its
origin. It made itself felt in politics in the form of an
intense, indefatigable, sympathetic humanity, and passed,
in the same spirit, into all modern philanthropic enter-
prise. It showed its vitality and strength in Scotland by
bringing about what David Hume would certainly have
pronounced an impossibility in the nature of things, the
relinquishment, by a large body of clergy, of the privi-
leges and pay of a State-Church. Its express contribu-
tions, of a high class, to English literature, have not
been numerous. The works of Hugh Miller are, on
the whole, its most important literary performances.
But its indirect influences on English literature have
been remarkable. To it, without question, is due that
lofty and earnest spirit which has rendered much of the
doubt of the present century more religious than much
of the faith of the last. All Macaulay's critics have
taken note of those touches of old Hebrew grandeur
which sublime his noblest passages, nor has the observa-

334 MAN OF SCIENCE.

tion failed that they came from that Hebrew Bible
which he read in the house of his Evangelical father.
In Mr Ruskin's earliest, which many consider also his
greatest books, — for their morning softness and depth of
glistening blue may be thought to have more enduring
loveliness than the perpetual sword-gleam of his later
writings, — passage after passage, inferior in eloquence
to none in the English language, suggest the idea of an
Evangelical Bos suet or Jeremy Taylor. And has it been
enough considered that it was from the cottage of a
Scottish Old Light Seceder that Thomas Carlyle went
forth to write those books which, for good or for evil,
have changed the current of English and American,
possibly also of European, literature ?

Hugh Miller saw with grief inexpressible that the
Evangelical party in England, with its Record news-
paper and its Dean Cockburns, Avas taking the fatally
wrong turn in the matter of science and religion.
In Scotland, during his lifetime, there was not much
cause for alarm. While Eleming, as Professor of Geo-
logy in the Eree Church College, sent out clergymen
to teach and preach that death and pain existed myr-
iads of ages before Adam, that the starry heavens
and the earth are of an antiquity to be measured by
millions of years, that the Noachian deluge was local,
and while the leading religionists of Scotland recog-
nized with gratitude and approval the importance of
Miller's own services in the cause of religious truth,
he had no occasion to fear. But the Evangelicals of
England never showed the courage and faithfulness in
this matter of the Evangelicals of Scotland, and the
lamentable exhibitions we have recently had have
painfully demonstrated that Hugh Miller's expostula-
tions, printed in his Impressions of England and its

THE INDEPENDENCE OF SCIENCE. 335

People, have been of none effect. It is too probable
that if he had lived twenty years longer, he would have
found himself looked on askance by some Evangelical
magnates of his own country. He had never hesitated to
abandon an old position when he found it to be unten-
able, and he had not been long in his grave when there
were unmistakeable signs that part of clerical Scotland
was disposed to fall back upon at least one of the lines of
defence which he had given up, to wit, the hypothesis of
a cataclysm or chaos, embracing the whole world,
immediately antecedent to the human period, and
separating the entire succession of geological formations
from the six days' work of Genesis. Instead of this
view he adopted that which assigns an immensely pro-
tracted duration to the successive Mosaic days. In his
latest work, the Testimony of the Rocks, he expounded
the Age theory of Mosaic geology with admirable
breadth and lucidity ; and it is generally admitted that
this is the sole hypothesis which can now be maintained
with any show of plausibility by those who hold Chris-
tian theologians bound to furnish a scheme of reconcili-
ation between geology and Genesis.

Hugh Miller maintained the entire independence of
science. ' No scientific question,' he says, ' was ever
yet settled dogmatically, or ever will. If the question
be one in the science of numbers, it must be settled
arithmetically ; if in the science of geometry, it must be
settled mathematically ; if in the science of chemistry,
it must be settled experimentally. ... As men have
yielded to astronomy the right of decision in all astro-
nomical questions, so must they resign to geology the
settlement of all geological ones.' Again : ' The geolo-.
gist, as certainly as the theologian, has a province exclu-
sively his own ; and were the theologian ever to remem-

336 MAN OF SCIENCE.

ber that the Scriptures could not possibly have been
given to us as revelations of scientific truth, seeing that
a single scientific truth they never yet revealed, and the
geologist that it must be in vain to seek in science those
truths which lead to salvation, seeing that in science
these truths were never yet found, there would be little
danger even of difference among them, and none of
collision/ This is from the Testimony of the Rocks.
So also is the following, which proves that if he had
once leaned too strongly towards catastrophism, the
balance was coming right : ' What more natural to
expect, or rational to hold, than that the Unchange-
able One should have wrought in all time after one
general type and pattern, or than that we may seek, in
the hope of finding, meet correspondences and striking
analogies between His revealed workings during the
human period, and His previous workings of old during
the geologic* periods ? '

An erroneous idea, however, would be conveyed of
the general scope and pleasantness of Hugh Miller's
writings if they were regarded as constantly, or mainly,
controversial. The exquisite accuracy, combined with
imaginative beauty, of their descriptions of natural
scenes and objects ; the scientific fitness and poetic
felicity of the illustrations they present of the Divine
mind acting in matter ; the ethical force of their ex-
hibition of the mutual adaptation of man and his world,
the lofty conception they present of man as the tiller of
the Earth-garden, the fellow-worker with God in sub-
duing and beautifying the planet and in raising to the
height of spiritual and physical perfection the human
family ; these, and many other excellences which will
occur to all acquainted with those books, will render
them precious and fascinating when the particular con-

THE GEOLOGY OF SCOTLAND. 337

troversies on which they touch have assumed new aspects
or have given place to others.

Having been a lover of nature all his life, Miller
deliberately chose, at the time when his powers were
reaching their maturity, to enroll himself among the
votaries of science. For about thirty years the ac-
tivity in which his mind chiefly delighted was that of
scientific research and reflection. Other labour might
be strenuous, but it was hard ; here he obeyed his ruling
impulse, and to obey was to enjoy. Science never
failed him. Year after year, as his. frame became un-
strung, and his nerves shaken by toil at the editorial
desk, he returned to the mountains, and in long pe-
destrian expeditions sought that health which was sure
to come with the pure air, and the bracing exercise, and
the glow of faculties at their congenial work.

What he could have done as a man of science can
never be fully known. Almost all the scientific works he
has left are more or less marred by the controversial
ends he kept in view, or by imperfect unity arising
from publication in form of lectures. The Cruise of
the Betsy, in which he gives an account of his geological
investigations among the Hebrides, has been preferred
by some critics to his most elaborate controversial works.
Had he lived to realize the ambition of his life, to write
a comprehensive book on the geology of Scotland, the
world would have been able to take by sight, what must
now, to some considerable extent, be taken by faith, the
measure of his greatness. If, after an eight weeks'
ramble, he made so much of the geology of England as
is made in the First Impressions, what might we not
have expected from the observation and study of thirty
years in his beloved Scotland ? Records, no doubt, exist,
and have been published, of the geological tours in which

VOL. ii. 22

338 MAN OF SCIENCE.

lie prepared himself for his high undertaking, but these
are no more than disjecta membra, valuable and interest-
ing apart, yet offering no hint by which imagination
itself can picture the living whole into which they would
have been moulded by the hand of Miller. No man
ever knew the geology of Scotland as he knew it.
Others may have grappled as vigorously with a particular
problem suggested by it here and there, but who ever
studied it so long and so lovingly as a whole? And
not only would the book have been a masterpiece of
geological literature ; it would have been unique as a
manual of Scottish landscape, doing in prose for Scottish
scenery what Scott has done for it in poetry ; and it
would assuredly have displayed, in soft idealizing gleams
across the rugged features of its general framework, that
proud and tender affection for Scotland, that reverent
acquaintance with all that is noblest in Scottish history
and character, which fitted Miller so admirably to have
become the historian of his country. As I think of
what a work the Geology of Scotland by Hugh Miller
might have been, I cannot but recall those words, more
fanciful, perhaps, than Thackeray commonly permitted
to his masculine genius, in which he referred to an
unfinished picture, containing a few figures dimly
sketched, by his frierjd Leslie. ' The darkling forest/ he
said, 'would have grown around them, with the stars
glittering from the midsummer sky : the flowers at the
queen's feet, and the boughs and foliage about her.
They were dwelling in the artist's mind, no doubt, and
would have been developed by that patient, faithful,
admirable genius : but the busy brain stopped working,
the skilful hand fell lifeless, the loving, honest heart
ceased to beat. What was she to have been — that fair
Titania — when perfected by the patient skill of the

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 339

poet ? Is there record kept anywhere of fancies con-
ceived, beautiful, unborn ? Some day will they assume
form in some yet undeveloped light? They say our
words, once out of our lips, go travelling in omne cevum,
reverberating for ever and ever. If our words, why not
our thoughts ? If the Has Been, why not the Might
Have Been ? Some day our spirits may be permitted
to walk in galleries of fancies more wondrous and beau-
tiful than any achieved works which at present we see,
and our minds to behold and delight in masterpieces
which poets' and artists' minds have fathered and con-
ceived only.' One has difficulty in realizing that it was
the giant hand of Thackeray which traced these tender
pencillings of fancy. It is no fancy, however, that, in
the future to which Christians look forward, neither will
the energies of the soul be paralyzed, nor the definite
lines of personality be effaced. So long as Hugh Mil-
ler's personality retains its mould, he will think with
love of Scotland, and be wafted in memory to her pine-
clad hills and craggy shores ; and if the converse of
friends beyond the bourne has any analogy to that of
friends on earth, he may vary the note of celestial felicity
by dwelling on the wonders and beauties of that great
work which he was not permitted to achieve on earth.

340

CHAPTER III.

THE LAST EDINBURGH PERIOD.

THE life of Hugh Miller, so varied and eventful in its
early period, formed no exception, in the ten years
preceding its close, to that placid uniformity which pro-
verbially characterizes the lives of literary men, and
which precludes detailed description.

During those years he conducted the Witness with
steady and ever-broadening success, speaking his weighty
word on every important question as it arose, and widely
accepted as a guide of opinion, mis views on the sub-
ject of education were in advance of those of the body of
his contemporaries, especially his ecclesiastical contem-
poraries. He maintained them with his usual courage
and frankness, careless of the bitter obloquy to which
they exposed him in some quarters. The state of public
opinion at this moment proves that the conclusions at
which he arrived have become in substance those of the
nation. He advocated the exclusion of denominational-
ism from the machinery of popular education, and the
method by which he proposed to effect this object was
that of intrusting the power in connection with educa-
tion to the body of the people. It is scarce necessary
to remark that the very idea of excluding the Bible

HIS SOCIAL POSITION. 341

from the National Schools would have been abhorrent to
him ; but no limit can be set to the decision with which
he would have forbidden the inculcation of distinctive
denominational tenets by National schoolmasters.

Socially his position was fully established. The
words of Miss D unbar, that the day was coming when
his country's greatest would court his acquaintance, had
been literally fulfilled, and there was no circle in Edin-
burgh or in London which would not have felt itself
honoured by his presence. In the communications
addressed to him by men of rank or reputation, it was
assumed as a matter of course that his place was among
the intellectual aristocracy of his time, and that he was
one of those whose acquaintance conferred distinction.
Again and again did the Duke of Argyll solicit the
honour of a visit from Miller, resting his hope of a
favourable reply, not on his own aristocratic birth, but
on community of scientific interests and pursuits. The
difficulty was to overcome that feeling on the part of
Miller which we found himself describing as diffidence,
but which is, perhaps, insufficiently characterized by
the term; a feeling which partook little of self-dis-
trust, and still less of haughty coldness, but consisted
principally in a shy and sensitive reserve, a conscious-
ness that his mental instruments could work perfectly
only in their own placid atmosphere. He was totally
devoid of ambition to shine in mixed and fashionable
society. On the whole I should say that the word
' shyness ' most correctly describes the quality in Hugh
Miller which led him inexorably though courteously
to decline invitations like that of the Duke of Argyll.

He was not a man to have many intimate friends,
and few indeed of those whom he knew subsequently to
coming to Edinburgh did he take to his heart with that

342 MAN OF SCIENCE.

impassioned ardour of affection which marked his Cro-
marty friendships. One of the few, however, respecting
his regard for whom such language would hardly be
out of place, was Mr Maitland Macgill Crichton, of
Rankeillour. The rugged, simple-hearted country gen-
tleman, intrepid in thought and word, sincere beyond
the tolerance of guile, impatient of generalship and
suspicious of expediency, made his way at once to Hugh
Miller's heart. There was that difference and that agree-
ment between them which are said to go to the making
of the happiest friendships, — Crichton all impulse and
impetuosity, Miller all calmness and reflection, both
intensely devoted to the cause of Scotland and her
Church, both averse to the sly prudences of party
leadership, both too strong to be capable of cunning.
They perfectly understood and perfectly trusted each
other. When Miller determined to leave the town of
Edinburgh and locate himself in the suburbs, his friend
accompanied him in long roamings for weeks together,
the main purpose of house-hunting being doubtless
combined with minute exploration of the environs of a
city which Miller dearly loved. The word used by him
in estimating Mr Macgill Crichton's services to the
Free Church was ' gigantic.5 Crichton, for his part,
threw all the vehemence of his nature into his love for
his friend, and insisted, almost with petulance, on his
right to have at least an annual visit from Miller. The
stated time for the trip to Rankeillour was at Christmas.
Sir David Brewster was generally of the party. , In this
circle Hugh felt himself as much at home as at Cro-
marty. The completeness and tenderness of Crichton's
trust in Miller were evinced by his naming him in his
will, — the sole addition to his own brothers, — as tutor
and curator to his three youngest children.

CHALMERS. 343

For seven years of his last residence in Edin-
burgh, Chalmers was still in life. The relation be-
tween the men was not so much personal friendship
as what I may call comprehensive, unwavering alliance
on all points of sentiment and opinion. Chalmers had
the large and masculine sagacity, — a thing of the heart
as well as the brain, — to accept Miller for what he was,
a strong-featured, strong-charactered, original man, whose
services to a cause he loved were sure to be of incalcul-
able importance, but who was not to be expected to pull
in party harness, or to tame down his natural port and
action to the step of party drill. Such a man, Chalmers
felt, ought not to be fretted by little criticisms. A
word, now and then, of frank sympathy, was what he
deserved, and such a word Chalmers was always ready
to speak. ' You are getting on bravely with your
education battle/ it might be, or ' Many, many thanks
for your noble article on the West Port ; ' flashes of
radiance, slight but precious, which would kindle a
gleam of proud encouragement in the eye of Miller.
Chalmers frequently looked in upon the family circle in
Archibald Place, and Mrs Miller recollects the ' apostolic
fervour/ softened no doubt with fatherly kindness, with
which he ' put his hand on Harriet's golden head and
blessed her/ A generation has arisen which knew
not Chalmers in the body, and already, when the
defects of his theological erudition, and the lack of
searching and exhaustive power in much of his thinking,
are considered, there begin to be whispered inquiries as
to wherein his greatness consisted. Even in his books,
with their glowing earnestness and massive force, there
is enough, I think, to rank him with the sons of the
mighty ; but it was evidently in himself, in the influence
of his personal weight and worth, in the majestic noble-

344 MAN OF SCIENCE.

ness of one for whom virtue was ' not the price of heaven
but heaven itself/ that lay the spell which constrained
men like Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller to pay him
kingly honours. We may read Chalmers's books and
think him overrated ; but we cannot read Lockhart's
description of him, or observe how profoundly his con-
temporaries felt the contagion of his moral intensity,
without recognizing him for a man of great genius.
One of his characteristics was an exquisite and joyful
appreciation of excellence, howevei different it might
be from his own ; and I can well understand his en-
thusiastic delight in the compositions of Miller, whose
sense of literary form was much finer than his own.

In endeavouring to place before the reader a just
picture of Miller's Edinburgh life, I am happy to be
able to avail myself of the memoranda of a lady who
knew him intimately during the whole of the period,
and whose delineation will be perceived by all who even
partially shared that privilege to be delicately true.

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS BY A LADY.

1 1 first met Hugh Miller in the beginning of 1840,
when he came to Edinburgh to edit the Witness. He dined
at our house with some of the gentlemen who had been
the means of setting up that paper. I had the good fortune
to sit next to him at dinner, and so had a good deal of
conversation with him. We somehow got on the poets,
and found several of them to be intimate mutual friends.
The delight of that conversation is still fresh in my re-
membrance. His appearance then was that of a supe-
rior working-man in his Sunday dress. His head was
bent forward as he sat, but when he spoke he looked
one full in the face with his sagacious and thoughtful
eye. There was directness in all he said; to have

RECOLLECTIONS BY A LADY. 345

spoken without having something to say would never
have occurred to him. He had not the light, easy, in-
accurate manner of speech one usually meets with, — every
word was deliberate, and might have been printed.
There was a total want of self-assertion about him, but
at the same time a dignified simplicity in the way he
placed his mind alongside that of the person with
whom he conversed. There is no doubt he was some-
what shy and proud and jealous of his independence,
and some found him inaccessible from this cause ; but
I happened somehow to overleap these barriers the first
day I met him, and they were never interposed during
our further intercourse.

' When his family came to town, it was with no
common pleasure that I recognized in Mrs Miller a
young lady who had been a classfellow of mine. This
led me frequently to her house, and gave me the oppor-
tunity of seeing her husband, and my admiration of
and interest in him increased every time I met him.
There could be no greater or more exciting pleasure
than to converse with Hugh Miller. He did not
harangue but conversed, and raised those with whom
he did so for the time to his own level. One felt
amazed to hear one's own trifling remarks made the
means of bringing out his stores of observation and
thought; and if by good fortune one brought to his
notice some to him yet unknown fact or quotation from
the poets, to whose " terrible sagacity " he loved so
often to refer, it was indeed gratifying to see the look of
pleased attention with which he listened. It seemed as
if he could not but be thinking, and that everything
brought grist to his mill, set agoing some new train of
thought, or confirmed some old one. Then, of course,
there were all the exciting subjects of the time, — a time

346 MAN OF SCIENCE.

never to be forgotten by those who lived in it, and
shared the principles and emotions of those engaged
in the struggle which ended in the formation of the
Free Church. If one happened to see him the day
before the publication of the Witness, then one was sure
to see in the next day's article some of the observations
that had fallen from him the day before. Some, not
all, for surely every one who knew Hugh Miller must
have felt, as I do, that his mind was deeper, richer, more
far-sighted, than any of his written utterances showed
it to be.

' How one wishes one could recall some of those
pleasant meetings, but

" The path we came by, thorn and flower,
Is shadowed by the growing hour,
Lest life should fail in looking back."

Among the gleams of the past, seen through that
shadowed vista, is one of a summer evening when, after
dining with the Millers at Sylvan Place, we walked to
Blackford Hill. In the valley behind the hill he and
the other gentlemen of the party tried who could throw
furthest some of the large stones lying about. It was
soon seen whose arm had had the advantage of being
strengthened by labour, so greatly did his throw exceed
the others. I think it was at that time that, referring
to the change from labour with the chisel in the open
air to labour at the desk, he said the last was far
harder than the first, and that the change had come too
late to him. " It was too late ere I was caught," was
his expression.

' One evening the conversation turned on ghosts,
a propos of Mrs Crowe's " Night Side of Nature," which
had just been published. It was said that that lady
had sought out every one who could tell her a ghost-

RECOLLECTIONS BY A LADY. 347

story. He said he was glad she had not found him
out, as he happened to have a store of such stories.
On being asked to tell us some, he complied most
readily, and told us several. I never heard such
stories so told. I happened to have made the re-
quest, and he " held me with his eye " as he told
them, an eye not " glittering," but pale and sad, — the
saddest I ever knew. He seemed to see the scenes he
described, and compelled one to see them too. It was
evident he had been nurtured in the belief of these
superstitions, and that in early life they must have had
complete sway over his mind, — a sway that might be
resumed in hours of weakness. Then, however, he dis-
claimed all belief in them ; and in the conversation
which preceded the stories, had made some forcible
remarks on the frequent combination in the same person
of scepticism and credulity, and on the difference be-
tween a real faith in revealed truth, and the ready belief
in lying wonders, then beginning to be common.

' Whoever has read that chapter in Hugh Miller's
autobiography which relates his religious history will
be aware that the inner life and conflict of the true
follower of Christ would not in him come to the sur-
face in conversation. But no one could have inter-
course with him without plainly perceiving his deep
religious reverence and faith. I have heard the opinion
expressed, that doubts must have beset him to the end
of his life. The very contrary was my impression. He
had laid these " spectres of the mind " in earlier life,
and they did not rise to haunt him again. He saw the
rising tide of scepticism, and foresaw that it was bring-
ing misery to the world and trial to the Church, and to
raise some bulwarks against it was his earnest desire.
His attempts to harmonize Scripture and geology were

348 MAN OF SCIENCE.

more for others than himself. All intercourse with him
gave the assurance of his thorough belief that the book
of revelation and that of nature were from the same
hand, and that this would be manifest one day, though
now the last was but half-read, and the first, perhaps, mis-
read. His delight in tracing the proofs of the creation
of man's mind in the likeness of his Maker's, as shown
in the works of both, was evident to every one who had
looked over his museum under his guidance, long before
his lectures were published. When he referred to our
Lord, it was usually as the Adorable Redeemer, an
epithet which may seem somewhat formal in the in-
creasing preference for the Saxon element in our lan-
guage, but which fitly expressed the deep reverence
with which he ever named Him. He delighted to
observe or hear anything which led to the inference that
those whose genius he admired had been led, sooner or
later, to listen to the voice of that Adorable Redeemer,
and learn of Him. An instance of this may be seen in
his remarks on Shakspeare, when relating his visit to
Stratford-on-Avon in First Impressions of England. I
remember discussing with him the various passages in
Shakspeare which allude to religious thought or feel-
ing, especially that in Richard the Second, in which the
poor king in prison, speaking of the multitude of
thoughts fighting within him, says,

"The better sort, —

As thoughts of things divine, — are intermix'd
With scruples, and do set the Word itself
Against the Word :

As thus, — Come, little ones ; and then again, —
It is as hard to come, as for a camel
To thread the postern of a needle's eye."

I do not, however, remember Hugh Miller's remarks
with sufficient accuracy to set them down.

RECOLLECTIONS BY A LADY. 349

'In the end of 1848 I happened, when calling on
Mrs Miller in Stuart Street, to hear that her husband
was giving some little lectures on geology to a few lady
friends, and I was most kindly invited to join the party.
We met on Saturday forenoons, and sat round a table
on which he had arranged some specimens to illustrate
what he was going to tell us about. These lectures
were the germs of those he afterwards delivered before
the Philosophical Institution, and which have been pub-
lished under the title of the Sketch-look of Popular
G-eoloyy. Any one who reads that volume may see how
pleasant as well as instructive they were. But it cannot
convey the interest of being taught by such a teacher,
who thought no question too trivial to be answered, and
explained himself by all manner of illustrations, homely
or otherwise, but always comprehensible and distinct ;
while over everything his imagination threw an endless
charm, and his earnest faith a deeper interest. His
manner to women I always thought particularly good,—
wholly wanting in flattery but full of gentle deference.
Our meetings frequently ended by our enjoying Mrs
Miller's hospitality and society at luncheon, when we
witnessed the same gentle manner in his own family,
and various little incidents which showed his strong
parental love. As spring came on our lectures took
place in the open air instead of in Mrs Miller's drawing-
room, and we had some charming walks to shores and
quarries in the neighbourhood of Portobello, and to
Salisbury Crags and Arthur Seat, where the Queen's
Drive had been lately opened, and afforded us many
illustrations of what we had learnt from him during the
winter. Never was geology more pleasantly studied.

' We spent a few weeks that autumn in the neigh-
bourhood of Melrose, and having asked him to visit us

350 MAN OF SCIENCE.

on the banks of Tweed, I had the following note from
him.

" Edinburgh, 2, Stuart Street, 21st August, 1849.

" Your kind note reached me as I was engaged
on the last article for the Witness which I shall
write for at least several weeks. The completion of
my book * has at length set me at liberty ; on Thurs-
day I leave by the Wick Steamer for the extreme
north ; and on the Saturday, to which your kind invita-
tion refers, I shall be sauntering, if the voyage be a
prosperous one, not along the soft wooded banks of the
Tweed, but along the bleak crags that overlord the
Pentland Firth. Your river has all the beauty on its
side, but the broad Pentland with its roaring eddies is
by far the more magnificent river of the two. My book
will not be fairly published until Saturday first ; but on
Saturday last I did myself the pleasure of forwarding
copies to all my lady-pupils, though I am not sure that
your copy has got further than C — Street. You will, I
suspect, find the pure geology of it rather dry ; but in
the concluding chapters, more especially in the last taken
in connection with the chapter on the degradation
principle, you will, I think, find some thoughts that will
interest you. A man who merely refutes an error, if it
be an ingenious one and suited to fill the imagination,
does only half his work. The void created ought to be
filled with something as novel and curious as that which
has been taken away ; and in the chapters to which I
refer I attempt embodying a theory compensating for
the development one. I had a note yesterday from Mrs
Miller. She was well when it was written, and in
spirits, and just emerging from the bustle of a Free-
Church-Manse marriage."

* Footprints of the Creator.

RECOLLECTIONS BY A LADY. 351

' He seemed to feel an increase of kindness to us, his
" lady-pupils," after that pleasant season.

' My after-recollections of him at Stuart Street are
fragmentary; — of sitting with him and Mrs Miller at
the fireside late one dark winter afternoon discussing
murderesses, from Lady Macbeth down to Mrs Manning,
whose trial had just taken place, and reading the
observations I had heard from him in the next Witness.
Again, — looking over Johnston's Physical Atlas with
him, and, on my observing that Cromarty was coloured
with the Scandinavian tint, his assuring me with evident
satisfaction that most of his ancestors were of that
descent. Again, after his return from some visit to
the north, his speaking of Nature being an increasing
source of pleasure as we go on in life, unlike most other
things. At the same time he referred to an anecdote of
Thorwaldsen, who said to a friend, that his genius was
decaying, for now he felt satisfied with his works, while
formerly his idea had always gone far beyond what he
could execute. Hugh Miller said he had felt the same,
and felt, for the same reason, that he would never now
write anything better than he had done.

' In the summer of 1856 there was an archaeologi-
cal collection exhibited in Edinburgh. In the beginning
of August I went there early the last day it was open,
and came upon Hugh Miller looking at the ethnograph-
ical department. He told me he had been ill, and was
then on his way home after a week's recreation. I
expressed surprise at this, as I thought I had noticed his
hand in the Witness during the past month. He said
I was right, but that he had written these articles
during the time of the Assembly. After looking with
him for a little at the stone and bronze weapons, I went
further to look at some portraits of Mary Stuart, and at

352 MAN OF SCIENCE.

a print to which he directed my attention — the print
which was the subject of conversation when the boy
Walter Scott met Robert Burns. As I returned I found
Hugh Miller standing by Robert Bruce's sword, which
had been placed in an upright position in the centre of
the gallery. He measured it, and then, turning to me,
recited from the " Lord of the Isles " the lines referring
to it. Lord Elgin had sent the sword, and Ave were speak-
ing of his being of the same family as the King, when
Hugh Miller told the story of the old Scotch lady of the
name, who, on being asked if she was of King Robert
Bruce's family, answered that the King was of her family.

1 On one of the first days of December my sister and
I went down to Portobello to call for Mrs Miller. We
met him at the gate of Shrubmount, and he came into
the drawing-room and remained while we were there.
We thought him looking well, and remarked to each
other afterwards that there was an increase of dignified
ease in his manner, as of a man assured of his position.

' He showed us a stag's horn, found in the bank of a
burn that flows into the Solway, which a friend had sent
him. The burn, swollen by the rains in October, had
carried away some of the soil from the bank, and the
horn was seen sticking out from it. Though it was not
whole, from what remained it was evident that it had
belonged to a stag of at least sixteen tynes. This con-
firmed an opinion he had for some time formed, that
before the British deer had been driven by man to the
higher and poorer districts of the country, they had
been a larger race. Lord Kinnaird, to whom he had
shown it some days before, had mentioned another con-
firmatory fact. A friend of his in England, who had
very much enlarged his deer-park, found that his deer
were developing larger horns than usual. We spoke of

RECOLLECTIONS BY A LADY. 353

Thackeray's Lectures on the Georges, which he had just
given in Edinburgh. Hugh Miller had not heard them.
Thought Thackeray too like Swift in his estimate of
human nature. Spoke of the admirable imitation of the
style of the writers of Queen Anne's time in Esmond.
A propos of Thackeray's comments on the " First Gentle-
man of Europe," he referred to the complete change in
the use of the word "genteel" formerly used by the
well-bred to signify good-breeding — and now only vulgar
or ironical in its use.

' He showed us some newspapers sent to him from
America, with an attack on him, in the American
fashion, for an Article on " Dred " which had appeared
in the Witness. He had not written the article (which
was a laudatory one), and said he would not have so ex-
pressed himself. I said I had been sure that article was
not written by him, but that I had been much struck
by one on the immoral doctrines brought forward by
American divines on behalf of slavery. It was written
by him. He said it was most remarkable how these old
doctrines, striking at the root of all morals, were brought
up again in a new dress to serve a new cause. The
conversation then turned on the chances of the continu-
ance of the White supremacy in the Southern States. He
thought the chances all in favour of the Whites from the
superiority of race. From all he could learn there was
no man of mark among the Blacks or Half-castes.
Frederick Douglas was their most remarkable man. He
had met him, and thought but little of him. He com-
pared the supremacy of the Whites to that of the Eng-
lish over the Irish in Cromwell's time and afterwards—
with this difference, that Cromwell's despotic supremacy
was exercised with a good conscience, however sternly,
while the immoral doctrines to which he had referred

VOL. ii. 23

354 MAN OF SCIENCE.

showed that this could not be altogether the case with
the Southern Americans. He thought the religious
parts of " Dred " very inferior to " Uncle Torn," — rather
sentimental and sickly. He referred to the opinions of
Mrs Stowe's brother, Dr Beecher, on Sin and Eternal
Punishments. " He would make us out to be ticket-
of-leave men," he said with scorn.

1 Ere the new year had come he had passed away
from amongst us in that paroxysm of bodily and mental
illness in which his strong will gave way, and he lost his
self-control.

c Edinburgh streets have seemed emptier since I could
no longer hope to meet there his rugged stalwart form,
and see his pale abstracted eye brighten with the smile
of kindly recognition.

' There is a city which the streams of the River of
Life make glad. May we meet as fellow-citizens there !

<M. W.J

At Cromarty and Linlithgow Miller, as we saw, was
an indefatigable and voluminous correspondent. In
Edinburgh, penning two or three leading articles per
week and with a book generally on hand, he required
no further vent for his literary productiveness, and wrote
no such letters as those which it formerly had been his
delight to pour forth. He told his friends that they
must consider the Witness a bi-weekly letter from him,
and confined his epistolary performances to notes of
reply to invitations, brief answers to geological querists,
and the like. In this rapid fashion he corresponded—
if correspondence it can be called — with a very large
proportion of the most eminent scientific men of his time.
Professors Owen, Agassiz, Sedgwick, Sir Charles Lyell,
Sir David Brews ter, Mr Mantell occur to me at

A FAITHFUL DOG. 355

the moment as among those who compared notes with
him as a scientific peer and fellow-worker. But it
is evident that, how distinguished soever these and others
may be, and apt and seasonable as were Miller's brief
scientific replies, these last were of an occasional na-
ture, and, the rather that they touch almost invariably
on matters treated of in his printed works, are not
generally suited for publication. The course I have
adopted is to glean from the memorials of those years
such letters and jottings by Miller as illustrate his
manner of life and bring into view the several occur-
rences by which it was diversified, adding, as formerly,
such notes or letters from his correspondents as tend to
elucidate the narrative or otherwise interest the reader.

We shall begin with a batch of letters addressed to
Mrs Miller during a tour undertaken by him in the
North of Scotland — Sutherland, Cromarty, Inverness,
the Caledonian Canal — in the summer of 1843.

' Port Gower, Sutherlandshire, 8th July, 1843.

' The boat anchored off Aberdeen for about an hour,
and I went ashore. As I had to restrict myself to
sauntering about the harbour, I saw only tide-waiters,
sailors, and boatmen. I picked up, however, a little
story for Harriet, which you may read to her as from
papa. Just as we had gone out from the pier on our
return, a small white dog came down, whining and paw-
ing to be taken on board, but the boatmen rowed on.
The mole runs a long way out, and as we were scudding
alongside of it below, the dog was keeping pace with us
above, and stopping every moment to make the most
pitiful appeals to our compassion. The poor animal
had, it would seem, lost his master, and expected to find
him in the steamboat. At length the mole terminated,

356 MAN OF SCIENCE.

and on its outer sides there was a heavy sea breaking,
but the little dog, after looking doubtfully on the broken
water for a moment, dashed in and swam hard after us.
The poor animal won on the regards of even the surly
boatmen, and after he had made way for about fifty
yards against a strong flowing tide, they rested on their
oars and took him in. He lay cowering in a corner of
the boat, showing that it was evidently not among us
but in the steam vessel he hoped to find his master ;
the moment we reached the vessel's side he climbed up
the ladder, explored every corner from stem to stern
above and below, and not finding him whom he sought,
took leave of us by leaping overboard. As there was a
strong shore-going tide in his favour he would, I doubt
not, safely have made the land. I dare say after reading
my story to Harriet you must translate it for her into
what Swift used to call the " little language/7 The per-
severance and solicitude of the creature served to show
me how dogs who have lost their masters many hun-
dred miles from home have contrived to trace them out,
making good their passage across wide seas by working
on the feelings of seamen. The appeals of a devoted-
ness like that of the poor little doggie the rudest natures
cannot withstand.

' On landing in Wick I made my way to the inn, and
after waiting to take a draught of lemonade, the only
thing my strained stomach could bear at the time, I
opened my bag to get out my hammer and chisels, that
I might spend two hours ere the coming in of the south
mail in geologizing. My walk, pleasant in the main,
though the morning was rather close, ran along the
Wick, a small stream which flows through a flat valley
remarkable chiefly for being rich and green with grass
and corn, and yet totally bare of bushes and trees. In

TRACES OF THE DISRUPTION. 357

the fence of a field formed of upright flags I saw numer-
ous scales, occipital-plates, and gill-covers of some of the
better known fish of the Old Red, but nothing worth
bringing away.

' On the journey south I saw from the top of the
coach several melancholy marks of the Disruption,—
preaching tents on green hill-sides with a few rude
forms around them, and not far distant parish churches
locked up. There is no preaching in the vacated
churches in Caithness ; Moderatism is sitting down
helplessly and attempting nothing. The poor people of
Scotland have been grievously injured, but the extent of
the injury is not yet felt. The coach passed great
numbers going to a Free Church sacrament. As the
hour was comparatively early, it was chiefly elderly men
and women we saw, who, to use their own phrase, were
" stepping on before," the more vigorous walkers not yet
having taken the road. I passed on through Helmsdale
to Port Gower, where I now am in a very pleasant little
inn. The scenery in the immediate neighbourhood is
not so fine as at Helmsdale, which is a very striking
place in the opening of a deep, grand glen ; but the
situation is more central for geological inquiry, and
Helmsdale lies within reach of an ordinary excursion.
I have been out for a few hours among the rocks, but
they do not seem at all rich in the neighbourhood of the
inn. The cliffs on the shore are of a rude and very
hard breccia, which, save foi some two or three belem-
nites that I have detected in it, I would not know to be
oolitic at all. You can have no idea how thick the
population lies on this narrow border of coast. The
bases of the hills are so studded over with miserable
cottages surrounded by miserable patches of corn land,
not larger than ordinary-sized gardens, that for miles

358 MAN OF SCIENCE.

together the appearance is that of one vast straggling
village. Depend on it, if the Poor Laws be introduced
into Scotland, the extra profits derived to the Duke of
Sutherland from his sheep farms will go but a small way
in supporting his paupers. He will find his northern
injustice taking to itself the form, not of a mere crime,
—for that would be nothing, — but of a very terrible
blunder.5

' Sunday, 9th July.

' I have just returned from Helmsdale, where I have
been hearing a sermon in the open air with the poor
Highlanders. The sun was very hot, and the portion of
my forehead that used to be best sheltered by my hat
is all blotched with red, and will, I dare say, be blistered
to-morrow. The congregation was numerous, from six
to eight hundred at least, and all seemed serious and
attentive. It must have been the mere power of asso-
ciation, but- 1 thought their Gaelic singing, so plaintive
at all times, even more melancholy than usual. It rose
from the green hill-side like a wail of suffering and
complaint. Poor people ! There stretched inland in
the background a long, deep strath, with a river winding
through it. It had once been inhabited for twenty
miles from the sea, but the inhabitants were all removed
to make way for sheep, and it is now a desert, with no
other marks of men save the green square patches still
bearing the mark of the plough that lie along the
water-side, and the ruined cottages, some of them not
unscathed by fire, with which these are studded. But
though thus desolate within, the sides of the two hills,
in which it terminates at the sea, are so thickly mottled
by little dwellings that it would seem as if the people
who had been forced out through its entire length had
stuck at its mouth. The inmates of these poor dwellings

THE SUTHERLAND CLEARINGS. 359

are all adherents of the Free Church. They surrounded
the tent by hundreds, wonderfully clean and decent
considering their extreme poverty, but with a look of
suffering and subdued sadness about them that har-
monized but too well with the melancholy tones of their
psalms. There is, it is said, a very intense feeling
among them. " We were ruined and made beggars
before," they say, " and now they have taken the gospel
from us." I hear that when the Duke last passed
through the place the men stood sulkily looking at him,
or slunk away into their houses, but that some of the
women began to baa like sheep. I can get no informa-
tion at the inns; the Duke is, of course, omnipotent in
the county, and there is a general fear of trusting a
stranger with what might be unfitted to reach his e£rs,
and might reach them notwithstanding/

' Monday evening.

' What a very peculiar taste in the ornamental High-
land landladies display ! My landlady at Brora last
year was a stately, lady-looking personage, who, as
Dandy Dinmont would say, behaved herself very dis-
tinctly. And yet, barbarous to relate, she had, by way
of ornament on the chimney-piece of her best room, a
child's toy-house, rough with glue, and daubed over
with paint. In my present inn, a neat little place, with
a good side-board and mahogany chairs in the sitting-
parlour, and with a very genteel bed-room, there are
square bits of common 2JJ. per yard room-paper, framed
round with a listing of black velvet, that hang on the
walls, and supply the place of pictures. My bed-room
has got two of these superb ornaments. One of them
presents five nondescript brown flowers, with brown
leaves on a field of buff. The other boasts of but one

360 MAN OF SCIENCE.

flower ; but as it is in green and red it has got its
superior beauty protected by a cover of glass. Is there
nothing akin in Highland gentility to the stately gen-
tility of the savage ? The dignified Indian chief, when
determined on being very fine, smears his forehead with
vermilion, and sticks himself round with glass beads/

' Monday evening.

* I have been spending the day, from nine o'clock
till five, among the cliffs to the north of Helmsdale.
Rare sport. Fossil wood and corals may be gathered
on the shore by tons, and there are abundance of
bivalves, serpulse, impressions of ammonites, spines of
echini, and some fine belemnites. I found a piece of
fossil wood, a cross-section of a tree showing the pith
and the annual rings, which measures rather more than
twenty inches across. It was so weighty that I had to
employ three boys to carry it to Helmsdale, where it
lies to be shipped for Leith by the first vessel. By
being at an expense of a few shillings with it, it may be
rendered one of the most splendid specimens of the kind
anywhere in existence. If sawn through the centre, and
then polished, it will show the growths of at least fifty
summers, and the alternating checks of as many winters.
The polishing cannot cost me more than six or eight
shillings, and it will form an ornament for your mantel-
piece splendid to your heart's content. Some of the
corals are of great size. I saw one nearly three feet in
diameter, and which, to all appearance, would not have
attained to so great a bulk in less than a century. At
least, the brain-stone coral of the tropics, which it very
nearly resembles, takes a full hundred years to attain a
size equally great. I could, of course, bring only frag-
ments away with me, but even the smallest are pretty,

HELM SD ALE FOSSILS, 361

and when polished will be exceedingly so. The pattern
is that of a piece of honeycomb, with a many -rayed star
in the centre of each hexagon. Lyell figures it in his
Section on the Oolite, and I remember being struck
with the beauty of the figure. Both the corals and the
fossil wood take the form here of a very rich limestone,
and the people gather them on the shores, and burn
them in kilns for lime, without dreaming that in some
remote age of the world the one has manifested animal,
and the other vegetable, life. On passing along the
beach I went up to a kiln beside which several tons of
limestone had been lately accumulated. Fully two-
thirds of the whole was fossil wood, and the half of the
remaining third corals. The people have learned to dig
the trees out of a shaly conglomerate just as in the
centre of the county they once used to dig trees out of
the mosses, but though they saw the coaly bark, the
pith, and the annual rings, it never once came into their
heads to suppose it was trees they were digging. I
pointed out to one of the owners of the lime-kiln the
true nature of the stones he was employing, and he
seemed much surprised. " That," he said, " was never
known here before." Much depends on the locality of
a marvel. All the world has heard of the fossil -trees of
Craig-Leith. Here fossil trees not less in bulk, and
quite as finely petrified, are so abundant that the High-
landers dig them out for lime, and yet no one has heard
anything of them.

' I had a Highland boy of thirteen carrying my bag
all day. He soon became as good a practical geologist
as myself, and as expert in finding corals and belemnites.
Boys are much less stupid than men. The Highland
boy learned to know at the first telling that detached
fragments of belemnites were of no value, and that the

362 MAN OF SCIENCE.

pieces were only worth keeping when all together made

up an entire belemnite. I have taught old • the

same lesson I know not how often, yet he persisted in
bringing me the detached fragments notwithstanding.
Lamb's joke had some truth in it after all. Boys in the
main are superior to frivolous members of parliament.
" What church," I asked my boy, " does your father go
to?" "Oh, the church that's put out," he replied;
" none go to the other churches here but the Duke's
people." On coming home I made him happy with a
shilling and a drink of ale/

' Brora, Tuesday evening.

1 Here I am after a walk of about ten miles along
the coast. The day was warm, and my path or rather
no-path lay for the greater part of the distance over
loose sand, but exercise and a reinvigorated stomach are
already beginning to tell in my favour ; and so here I
am, after an additional spell among the rocks between
dinner and tea-time, a fresh active fellow at your service.
The Brora, a dark mossy stream, runs at the back of
the inn here, between precipitous banks ; it abounds in
fine small trout that were leaping so thick and looking
so happy this evening that I became quite sentimental
in looking at them, and formed the romantic notion of
eating a few of them with pepper and vinegar just that
I might be happy too. Accordingly at tea I got the
idea realized into an act, and found it, but you won't
believe me, a good workable idea, notwithstanding its
mixture of romance.

' Brora is a loose straggling village, with too many
people in it for all they have to do, and there are num-
bers of miserable-looking cottages between it and the
hills, whose inmates are too palpably in the same con-
dition. One of its peculiar features is the river. In

THE BRORA. 363

passing through the village it has cut for itself a deep
trench, thirty feet deep at least, in a white sandstone
which, though extremely soft, stands the weather, and
thus preserves on both sides a perpendicular frontage.
The appearance in consequence for some distance is
rather that of a canal at the masonry of the locks, than
of a river, — a curious exemplification of how geological
phenomena affect scenery. Where the walls are steep-
est, and the water blackest, there is a bridge thrown
over which the public road passes/

' Wednesday morning.

' After taking tea last night, and then filling the
opposite page, I walked out along the southern bank of
the Brora for about half a mile. The path led through
a sort of rectilinear ravine, evidently artificial ; on reach-
ing an extensive hollow the rectilinear ravine became a
rectlinear mound, and I found it terminate at an old pit
mouth. Those I saw last year lie on the opposite side
of the stream. Though about two hundred feet in
depth, it is now filled up with water to within thirty
feet of the opening. The appearance of the hollow in
which it has been opened struck me as remarkable.
All around, between me and the sea, I saw a sloping
rampart, terminating atop in a long even height, and, in
the bottom, in a level plain laid out in fields and with a
wooded island rising from out of it with the same slope
as the surrounding rampart. I saw at once that it
could not be the result of any glacial action, as the
body of the rampart is not of debris, but, as shown by
the artificial ravine, of white sandstone. On climbing a
height to survey its general appearance, I marked that
the trench-like appearance of the bed of the river, to
which I referred last evening, commenced exactly at the
hollow, — it is a breach in the rampart, — such a breach

364 MAN OF SCIENCE.

as you may have seen in the side of a mill-pond over-
flooded and broken up by a thunder-shower. The
mystery lay unveiled ; — the hollow had been at one
period a deep and extensive lake, which the river, by
wearing down the soft white stone of the lower barrier,
had gradually tapped off. I could see no one able to
inform me regarding the nature of the soil in the hol-
low, or whether freshwater shells or moss were found in
the subsoil. By the character of the shells the age of
the lake might be ascertained, but ancient it must be,
as the bed of the river is now a considerable distance
beneath its level.

' There is a pause in the rain, and the sky is clear-
ing, so I shall e'en wrap my plaid about me, and set
out for the quarries, and the seat of the glacier. I had
intended visiting Loch Brora, but it is six miles away,
and, having no change of dress, I am unwilling to put
myself in the way of being too thoroughly drenched.'

' Wednesday evening.

1 1 have been at Loch Brora, and at the quarries,
and the seat of the glacier, and I have traced the river
for miles, and filled both my large pockets with fossils,
and all this without catching a single drop of rain. Am
I not a lucky fellow? Loch Brora is a long narrow
sheet of water, that lies up among the hills in the gorge
of a deep rocky valley. The mountains on both sides
rise to a great height, wild and naked above, but with
their bases lined very sweetly with dwarf birch. One
immense hill in the distance, of bold outline and pre-
cipitous sides, is the acknowledged monarch of the
scene, — the loch stretches out in front of him for about
four miles, its undulating and winding shores tufted
with birch, and here and there mottled with, small green

LOCH BRORA. 365

spots that, ere the poor Highlander had been driven
from home, kept him in oats and bere. I saw in one
little bay some of the prettiest water-lilies I have ever
seen. They looked like so many bathing Venuses sub-
mersed to the neck. Some of the green deserted spots
on the shore, with the purple hills rising behind, the
blue loch in front, and the dwarf birch all around, were
really very sweet. I doubt not that the thoughts of
them live, set in sorrow, in hearts beyond the Atlantic.
As you look down the loch, the whole opening of the
glen seems a tempestuous sea of miniature hills, from
thirty to forty feet in height ; — the Highlanders call
detached hillocks of this kind Tomhans, and believe
them to be the haunts of fairies. Geologists have learned
from Agassiz to term them moraines. They form the
accumulations of stones and gravel which were ploughed
up before the glacier. Amid a good deal of irregularity
they have an evident bearing in their arrangement to
the mountains around, from which the ice descended.
In some places I could trace them in chains of half a
mile in length quite parallel to the mountains ; and
about half a mile above Brora three of these chains lie
parallel to one another, like the strings in a triple neck-
lace of beads. There lie between them miniature val-
leys cultivated by the ejected Highlanders ; and there
are many miserable-looking hovels on their sides.
Imagine a table covered with crumbs, and that you set
yourself to rake them into lines with the edge of your
hand, keeping a sort of rude parallelism to that end of the
table at which you sat, and from which you raked them.
Your little lines of accumulation would be moraines of
crumbs. But there are more than moraines here to
testify of the glacier. Suppose your hand to be moist,
and that it left on the cleared table in the direction in

366 MAN OF SCIENCE.

which you pushed the crumbs before you, a number of
minute streaks corresponding with the minute ridges of
the skin. Such are the marks on what may be termed
the cleared table here. Wherever the rock is laid bare
we see it all furrowed and channeled with grooves and
scratches, in the bearing of the moraines on the hills.
These workings give a very high idea of the antiquity
of the oolite, comparatively modern as the oolite is in
the chronology of the geologist. When the ponderous
ice slid over it, it was in exactly the same fossil state
that it is now. The rock, a white sandstone, abounds
in fossils, that are but hollow casts ; and wherever one
of these casts occurs, the stone is weaker than where
there is none. Now, we find that the glacier discovered
this weakness, and in many places broke out the hollow
casts that are nearest the surface, leaving within the
fragments that it pressed down into them.

' I did not take the beaten path to Loch Brora, but
struck upon it through the moor, and passed on my
way through a large peat mass, roughened at present by
the winter fuel of the people of Brora. There are a
few scattered moraines that rise over its dingy level, and
which must have been there long ere the morass itself
had any existence. And yet in this morass large fir-
trees are found, the remains of one of our ancient forests.
I saw in one pit several huge blocks laid bare ; — they
seemed originally to have been trees of that short-
stemmed, bee-hive-looking class I have seen in some
places in the central Highlands. They never assume
that form save when standing far apart in a compara-
tively open country. Here are degrees of antiquity for
you ; the moraines are as of yesterday when compared
with the oolite, and the ancient forests as of yesterday
when compared with the moraines.

THE BRORA OOLITE. 367

' I know you are heartily tired, but I must say some-
thing about the quarries. Imagine a border of com-
paratively flat country stretching between the hills and
the sea, and out of the middle of this border, where at
the broadest, imagine a wood-covered hill rising, quite a
dwarf-looking thing when compared with the mountains
behind, but a genuine hill notwithstanding. It stands
quite independent, a hill set up for itself, and descends
nearly as steeply towards the mountains as towards the
sea. Now, this independent hill is a hill of the oolite,—
English, if I may say so, to its very heart ; — nay, more, it
belongs to a more modern deposit of the oolite than any
other in the country. The flat base on which it rests
belongs to that inferior middle and lower part of the
Oolite known as the Oxford Clay and the Great Oolite,
whereas this hill belongs to that superior middle part of
the system known as the Coral Rag. It is an isolated
specimen of the deposit which, though somewhat too
bulky for most private collections, seeing it measures a
full mile in length by rather more than half a mile in
breadth, is excellently fitted for furnishing specimens
which, were it not there, could not be had nearer than
England. Now, it is in this insulated hill that the
quarries are opened. The stone is of a beautiful white,
and was at one time much run upon. There are houses
in Edinburgh built of it. It was found, however, to
have one great defect, — though pretty and durable, it is
so exceedingly porous that a house built of it formed
but a kind of sponge that took in every drop that fell on
it during a shower and retained it, dispensing damp for
weeks thereafter. And so, greatly to the detriment of
Brora, for which at one time it promised to make a kind
of trade, it has fallen into disuse. It abounds in fossils,
curiously preserved as casts. It is really wonderful how

368 MAN OF SCIENCE.

sand, however fine, could have taken the impressions so
finely. I picked up to-day a cast of a piece of decayed
wood on which not only the yearly rings but even the
longitudinal fibres were visible. It has preserved even
microscopic peculiarities. And as only the white sand-
stone remains, the fossils have all the appearance of being
pieces of beautiful sculpture. One might almost
imagine among the debris of these quarries — for there are
two opened in the hill — that he had before him the
rubbish of one of our old cathedrals after the rascal
multitude had reformed all the carved work with their
pickaxes and hammers, — only the workmanship is much
finer than was ever yet fashioned for Scottish cathedral.
I found two masons at work in one of the quarries, and
showed them that by some unaccountable means or other
I had learned to hew. Good-night, dearest, — it is eleven
o'clock/

' Thursday. Golspie.

' Another stage in advance. Taking an early break-
fast at Brora I set out along the shore about half-past
seven, and arrived here about ten. There is not a great
deal to be seen by the way, but the walk was pleasant,
and when I entered on the bounds of the Dunrobin
Policies, very much so. Imagine a selvage of lawn with
the beach on one side, and a continuous line of bank on
the other, — the bank planted and presenting the appear-
ance of a tall screen of wood. Behind this screen there
is a bold undulating outline of hills, with the tall hill
crested by the late Duke of Sutherland's monument,
conspicuous in the midst. In the centre of the land-
scape rises Dunrobin, a square, white, many-windowed
pile with a round tower at each corner, and a square
detached tower, turreted and battlemented, projecting
from one of the sides. The woods close thick around it,

GOLDSPIE. 369

—so thickly that a road that leads to it from the shore
seems dark as a vaulted passage. There is much of
antique simplicity if not of ducal magnificence in its
whole appearance, and it says something for the taste of
the family that they have not employed their vast
wealth upon it in making it tawdry and fine. A
genuine old castle, that had earls and barons in it five
hundred years ago, is one of the things which money
cannot produce.

' The Andersons mention in their Guide Book that
there is a fine waterfall in the neighbourhood of Golspie.
I have just been seeing it ; but the weather of late has
been dry, and so, though the woods and rocks do their
part pretty well, the stream has almost struck work, and
sputters over the face of the precipice much in the sort
of sublime style I have seen the contents of a washing-
tub assume when emptied over a window. But the dell
in which it falls is not unworthy of being seen ; — it is
an Eathie on a larger scale, and richer in wood. It has
been hollowed in the Old Red Sandstone ; there are
precipices of diluvium a full hundred feet in height in
the lower part of it, and the cataract has been formed,
as such cataracts always are, where the stream suddenly
passes from a harder to a softer rock. I am too old, I
think, for getting into ecstasies with scenes of but
ordinary fineness. The Golspie water-fall would do
quite well for young ladies and romantic gentlemen, but
the mature man needs something strong to move him.
I wish I had an opportunity of trying the effect of
Niagara.

' On leaving the waterfall I struck up along a very
steep path to the Duke of Sutherland's monument. The
day was warm, and the labour considerable. As I
approached the top I saw within some sixty or eighty

VOL. ii. 24

370 MAN OF SCIENCE.

yards of the building a small cottage, and beside it the
debris of a quarry, out of which the stones for the
erection had been taken. The hill itself is one of those
Old Red Sandstone eminences which in this part of the
country attain to so great a height. I at once inferred
that the cottage was the deserted barracks in which the
workmen engaged in erecting the monument had lived.
What was my surprise, however, to find it inhabited ;—
one might as well expect to find a human family located
in a crow's nest on a tree-top. It is elevated I know
not how many feet over the level of the sea, far above
the line of cultivation, and with only heath and moss
around it. I tapped at the door, and sought a glass of
water, — the matron, a sunburned, staid-looking woman
of about thirty-five, brought me a drink very civilly.
Her husband, she said, had charge of the planting
below, and of the monument, but though they had
been in the place for only a year, they were both think-
ing long to get away. Last winter the snow lay so
thick around them, that for five weeks they could not
descend the hill, and weeks sometimes passed even in
summer without their seeing any one. It was so very
cold a place, too, at all seasons when there blew any
wind ! I saw in front of the cottage a minute patch of
garden ground, in which, as if by way of experiment, a
few potatoes had been planted, and that the more
vigorous among them had contrived to throw up three
whole leaves above the soil. According to Cowper,

" So farewell envy of the peasant's nest."

' The monument of the Duke, as becomes a man who
had four hundred thousand pounds a year, is of colossal
proportions. There is a huge statue of White, and a
huge pedestal of Red, Sandstone. The large dead eyes
look over Sutherland and the sea, and if they do not see

LANDSCAPE OUTLINES. 371

as profoundly into the real interests of the country as
the eyes of the living Duke, they see wonderfully little
considering that they are six inches across. The view
from the base of the monument is very extensive. Sup-
pose one half of the whole occupied by an immense acute
angle of sea, — the Moray frith. Imagine, further, a long
sharp tongue of land striking out into the middle of this
angle from the apex, and with a tall tower-like building
at its point. This tongue is the peninsula of Easter
Ross, and the tower-like erection the lighthouse of Tarbet
Ness. At the base of this tongue there is a spindle-
shaped lake, — the bay of Cromarty. The hills of
Sutherland and Ross make a splendid frame to the land-
scape on the north and west, and on the south and east
stretch the light blue hills of Moray, Banff, and Inver-
ness. Remember I am not vain enough to attempt
drawing a picture ; — I am merely scratching as with a
burnt stick a few careless outlines.'

' Saturday morning, Cromarty.

' One of our neighbours here, old Mrs Forbes, has
just been furnishing me with a new evidence that I am
getting old myself. My father was but fifty at the time
of his death, and I am now turned of forty. " Oh," she
said, after shaking hands with me, " you are growing
your father's very image." I have reached the same
period of life to which he had attained when she knew
him best, and years are bringing out resemblances to
him in my face and figure, which seem to have lain
latent before. I had a walk yesterday to the rocks
with my hammer, and succeeded in picking up several
tolerable specimens.'

4 Saturday evening.

' I have been holding a tete-a-tete to-night with your

372 MAN OF SCIENCE.

picture in Mrs Eraser's, and calling up old times. I
have been just re-reading, too, your letter to Mrs Gray,
the letter which Sir David Brewster could not believe
written by a woman ; and I felt both letter and picture
do my heart good. Think what you may of the matter,
dearest, you have no such admirer as your own husband.
You would laugh at me as fond and foolish did you
know how often I have been thinking of you during the
past week, and how much pleasure I have had in writing
this scrawl, just because, however trivial my topic, I felt
that I was conversing on it with you. You were beside
me, as now, and I felt the lover as strong in my heart
as I did seven years ago. Do you not remember how
many hours we used to sit together, and yet how very
short they always seemed? Shall we not, dearest, renew
these times at our meeting, ere I plunge once more into
the stern turmoil of controversy, and be a man of war ?
We shall have one or two quiet walks together ere we
cross the country to Edinburgh.

1 The first person I met as I landed was poor forlorn
Angus, now grown a great fellow. He had been watch-
ing the steamer by which Andrew came, but on finding
that I did not accompany him he waxed indignant and
high, and refused to shake hands with him. I got a
double shake. He then seized on my carpet-bag with a
shout, and bore it home in triumph. He is not quite
pleased, however, that I have not brought " Miller's boy "
with me. Angus is not a Moderate, — he has gone out,
regularly attending sermons in the factory close. His
head finely illustrates the phrenological doctrine that
size is power. He wears my old broad bonnet, and
finds it not a hair's breadth too large.'

' Sunday evening, 7 o'clock.

' I have been hearing Mr Stewart in the factory

ANGUS. 373

close. The congregation was larger than used to assem-
ble in the parish church, and apparently more attentive.
It was striking enough to see the familiar faces in such
a place, ranged, not in the accustomed pews which some
of them have occupied in my recollection for full thirty
years, but all mixed up in one group, — poor and rich
together. The day was gusty and fitful ; the surround-
ing walls of deep red, with their many windows, now glared
upon us in sunshine, now lay deep in shadow, — there
was the occasional rattle of a window in the upper
stories as the gust shook the boards, and the measured
roar of the sea mingled from the beginning till the close
of the service with the tones of the psalmody and the
voice of the speaker. Poor Angus was greatly engaged
in carrying forms and chairs, and in looking, uncouthly
enough, after the comforts of a few favourites, mostly
old women. Aunt Jenny tells me that he prays every
night in his own peculiar style for " Miller and Miller's
boy." '

' 9 o'clock.

c I have been seeing the old chapel of St Regulus
and poor Liza's grave. The little mound is as well
marked as it was four years ago, and it is now wrapped
over with a mound of rich unbroken turf. The little
head-stone bearing your and my name has whitened
somewhat under the influence of the weather, and leans
slightly to one side, but there is no other change. The
sun was hastening to his setting, red and broad, and
throwing a strong bright gleam on the upper foliage
of the surrounding wood, and on the top of the ruin,
while the tombs and graves lay in deep shadow. Poor
Liza ! The little events of her span-long life rose all
before me, from the time that I first felt that I was a
father, till I flung myself down in uncontrollable an-

374 MAN OF SCIENCE.

guish on my bed, a father no longer. The spring in
which we lost her was peculiarly a dark time ; — but it
is over ; and Liza still lives, though not with us/

' Monday, 3 o'clock.

'And I have heard from you. I am glad you
should have fixed on so interesting a locality, but not
at all glad that you should be so little able to avail
yourself of its various points of interest. But you will,
I trust, get stronger, and that by the time I join you
you will be able to accompany me in my walks. You
must take especial care and not over-exert yourself, nor
walk much in the sun. I am pretty sure that by put-
ting yourself in what boxers and pedestrians call a
course of training, — extending your walks tit by 'bit as
you felt your strength increase, — never exhausting your-
self,— never urging exertion past the point at which
fatigue is merely an agreeable languor, you could be
brought into condition, and made strong enough to
travel ten miles per day. My mother, never a strong
woman, has travelled at your age thirty miles on a
stretch. Only think of all you could do, could you
but travel thirty miles ! I shall, however, be well con-
tent if, at our meeting, I find you able to accomplish
five. Five would bring us to Loch Lomond together,
and take within our range a few of the striking points
of Loch Long.

f And so Harriet and Bill enjoyed their voyage,
and Harriet has become a shell and fossil collector.
Tell her papa trusts she is to have a great many pretty
things to show him when he comes to Arrochar, and
that she is to be so good a girl as not to cry when
nurse is bathing her. Tell her, also, that I send her a
kiss for mamma, and that I send mamma a kiss for her,

HIS HOME. 375

and that the best way of managing the matter will be
for her to receive first the kiss from you, for which you
are my proxy, and then to give you in turn the kiss for
which she is my proxy.

' Write me, dearest, as long letters as you can with-
out tasking yourself, and I in turn will devote to you
every leisure hour, my walks, my visitings, and my
dinings out will leave at my disposal. To say that my
chief pleasure, in a ramble devoted to pleasure exclu-
sively, arises from my conversations with you, is not
saying too much. My heart is continually turning to
you and the two little persons at Arrochar. My home
is not a locality, — it is not a dwelling ; it is you and
the little ones/

' Cromarty, 18th July, 1843, Tuesday.

f

' Mr Sage was preached out on Sunday last, and by
dint of superhuman exertion among all the lairds a
congregation of thirty were brought together to see that
he was. Cromarty, Rosemarkie, Avoch, all sent their
guests to swell the amount ; and of the thirty, two whole
individuals, a man and his wife, were stated hearers in
the parish church. There could be found no one to
ring the bell and no one to be precentor, though twenty
shillings were offered as remuneration, and a man and
gig had to be sent rattling to Cromarty an hour ere the
service began, to procure both out of McKenzie's con-
gregation. The story goes that, with the first tug the
bellman gave, a swarm of angry bees, disturbed by the
swing of the rope, came down about his ears with
wrathful fizz, and that to avoid their stings he had to
quit his hold and show them a clean pair of heels.
The Moderates are in a perilous state, when every
untoward incident that occurs is regarded as an omen,
and interpreted to their disadvantage. Their spirit in

•376 MAN OF SCIENCE.

this part of the country is bitterness itself. Servants
dismissed, labourers thrown out of employment, angry
interviews between landlord and tenant, — we hear of little
else in this corner. The poor in Cromarty who go to
- for assistance from the parish are invariably asked
as a first question, " Do you belong to the Free Church?"

' Tuesday afternoon.

' I have been spending a few hours very pleasantly.
Before leaving Edinburgh I mentioned to you my inten-
tion of digging into the floor of the large Pigeons' Cave
to see whether shells or bones might not be found in it,
as in some of the caves of England and the continent.
I procured, through Andrew, a small boat and a crew
of young lads, Andrew's contemporaries and companions,
and providing ourselves with tools and candles, we set off.
We went careering along the rocks at two oars' length
from the shore. I saw the little rock where you first said
yes to a certain interesting question, — the said important
yes bearing reference to a log-house in the back-woods.
I saw besides, the two beech-trees where we were so
foolish, you know, as to spend a great many hours to-
gether, and so exclusive that the company of any third
person we could not have endured. We landed at the
cave, drew up our little boat, and then commenced dig-
ging about twenty feet within the opening. We found
for two feet and a half pure guano, — the same umbery
sort of mass you saw in the museum of the Highland
Society, but without the overpowering stench, a differ-
ence which may possibly arise from the circumstance
that the guano of South America is an accumulation of
the dung of predacious birds, whereas the guano here
was an accumulation of the dung of pigeons. We took
home some of it with us, and James Ross is to trv its

THE PIGEONS' CAVE. 377

effect on a drill of turnips. Beneath the guano we
found a loose gravel, which became less loose as we
went down, and then passed into a sort of breccia bound
together by a brown oxide of iron. We found neither
shells nor bones. We then opened another pit about
fifty feet further in, — the guano was wanting, but the
gravel bore the same appearance as in the other open-
ing. There are masses of gravel that project, strongly
enough, from the sides of the cave at the height of four
and five feet from the floor. Some of them stick out
like fragments of cornices for fully two feet, bound
together by stalactites. They show that the bottom of
the cave must have at one time stood that high, that the
stalagmitical matter running from the sides bound into
coherent masses the stones and gravel in contact with
them, and that the sea then swept the loose matter away,
leaving the projections to be crusted over still further by
the stony cement. We broke into several of the bulkier
of them and found them composed of water-rolled peb-
bles and very distinct fragments of shells. I procured
a specimen in which there are five well-marked bits of
shell rounded on the edges as we find such fragments
on surf-beaten and rocky shores. How strange a re-
cord ! We have evidence all around the coast in our
raised beaches that the sea once stood higher on the
land than it does now ; but we see here that there must
have been an alternation of elevations and depressions.
When these shells were rolled in on the floor of the
cave, — a floor standing five feet above its present level,
the sea must have stood high. During the time when
they were consolidating through the agency of the
stalagmitical matter, the sea must have fallen, otherwise
the consolidation could not have taken place. It must
then have again returned and washed out the loose

378 MAN OF SCIENCE.

gravel which the matter had not reached. And then it
again fell. There is another cave among the rocks of
Cromarty that indicates similar changes.

' I saw on the walls and roof of the cave appear-
ances that used at one time greatly to puzzle me. The
commoner stalactites drop straight down like the stalks
of tobacco pipes, or slant along the walls. Every drop
that forms them obeys the gravitatory law. But here
and there we find a drop-formed stalk in which this law
does not seem to have been obeyed. Some of them
curve up at the ends and form hooks, from one of which
I suspended my watch, and some of them curve round
so as to form loops, — both ends joining to the roof.
How account for the formation of these? Did water
lose its weight in some wonderful age of the world and
set itself to drop upwards ? The solution of the diffi-
culty when at length discovered proved simple enough.
There is a small spider that takes refuge in the colder
months in these darker recesses, and forms as it passes
along the sides and roof a multitude of loops with its
hair-like threads. Along these the drop sometimes
runs, — a drop running continuously along one end
forms a hook, when a drop runs along each end it forms
in course of time a loop, — and such is the mystery. In
the outer part of the cave I saw some curious encrust-
ations. A miniature moss bends out to the light, and
the rock side to which it is attached is a roughed plane
of mosses in stone, all turning to the light. The dead
remained fixed in the attitude of the living.'

' Wednesday evening.

' I have been across the ferry in the little boat I had
yesterday, and after spending several hours in hammer-
ing among the strata of that fine section of Old Red

A DISCOVERY. 379

that leans against the Hill of Nigg, I have succeeded in
making something approaching to a discovery. I have
described in my geological volume one great platform of
death in the Old Red, above which fossil remains are
very unfrequent. I discovered to-day in this section
that there are two platforms of death equally abundant
in organisms, the one three hundred and eighteen feet
above the other. Nor does any change seem to have
taken place in species in the long lapse that intervened,
as the fossils of the lower and upper platform seem
identical. I disinterred out of both specimens of
Coccosteus, Osteolepis, and Cheiracanthus, that could
not be distinguished with reference to their localities.
This discovery throws a good deal of additional light on
the geology of the district, and solves for me one or two
problems which lay unsolved before. I found besides,
under the northern Sutor, a recent deposit that belongs,
I am inclined to think, to the period when the sea stood
high over the floor of the pigeon cave. It is composed
of an adhesive blue clay, not very unlike some of the
rich blue clays of the Lias, but the remains which
it rather plentifully contains are all recent, — bits of de-
cayed wood, among which I could distinguish pieces of
common fir and alder, — the common mussel, and a not
very rare Venus, fir-cones, and hazel-nuts. I was a
good deal interested in this last discovery. We have
on the Cromarty side a considerable quantity of the
same blue clay, and until now I could never find aught
to determine its age by.'

' Thursday morning.

' Nothing like perseverance ! I have been out again
at the fish -beds, and have got some capital specimens.
It is truly wonderful how thickly the fish must have

380 MAN OF SCIENCE.

lain in some period of the Old Red on this bank. The
herrings never lay so thickly on our coasts in the fishing
season. Out of an area across which two average-sized
nets would extend, I have been digging fish for the last
twelve years. I have taken many hundreds away, and
broken up many thousands more, and they seem in-
numerable still. Did our recent fish crowd together as
closely, a single net would mesh enough to load a
boat/

* Thursday evening.

' What would I not give for an occasional peep into
the magic mirror of the tale, that I might see what you
are doing, and how you are looking, and what Ha-ha and
Bill are about ! But I dare say I bear your absence
better without it. It would serve but to suspend the
viands over the hungry man. I am counting the days
till I receive your reply to my last. You would have
my letter on Wednesday ; yours will be posted to-day ;
it will be all this evening and all to-morrow on the
road, and I shall have it on Saturday. Or suppose a
day is lost through your distance from the Post-office,
it will not arrive in that case till Sunday ; but though
business letters may take their Sabbath-day's rest, and
welcome, my own Lydia's letter cannot be permitted to
lie silent so near me. I shall have young Andrew to
call for it, and if it tell me of your welfare, and that you
enjoy yourself, I shall go to church with a heart all the
more soft and grateful through its influence. A short
absence, dearest, serves to show me how very dear you
are to me ; you grow large as you recede, and you are
tall enough at present to fill my whole heart from top to
bottom. Good-bye ; it is past ten, and I intend rising
early to-morrow morning, if well, to make another at-
tempt on Shandwick.'

HIGHLAND MORAINES. 381

' Friday evening, 6 o'clock.

' Just returned after a pleasant, though rather fa-
tiguing walk, of twelve miles or so. In going I passed
along the elevated path that winds immediately above
Nigg at the base of the hill, just where the cultivated
ground borders on the moor. The day was one of
speckled sunshine, and everything fresh and green after
the recent rain. On one of the lower slopes, where the
hill of Nigg descends towards the east, there is a fine
tomhan roughened at its base with dwarf birch, and
bearing very distinctly atop the marks of a hill-fort.
Some six or eight other tomhans lie around it, according
to Burns,

" Hillocks dropt in Nature's careless haste ; "

according to Agassiz, hillocks not dropped in haste,
but ploughed up with vast deliberation and perse-
verance. The tomhans here are all moraines, — the pro-
duction of a moderately-sized glacier that once occupied
the north-eastern slope of the hill of Nigg. The hill-
fort may not be more than two thousand years old, —
not so much, perhaps ; two thousand years brings us
beyond the days of Csesar. And yet it gives a sort of
felt antiquity to these moraines to find one of them
occupied by an erection older than history. In my
descent on the shore I was struck with what I must
have often seen, but never so particularly remarked
before, — the great beauty of the curve in which the lias
strata recline against the coast. It forms such a sweep
as Hogarth would have introduced into his dissertation.
Betweeen the harder strata and the land there occurred
beds of a softer quality which have yielded to the sea,
leaving a long hollow, into which the higher strata
descend, as if by steps of stairs, and the appearance
presented is that of a low, long, elliptical amphitheatre,

382 MAN OF SCIENCE.

on which some two or three hundred thousand people
might take their seats. I found very few specimens, -
a few ammonites and belemnites, and a bit of fossil
wood ; but what I saw will be of use to me should I
set myself to my proposed geological sketches. The
recent formation which I found under the northern
Sutor throws a good deal of light on all our lias deposits
of the north. In both the lias and the deposit we find
the same classes of remains, — wood, cones of the pine,
and shells, — the bivalves among the latter presenting in
most cases their two valves unseparated. I should have
said that, before leaving the shore, I found the fish-beds
of the Old Red appeared almost in contact with the
lias. I found a Coccosteus last year in this place among
the loose pebbles, and wondered where it could have
come from.

' I hear on every side of the oppression of our land-
lords. In the parish of Logie there is a large gravel-
pit in a fir-wood in which on sacramental occasions the
out-door congregation used to assemble. At other
times it is a famous resort of the gipsies. Their smoke
may be seen rising over the trees six months in the
year, and their rude tents pitched in a corner of the
hollow. Some of the neighbouring farmers and cotters
expressed a wish not very long ago that persons so
dangerous and disreputable should be prevented from
making it a place of resort, but they were told by the
proprietor's doer to be kind to the gipsies, and they
would find them harmless. On the Disruption the
minister of Logie respectfully applied for leave to erect
his preaching-tent in the hollow, in the expectation,
fond man, of being permitted to rank with the gipsies.
But, alas, no ! Tinkers may be patronized as pictur-
esque, but the Free Church is dangerous; and so the

HIS FATHERS' PEW. 383

use of the hollow was promptly and somewhat indig-
nantly refused/

* Sunday morning.

' There has been a night of weighty rain ; the streets
have been swept clean, and the kennels show their ac-
cumulations of sand and mud high over their edges. I
awoke several times during the night to hear the gush
from the eaves and the furious patter on the panes ; and
I thought of the many poor congregations in Scotland
who would have to worship to-day in the open air.
But the rain is now over, and a host of ragged clouds
are careering over the heavens before a strong easterly
gale. I do begrudge the Moderates our snug comfort-
able churches. I begrudge them my fathers' pew. It
bears date 1741, and has held by the family, through
times of poverty and depression, a sort of memorial of
better days, when we could afford getting a pew in the
front gallery. But yonder it lies, empty within an
empty church, a place for spiders to spin undisturbed,
while all who should be occupying it take their places
on stools and forms in the factory close.

' I felt, by the way, when listening to Mr Stewart
last Sunday, that our out-door congregations would re-
quire a style of preaching for themselves. His discourse
was in his average style, very ingenious, but not very
powerful, and with more of point than breadth. I
thought it would have told better in a moderately-sized
church than in the open air. The cabinet picture re-
quires to be placed in a cabinet ; — I felt as if he were
hanging his cabinet picture in a vast gallery. The
times require that the power should be great, but the
finish, perhaps, not very nice. In an hour from this
the post will be in. If disposed to forget how I used
to watch his arrival at Linlithgow when expecting a

384 MAN OF SCIENCE.

letter from you, my present state of solicitude would
scarce fail to remind me of it.'

' 6 o'clock, evening.

' I have been hearing sermon a second time in the
factory close. Mr Stewart was in his happiest and
most impressive vein, — clear, interesting, solemn ; I
have rarely, if ever, heard him more effective. My
criticism on his last Sabbath's discourse would in no
respect apply. Never have I heard better out-of-door
discourses. His audience was most attentive, and at
several of the more striking passages visibly impressed.
The day cleared up beautifully, and except for a few
minutes, when a slight shower led to a vast unfurling of
umbrellas, we were quite as comfortable as we could
have been in any building. There has been much rain
of late, and it has been of great use and greatly needed,
but scarce any of it fell during the time of Divine service
on Sabbath. In his prayer Mr Stewart made appro-
priate mention of a goodness that could be at once
favourable to exposed congregations and to the con-
cerns of the husbandmen. I saw two servants in livery
at the tent. They are, I have been told, domestics of
Sir Hugh Eraser, a fierce intrusionist, and have been
warned to quit his service at the term, for their adher-
ence to the Free Church.'

' Monday morning, 7 o'clock.

' You have been my inseparable companion, dearest,
since we parted. You were with me last night on the
ridge of the hill, looking at all I looked at and feeling
all I felt. Do you remember the exquisite evening we
passed among the pines on the upper slope of the hill
above the cultivated ground, where the hill looks down
upon the town and bay ? There was a bright red sun-

REMINISCENCES. 385

set ; — the trees in front of us, where relieved against the
sky of flame, seemed as if drawn in black, while the
trees behind seemed as if dipped in blood. It was early
in our acquaintance, — friendship had passed into love,
though we had not yet become aware of the fact ; but
rarely, I suppose, do mere friends manifest the same un-
willingness to part that we did that evening. We
lingered on till all that was fine in the sunset had disap-
peared, and found the grey of sea and sky, and the
blackness of field and wood, quite as agreeable as the
many-tinted landscape we had so admired a little before.
My own dear Lydia, — it is an advantage to have recol-
lections such as these to summon up/

' Wednesday morning.

' I had an invitation last evening for tea with Mrs
Allardyce, but having previously accepted Mrs Smith's,
I had to make a compromise by leaving Mrs S. early
and calling on Mrs A. I spent two hours with her
very agreeably in conversation of an exclusively literary
cast. She showed me a very elegant translation
of a German poem with which she amused her leisure
last winter. The work itself is a great curiosity. The
Princess Elizabeth of England, one of the daughters of
George III., afterwards Landgravine of Hesse Hom-
burg, seems, like her sister Amelia, to have had a con-
siderable dash of genius. She amused herself long
before her marriage, in making a series of allegorical
drawings, descriptive of the progress of Genius, with
Imagination and Fancy for his companions. Take one
of the set as a specimen. The scene is a cavern crusted
with stalactites, some of which, as is not uncommon,
present the appearance of animals, some of men, — mere
approximation, of course, but yet traceable. Genius

VOL. ii. 25

386 MAN OF SCIENCE.

with his two companions stands thoughtful in the midst.
Fancy points out the resemblance to the boy, and
Imagination hands him a chisel and mallet, that he may
imitate them in the marble. The scene symbolizes the
origin of sculpture. When the Princess became the
Landgravine, — I should rather say when she became the
Landgrave's widow, her drawings were published with
a poetical description, the work of a German poetess,
affixed to each ; and what Mrs A. has been engaged
upon is a translation in the Spenserian stanza of the
description. It seems, as I have said, very elegant.5

' Inverness, Wednesday evening, 26th July, 1843.

1 1 trust to find you quite strong and ruddy, with
the rounded outline of your earlier days, and quite
able to climb such steep slopes as that which leads from
the farther beech-tree to the pathway above. We shall
have gallant walks together, and I shall be your squire
and sweetheart.

' I left Cromarty by the steamer about eleven o'clock.
Poor Angus carried my bag and stick to the pier, sturdily
refusing to give them up, though much urged. He then
took his place in the boat, and went out with me to the
vessel's side, where he attracted some notice by the
uncouthness of his gesticulations in bidding me farewell.
" What sort of a strange man is that ? " said one of the
passengers to me, as the boat was returning shore wards,
and Angus stood up swinging his arms like an ogre, and
shouting out, " Hugh, boy, Hugh, good-bye, boy ; " " he
is the strangest looking person I ever saw." " A poor
idiot," 1 said, " but a very attached one." The first
half-hour of our voyage was fine though somewhat
gloomy, and I enjoyed the bay as it receded, — the Hill,
Navity Shore, and the Burn of Eathie. There then

J^ INVERNESS. 387

came on, somewhat suddenly, a disagreeable rain, ac-
companied by a strong head wind, and the latter three-
fourths of the passage were barely endurable in con-
sequence.

' I wished Mr Mackenzie to show me the house in
which you were born. But he could show me only the
place it had once occupied. The house itself had dis-
appeared and a fashionable hotel rises on its site.
Tristram Shandy made a pilgrimage once to the gate of
a French city to drop a tear over the tomb of two faithful
lovers, but on reaching the gate found no tomb to shed
it over. And here was I, romantically seeking my wife's
birth-place in a spick-span, fresh-coloured building with
bottles of spirits in the lower windows and obsequious
waiters at every door. And now, dearest, good-bye. It
is past eleven, and I start for the west at five. Ere
going to bed, however, I shall read your letter once
more/

' Steamboat, Thursday evening.

' I rose this morning before four, and looked out on
the weather in despair. The rain fell thick and fast,
and the whole heavens seemed as if cloaked in grey felt.
In a wonderfully short time, however, the rain lightened,
and such a slice of the newly-risen sun as you might
clip off with a pair of scissors appeared through a
narrow slit in the east, reddening Craig-Phadrig with a
faint flush of vermilion. In an hour after it was a fine
morning, and the steamer set off with the prospect of an
agreeable voyage.

' Having spared you hitherto, I must inflict upon
you a very few sentences of geology. The features of
the very fine scenery around Inverness wear all a geolo-
gical impress. The ridge of the Leys extending from
the east side of the moor of Culloden to the shores of

388 MAN OF SCIENCE.

Loch Ness, is marked atop by its rectilinear character,
as if a ruler had been applied to it in the forming. The
coast of Caithness, as seen from the sea, presents exactly
the same appearance ; — so also does the ridge which
extends from the hill of Cromarty far into the parish of
Resolis. In each case these ridges are composed of
Old Red of the lower formation, — of sandstone, how-
ever, not low but high in this lower formation ; and the
rectilinear peculiarity seems to be one of its character-
istics. The ridge fronting that of the Leys, that to
which Craig-Phadrig belongs, is of an entirely different
character ; — the outline is more than usually waved and
indented. It is composed of the great conglomerate,
and this wavy character seems as characteristic a con-
dition of it as the rectilinear outline is of the deposits
that overlie it. Deep under the rectilinear ridge the
fish-beds appear, as shown in the quarry of Inches ; but
to indicate their place with regard to their indented
ridge opposite, one has to draw a line in the clouds.
In the valley between these two ridges,- — a portion
of the great Caledonian valley, there lie a number of
detached hills, of an appearance wholly different from
the hills on either side. Some of them are detached ;
some of them lie in chains, like birds' eggs blown,
and threaded. They are composed of sand and gravel,
and preserve a rude parallelism to the loftier hills behind,
just as rebounding waves preserve a parallelism to the
rock or mole from which they have been thrown back.
And these gravel hills are, as you anticipate, moraines.
They belong to a period when Loch Ness, that now
never freezes in even the severest winter, must have
existed as one vast mass of ice wedged into the earth,
and when a huge glacier filled the great glen of Scotland
from the east to the west sea.

LOCH NESS. 389

' We had fine sailing through the lower part of Loch
Ness. The hills, half rock, half wood, had their patches
of sunshine that looked all the lovelier and brighter from
the groundwork of shadow, and the previous rain had
given to every ravine its white thread of foam. We
could hear from the deck the dash of a thousand tiny
cascades. I marked Aldourie as we passed. Does it
not seem strange that in so thoroughly highland a place,
in a Tory family, and full eighty years ago, when
Jacobitism had still life in such recesses, the author
of the Vindicice Gallicce should have been born?
After leaving Aldourie behind us we neared Urquhart.
The steamboat made what Gait would have termed a
circumbendibus into its beautiful little bay, and passed
as near the picturesque old castle on its western
promontory as safety permitted. Originally it must
have been a place of great strength and importance ; and
as a ruin it is still very fine. Including the outworks,
the space covered very considerably exceeds an acre. It
was taken in the wars of Edward I. by the English, and
rough marching must they have had ere they reached it ;
— according to the well-known couplet, they must have
seen General Wade's roads " before 'that they were
made," but whether they blessed the General or no
history declare th not.

' I saw the Fall of Foyers ; but by a narrow enough
chance, and for a very short time. The captain was
unwilling to stop, and urged that very few of the
passengers were inclined to be at the trouble of visiting
it; but we made a muster of nine, all stark fellows,
who undertook to clear the ground to and from in
three-quarters of an hour, and so he consented to lay
to. I find I still rank with the young men, so far as
strength and activity are concerned. Only one of the

390 MAN OF SCIENCE.

party contrived to keep abreast of me, and him I ulti-
mately distanced. But I cannot expect to rank with
the young men long. You are acquainted with the
decision of Burns, —

" For ance that five an' forty's speel'd," &c.

The fall was in prime condition ; the sun shone, span-
ning the caldron with a very fine rainbow, and the
water, swollen by the late rains, covered in the preci-
pice and boiled in the hollow in its best and grandest
style. One of Byron's similes, descriptive of a water-
fall, if not indeed rather of that to which the waterfall is
compared, came athwart me as I looked :—

" Like the tail of the Pale Horse in the Revelation."

I do not know what the botanist might think of the
plants and shrubs so immediately in the neighbourhood
of the cataract that they lie under a perpetual drizzle,
but to my very hasty survey the group seemed different
from what we find either on wholly dry or wholly wet
ground. Marsh plants draw their moisture from below,
and plants of the dry land get only occasional showers,
but here were plants living in never-ceasing rain. There
was, however, neither space nor opportunity for examin-
ation, and so hurrying back we got aboard a few min-
utes within time.

' We made some stay at Tort Augustus in passing
the locks, and I rambled over the village and the Fort
for about three-quarters of an hour. The view from the
ramparts is exceedingly fine. Loch Ness is assuredly
the sublimest ditch in existence. The rectilinear sides,
parallel throughout its whole extent, and the extreme
steepness of the hills that rise out of it, in so many
places without skirt or margin, give it a very peculiar
character. The Eort and its immediate neighbourhood

FORT A UG USTUS. 391

interested me in some degree as the scene of the most
pleasing portion of the most pleasing work of Mrs
Grant of Laggan. Her earlier Letters from the Moun-
tains, written when she was a very young lady, and
yet, though young, intellectually at her best, for she
afterwards became stiff and pompous, — date from Fort
Augustus. She speaks in them, pleasingly enough, of
her walks, and of the young Moderate chaplain, whose
wife she afterwards became. The Fort itself, though
fast hastening to decay, will make, like all other modern
places of strength, but an indifferent ruin. For the
purposes of the landscape-painter one baronial castle, in
the style of Castle Urquhart, would be worth a dozen of
the most regular fortifications run to decay, Vauban ever
erected ; but when regular fortifications shall have run
to decay, baronial castles shall have gone out of existence
altogether ; and so in the millennium, the ruins that
tell of war and bloodshed will be very ungainly-looking
things. The village beside the Fort consists of a scat-
tered group of houses, a few of them exceedingly neat
and genteel, with native ladies in them that look like
the ladies elsewhere, but the greater part neglected-
looking and poor. The village has its church, and
Romance could doubtless be fine upon the clustered
cottages associated with the place of devotion. It seems
an argument for an establishment embodied in stone and
lime. Alas for the fact, however. A mean-looking
man, in shabby black,' comes regularly down to every
steamboat as it passes the locks, and stretching out his
fiery nose over the side, looks beseechingly for a dram.
And this mean-looking, red-nosed man is the minister
of the village.

' As we passed through the piece of canal which
stretches between Loch Ness and Loch Oich, I saw a

392 'MAN OF SCIENCE.

lime-kiln burning on the hill-side and would fain have
examined the stone, — a primary limestone, certainly,
perhaps a marble, — but had no opportunity. In pass-
ing through Loch Oich, the centre of the canal with re-
spect to level, for then the descent commences on both
sides, we had a striking though somewhat exaggerated
specimen of the very different climates of the east and
west coasts. On looking through the valley towards the
east we saw in a clear atmosphere a series of horizontal
clouds, rising the one beyond the other, like level beams
in a roof seen in perspective, and the mountains clear
and well-defined, and coloured according to their dis-
tances. In looking towards the west we saw hills shorn
of their tops by the descending fogs, a blue haze resting
on the lower grounds, and a turbid and broken sky
overhead. The hills, however, improve mightily in their
vegetation. The heath well-nigh disappears, and fine
rank grass covers their sides instead. But how sadly
they are scarred with ravines,— the conduit pipes by
which the upper fogs empty themselves in water into
the lakes. This difference between the vegetation of the
opposite coasts becomes very marked at Glengarry, when
for the brown sterility of many of the Loch Ness hills
we have mountains green to their summits, and woods of
luxuriant foliage. The old ruined tower of the chieftain
looks out with "imposing effect on the lake from a cluster
of trees. It does sound somewhat ridiculous that the
late Glengarry should have squandered so much money
in imitating the old highland chieftains who had none,
that now neither the lands nor the tower of the ancestors
of whom he was so vain belong to his son. He was so
proud of his family, that he ruined it.

' Isn't it provoking that I can't see Ben Nevis ?
Twice have I passed him now, and each time has he

BEN NEVIS. 393

veiled face and head like an eastern beauty. He pre-
sents this evening an enormous breadth of dark-blue
base, blue approaching to black, and at the level of
about three thousand feet there is a jagged outline of
cloud that varies its form every moment as the long
vapoury trail sweeps by. Hush ! — there is the sun
breaking out on his lower slopes, — the very appearance
you describe as of such frequent occurrence on the hills
of Loch Lomond and Loch Long. All is dark above
and on the flat grounds below, but rock and corrie on
the hill-side flare out in the light. And now the sunny
patches have flitted over it, and all is again blue and
sombre ; and now a single round patch of half an acre's
breadth sails slowly across. We shall have to quit the
boat almost immediately ; — the great breach in the canal
which was formed last winter, and so nearly drowned
the valley of the Loch, has not yet been repaired, and
so the last three miles of our journey towards the sea
must be by coach. Tor at least two of the three the
canal has a dry gravelly hollow.'

' Aboard the Steamer.

'Here we are awaiting the arrival of our heavy
luggage. Fort William lies across the loch, a cold, blue-
looking town under the base of a cold, blue-looking hill.
In half an hour I shall be there, and trust I shall fare
better this year than I did the last, when I found for
my friends Mrs D — and her sister, a locked door and
shuttered windows. I leave all my plans regarding the
Small Isles to be settled by them. Good-bye, dearest,—
the bell rings, and we are casting off our moorings.'

' Friday Morning. Fort William.

'Fort William is exactly the last place I would
choose to live in. It is a naked, mean-looking town at

394 MAN OF SCIENCE.

the foot of a steep marshy hill, that allows scarce selvedge
enough between its base and the sea for the houses to
stand upon. The highest ground in Great Britain lies
within a very few miles of it, and there are bold hills all
around, but the forms seem ill-combined, and the general
result is not striking. I was, I find, too hasty in my con-
clusion regarding the green vegetation of the western hills,
—I should, at least, not have generalized so promptly.
The hills fronting me are as dark and barren as any on
the east coast. As I write the haze thickens, and the
first drops of the coming shower patter against the
panes/

Our next letter furnishes a trait which will not sur-
prise us in Hugh Miller. He has attained a position of
the highest social respectability in the capital of his coun-
try, and his acquaintance are the most eminent men of
the age. Yet he calls to his side his old friend of the
hewing-shed, plain John Wilson, and sits down with
him at breakfast, John, I am quite sure, not finding
in Hugh any change since those days when they lived
together in the Niddry cottage, except that now, as the
wealthier man, Hugh can exercise the privilege of
friendship to hint delicately that, if John would be the
better of a little money, he has only to say so. In
this little incident of Miller's intercourse with John
Wilson do we not find better proof of a faithful, simple,
incorruptible heart than if he had endowed a hospital
or built a cathedral ? Here is the letter.

' Edinburgh, August, 1843.

' Very many thanks, dearest, for your punctuality.
I always sleep in on Saturday mornings ; this morning,
however, I was awaked by Bill. Nurse or Mary was

JOHN WILSON. 395

running up to him, and then running back, a famous
joke to poor Bill ; and he was greeting each exhibition
with so lusty a shout of laughter that he awoke papa.
When I became collected enough to remember that it
was Saturday I rang the bell, and as coolly as you used
to order breakfast in similar circumstances, I ordered up
your letter. " Yes, sir," was the reply, and the letter
came. And so again, dearest, many, many thanks for
it, and for your punctuality.

' I had my old workfellow, John Wilson, at break-
fast with me. He has been out of employment for
some time, and has taken to dealing in tea and sugar.
You will not be displeased with me for offering him the
use of a few pounds for laying in stock if he should
require them, or if necessary, to any small amount, the
use of my name. I am much mistaken if John be not
one of the class whom it is a privilege to be permitted
to favour. He thanked me very cordially, but said that
at present, at least, he stood in no need of assistance.
I have some thoughts of getting up a descriptive article
of my residence at Niddry, in which I might introduce
John, and contrast his blameless life with the dissipation
of the other workmen. It might excite interest, and
do him good in his present way of life.

'There is an interesting exhibition of ancient armour
in Edinburgh at present, which I have just been seeing.
Some of the suits of mail are very ancient and very
curious. One gigantic suit gives the idea of what sort
of a man the Bruce must have been. Its height does
not exceed six feet two, but the breadth of shoulder,
strength of limb, and depth of chest, are enormous.
The warrior who wore it, an old Teutonic Goth, must
have been a full match, if his courage was equal to his
strength, for at least four ordinary men.'

396 MAN OF SCIENCE.

William Thorn, the writer of the following letter,
was a man of fine and brilliant genius, his vein of
pathos as true as that of Burns. Born in Inverury, a
small town of Aberdeenshire, at the confluence of the
Ury and the Don, he earned a precarious livelihood by
hand-loom weaving, and found consolation in the pierc-
ing and tender melody of his songs. His Mitherless
Bairn, the subject of one of Faed's noblest pictures,
must live as long as the language. The following letter,
light as it is, has touches of an arch, brave, and piquant
humour, which bespeak the child of genius. He sank
mournfully, as the immense majority of his class have
done.

' Inverury, March 4tb, 1844.

' Accept my very sincere thanks for your lively
and kind notice of me and mine in your widely-spread
Journal. True enough, it is a significant way of re-
quiting such favours by dragging your care and kind-
ness into fresh work ; but, believing that you will as
well as word my prosperity, I take leave to hand my
Prospectus, in the hope that, should you meet a friendly
name, you will make my list all that the longer. My
book will be a little book, which is sometimes a great
mercy ; but however lowly its claims in other respects,
I assure you no page shall bear aught to disparage its
patrons or me. I would fain have waited yet a little,
and, in finishing what is pretty well en, have more
nearly come up to that expectation which a (perhaps too
partial) favouring press has taught to wait my appear-
ance. Here is the secret ; — customar weaving is down,
fairly sunk before its leviathan rival, the big manu-
factory ; cheapness, elegance, durability, all spring ahead
of the solitary weaver. My loom, once my ship — Hope
and Hardship, alternate steersmen — is now seen ducking.

COWPERS COUNTRY. 397

The former of these mates " cuts," the other lends a
hand to heave the lyre overboard, hen-coop ways, that
we may float ashore, never doubting of his company
even there. I think, if my project prosper, of a small
shop stuffed with second-hand books — " Bought or ex-
changed." Such my El Dorado ! The hope makes me
happy ; even that is something/

A few extracts may be taken from the letters sent
to Mrs Miller during the English tour, but as he made
large use of those letters in preparing the First Im-
pressions, we must glean, sparingly.

' Olney, 9th September, 1845.

' Here 1 am in a quiet old inn kept by a quiet old
man who remembers Squire Cowper and Mrs Unwin ;
and in the early part of the day I walked the walk
described by the Squire in the Task with an old woman
of 71 for my guide, for whose schooling Mrs Unwin had
paid. She knew the Lady Hesketh, too, and, when a
little thing, used to get coppers from her. A kindly
lady was the Lady Hesketh, — there are no such ladies
now-a-days, — that is, at Weston Underwood, I sup-
pose. She used to put coppers into her little silk bag
every time she went out, in order to make the children
whom she met happy. She and Mrs Unwin, too, were
remarkably good to the poor. I walked with the old
woman, much entertained with her gossip, through the
stately colonnade of limes whose " obsolete prolixity of
shade " the poet has celebrated, and which is in sober
truth a very notable thing, on to the " alcove," and
from thence to the " rustic bridge," and then on
through the field with the chasm in the centre of it, into
which the sheep of the fable proposed throwing them-
selves, to "Yardley Oak." Then returning by another

398 MAN OF SCIENCE.

road, I passed by the "peasant's nest," and after
making the old woman happy with half-a-crown, parted
from her and struck down to the Ouse, a sluggish,
sullen stream fringed with reeds and rushes, that winds
through flat dank meadows, on which a rich country
looks down on either side. I saw the broad leaves of
the water-lilies bobbing up and down in the current,
but the lilies themselves were gone. By the way, my
old guide knew not only the squire and the two ladies,
Mrs Unwin and the Lady Hesketh, but also the little
dog Beau, and a pretty little dog he was, with a good
deal of red about him.

' This part of the country lies on the Oolite, and we
find fragments of Oolitic fossils in almost every heap of
rubbish by the wayside. Directly opposite Cowper's
house in Weston Underwood I picked up a fossil pecten
and terebratula, and bethought me of his denunciations
of the geologists, — who, to be sure, in his days were a
sad infidel pack. His Olney house, a tall brick build-
ing not very perpendicular in the walls, is now an infant
school. I entered what had been his parlour, and was
almost stunned by the gabble of infant voices. There
have been alterations made in the interior of the building
to suit its altered circumstances, but the small port-hole
in the partition through which his tame hares used to
come bounding out to their evening play on the carpet
still exists in statu quo. I saw, too, in the garden an
apple-tree of his planting, — a Ribs tone pippin, if you
wish to be particular, — and the little lath and plaster
summer-house in which he wrote so many of his poems
and letters. The latter has been preserved with good
taste, which one would wish to see more general, in
exactly its original condition, — nothing has been changed
except that, like the book in the Revelations, it is now

SHAKSPEARE. 399

written within and without with several thousand
names. I saw among the others a name not particu-
larly classical, that of John Tawell the Quaker, who was
hung some time since for poisoning his mistress. The
characters are written in a firm bold hand, and immedi-
ately beside them there is a vignette evidently of after
production, — a gallows with an unfortunate wight
hanging on it, —

" With his last gasp his gab doth gape."

Immediately behind the garden is the snug parsonage-
house, — the home in succession of John Newton and
Thomas Scott, — and the parish church in which they
both preached, a fine solid structure with a tall hand-
some spire, closes the vista in this direction.

' So much for Olney ; — the greater part of yesterday
I spent in Stratford-on-Avon, where I saw both the birth-
place and grave of " William Shakspear, Gentleman,"-
have you ever heard of such a person ? The birth-place,
—a low-browed room, under the beams of which one can
barely walk with one's hat on, is not half a mile removed
from the burial-place. The humbly-born boy was a
purpose-like fellow, and returned to his native town a
gentleman, and to get himself a grave among its mag-
nates in the chancel of the church. By the way, in
utter defiance of fine taste and fine art, I pronounce the
humble stone bust, his monument, incomparably
superior to all the idealized likenesses of him, whether
done on canvas or on marble, that men of genius
have yet produced. The men of genius make him a
wonderfully pretty fellow, with poetry oozing out of
every feature, — but their Shakspear would never have
been " William Shakspear, Gentleman ; " neither, in the
times of Elizabeth and James, when money was of
such value, would he have returned to his native

400 MAN OF SCIENCE.

village a man of five hundred a year. The Shakspear
of the stone bust is the true Shakspear ; — the head, a
powerful mass of brain, would require all Chalmers's
hat, — the forehead is as broad, — more erect and of
much more general capacity ; and the whole counten-
ance is that of a shrewd sagacious man, who could, of
course, be poetical when he willed it, — rather more so
than anybody else, but who mingled wondrous little
poetry in his every-day business. The man whom the
stone bust represents could have been Chancellor of the
Exchequer, and in opening the budget his speech would
embody many of the figures of Cocker, judiciously
arranged, but not one poetical figure/

' Birmingham, Ravenhurst Street, Oct. 5th, 1845.

' There is still a good deal to interest me within
half a day's ride of Birmingham ; I must revisit at least
once more the ancient formation in the neighbourhood
of Dudley, and see, what are rather famous in this
quarter, the Clent-hills, a group of eminences from
which Thomson is said to have drawn some of the
noblest descriptions in the Seasons. It is, however, no
mere love of sight-seeing that detains me in England.
Have you ever noticed on the shore what fishermen
call " the turn of the tide " ? Often, for the greater part
of an hour, it is impossible to say whether the sea is
rising or falling along the beach. But then all at once
there comes a change ; if it be flood that has com-
menced, the little waves come running upwards, bearing
on their tops a slight crust of dried sand, and pebble
after pebble disappears ; if it be ebb, the waters are
drawn off as if by suction, and strip after strip of the
damp strand is laid bare. Now, for the last month I
have felt, with regard to my health, as if the " tide was

THE LEASOWES. 401

on the turn ; " I have been rallying slowly but not de-
cisively; and until I feel the flood-stream of health
setting fairly in, I hold it would scarce be justice to
you, myself, or the bairns, to return to Archibald Place,
and commence my labours with but the prospect of
sinking under them.

'I walked yesterday considerably more than ten
miles along very uneven ways, and some six or eight
miles to-day. It would have been interesting could we
have traced together in the Leasowes the marks which
still remain of the artistic skill of Shenstone. I never
yet saw any place in which a few steps so completely
alter a scene ; in the space of half a mile one might fill
a whole portfolio with sketches, all fine and all differing
from each other. There is not in all Shenstone's works
a finer poem than the Leasowes.

' It grieves me to hear that there is still something
radically wrong with your constitution. You must lose
no time in getting out to Gifford ; if you have this
bracing weather in Scotland, and if it continue for but
a fortnight, it may do you a world of good. Mrs
Eraser describes the country in her neighbourhood as
fine, the house as comfortable, and the society as good.
I suppose you will take Harriet with you ; — is she still
looking about her as when she first set out on her
travels, and exhausted her mamma's knowledge of the
plants and grasses ?

' My present mode of life is not very suggestive of
topics for discussing in the Witness, and I am afraid
my last two articles will betray the fact. My evenings
in London hung heavy on my hands ; I bought a cheap
two-shilling edition of Eugene Sue's last work, " The
Wandering Jew;' to while away the time in my lodg-
ings, and the perusal suggested an article on the State

VOL. ii. 26

402 MAN OF SCIENCE.

of Opinion on the Continent. It is no wonder that
Popery, in its contest with mere liberalism, should have
the better. Bad as it is, it is not so bad as the anta-
gonist system of morals which the writings of Eugene
Sue serve both to illustrate and to spread.

' You speak, dearest, of temperament, and the diffi-
culty of bearing up against it by any mere effort of the
will when it is adverse to small but not unimportant
everyday duties. I know somewhat of that difficulty from
experience in myself ; willing may do much, but it will
not change nature, or convert uphill work into downhill.
But I trust we shall both get on, bearing and forbearing,
with a solid stratum of affection at bottom. I have been
conscious since my late attack of an irritability of
temper, which is, I hope, not natural to me, and which,
when better health comes, will, I trust, disappear. I
keep it down so that it gives no external sign ; since I
entered England it has found no expression whatever ;
but I am very sensible of it, especially after passing a
rather sleepless night. To-day I am in a very genial
humour, the entire secret of which is in the excellence
of last night's rest, induced, I think, by the fatigue of
the previous day. I mention the thing merely in cor-
roboration of your remark ; — we cannot be independent
of the animal part of us. I am a good boy to-day
because I slept well last night, but I was not so good a
boy a week since, for my nerves were out of order, and
my sleep had been bad/

' Dudley, Oct. 16th, 1845.

'Fine weather at last, — clear, bracing, warm, but
not too warm, exactly the sort of weather for getting
well in ; and here I am, you see, enjoying it. Had
such weather come six weeks ago, I would have been
well, I think, for the last month. When nervousness

THE DUDLEY COAL-FIELD. 403

mingles with one's other complaints, one is exceedingly
dependent on what sort of a sky chances to be over-
head ; it is well to be out-of-doors getting strong and
all that, but when Nature's face is as gloomy as one's
own, as if she too had nerves, the mere sense of duty
lacks strength to drag one out. It cost me no effort,
however, to get out yesterday morning. I took coach
for the Leasowes, where I spent some hours in re-ex-
ploring, and then, passing through Hales Owen, walked
on to the Clent Hills, through a picturesque country,
rich in historic associations. Then descending on
Hagley, I walked on to Stourbridge, a considerable
town, and as the evening was darkening, took coach
for Dudley, a ride of a peculiar sort of interest. The
coal-field to which this part of the country owes its
prosperity, and which has made it the workshop of the
Empire in whatever is wrought in iron, is of no great-
extent, but of astgnishing richness. One of its seams,
known as the Ten-yard coal, is actually thirty feet in
thickness, thrice that of the next best seam in Britain,
and the tract of country over it is studded — as seen last
night, I should rather say, spangled — with furnaces. The
view on both sides, as seen from the coach-top, had, if I
may venture on such a combination, an infernal beauty ;
it seemed, at least, a bit of the scenery described by
Milton. The darkness was sprinkled thick with roar-
ing, flickering, comet-like fires, and the heavens above
glowed in the reflected light a blood red.

' To-day I have spent very agreeably in exploring the
caves and the ruins of the Castle Hill of Dudley, and in
geologizing at \heJVrens-nest, a very singular hill rich in
the Silurian fossils and honey-combed to a vast depth
by lime workings. I spent some time, too, in examining
the Dudley museum, — a well-arranged collection, con-

404 MAN OF SCIENCE.

siderably richer in the more ancient organisms than the
British one. I saw in it not a few of the originals figured
by Murchison, and found it of use to acquaint myself
with them in their actual forms. But I will be unable,
I find, to add materially to my collection here. It is
rare to find a well-preserved trilobite, — so rare that the
fossil dealers charge for them from 10s. to £5, and I can-
not afford to collect specimens at such a price. 1 had no
little pleasure, however, in hammering among the rocks,
though I found but little ; — I was in a region which I
had not hitherto explored, and all I did find in it was
new to me, — new, at least, as fossils, though Murchison
had brought me acquainted with their forms.

'Dudley Castle is a fine specimen of the very
ancient and very extensive English'castle, — consisting of
keep, chapel, dungeon, great hall, servants' hall, ladies'
rooms, &c., &c., with a vast court, in which I found a
company of soldiers on parade> and surrounded by a
deep moat. The keep, a picturesque pile of great
strength, bears marks of the iron hand of Cromwell.
It was garrisoned during the civil wars by the Royalists,
and held out until battered down on one of its sides
almost to the ground. Balls of thirty-two pound weight
have been found among the ruins, — some of the Lord
Protector's arguments, of whom it may be said as
Barbour said of the Bruce, that

" Where he strook wi' even straik
Nothing mocht against him stand."

The castle, though now thoroughly a ruin, was inhabited
so recently, that the grandmother of Mrs Sherwood (an
authoress of some celebrity) spent some time in it in the
capacity of lady's-maid ; and the grand-daughter gives
some amusing gossip in one of her works of her ancestor's
recollections of its splendour. The English have less of

THE CASTLE HILL, DUDLEY. 405

family pride in their composition than we. I question
whether a Scotch authoress would choose to introduce
her grandmother to the public as a waiting- maid, even
though her story should be a very good one.

' The caverns under the Castle Hill are very extra-
ordinary, and the work of excavation is still going on.
It is one of three hills of the Silurian system, — the
Wren's-nest is another, — that rise in the middle of the
coal-field, and the lime which they abundantly furnish
is in great use as a flux for fusing the dry ironstone,
besides for building and agricultural purposes. And so
they have been wrought to their very centres, and perfor-
ated by railways and canals. One of the caverns I visited
is a most extraordinary place, a full half-mile in length,
with a deep sluggish canal winding through it, and sup-
ported with vast columns of rock. Had it not been
excavated by human labour I would term it sublime, but
the idea that it was all picked out by barrowfuls militates
against its respectability. Dr Buckland, however, makes
it the subject of a really fine description, and lectured
on it to the members of the British Association in 1839.

' This is a letter somewhat like a bit of a guide-book ;
but you must bear with it. I am telling you of what I
have come to this part of the country to see, and have had
much pleasure in seeing. Though not yet very strong,
I have borne the fatigue of my yesterday and to-day's
explorations tolerably well, — greatly better than my
sight-seeing in London, but the clear sky and pure
bracing air have mightily assisted. I lodge here in a
Temperance Coffee House, kept by very quiet people,
and am on particularly good terms with their youngest
boy, a little fellow of eight years, who makes speeches at
Temperance meetings, and divides all society into Tee-
totallers and Drunkards. He is beside me at present

406 MAN OF SCIENCE.

writing a speech, which begins — •" Ladies and Gentle-
men, I don't mind saying a few words ; I have been a
teetotaller eight years." He is a clever big-headed
little fellow, but somewhat spoiled by the notice which
has been taken of him. The circumstance of one's self
having children wonderfully softens the heart towards
the children of others.

'There were some four or five points during my
journeyings of yesterday and to-day in which I wished
you were with me, — at the Leasowes, — at the Clent hills,
at Hagley, — on the coach-top as we drove through the
region of furnaces, — on the Dudley Castle Hill, — and in
the caverns of the Wren's -nest. But though not strong
myself, you are less strong still, and could not have borne
half the fatigue. By the way, if this reach you ere you
have left the north, I would suggest to you coming
south by the omnibus that plies from Fort William to
Loch Lomond, — passing through Glencoe and the Deer
Forest of Breadalbane. You would see by this means
some of the wildest scenery in the kingdom, — scenery
that ere the establishment of the present conveyance was
scarcely accessible to ladies at all, and to men only at a
considerable expense of money and exertion. It would
be well for you to secure an inside seat, with the stipula>
tion that you might if you liked ride outside. Glencoe
is often drenched by deluging rains, and if you took
merely an outside seat, — by far the most advantageous
for sight-seeing, — you might suffer as much as you did
in the storm of Loch Katrine. If you take this route
there are one or two things to which it might be well to
direct your attention. After leaving Fort William the
scenery for the first eight or ten miles is tame, but this
part of the ride would be passed over in the twilight
darkness of the morning. You would then get into a

[GLENCOE AND BREADALBANE. 407

very fine tract of mingled hill, island, and mountain,—
the formation here is the mica-schist, and the scene
finely represents its characteristic pictures queness. You
then enter Glencoe, a porphyritic region, and you at
once find the picturesque giving place to the sublime.
The forms of the hills are different, every summit is a
pyramidal peak, and the vast precipices are barred by
imperfectly -formed columns. At the top of the glen you
enter a granitic region; there are vast barren plains,
and the hills are rounded, not peaked.

' Where the porphyry ends and the granite begins
you see a hill of each, set up in close juxtaposition as if
for specimens. You then enter on a dreary gneiss
district ; the hills are vast, but truncated — mere lower
stories of hills ; the valleys, too, are on a large scale, but
not picturesque. You then a second time enter a mica-
schist district, and all is picturesqueness and beauty.
And then you arrive at Loch Lomond, and all is known
ground. I know not better illustrations anywhere of
the dependence of scenery on geologic formation than
are to be found in the line from Fort William to Dum-
barton, so interesting on many other accounts, and wish
you would take it.

' I have not yet said anything of London, and yet I
passed my week there — nearly a week, at least — most
agreeably. The greater part of two days I devoted to
the Museum, but I did not derive such advantage from
the study of its fossils as I had expected. They are
numerous, but in most cases the arrangement is not
good. I had some conversation on the subject with the
curator of this department, and found he had enough of
geology to discover that I, maugre my "leather clothes,"
had more. By the way, in the shelves devoted to fossil
fish I saw a very considerable number of specimens of

408 MAN OF SCIENCE.

my own gathering, many of them still bearing young
Andrew's handwriting. I think they must be those I
sent to a young Englishman, in exchange for fossils
of the English Oolite and Lias. I think I remem-
ber being hurried when I sent them, and getting An-
drew to name them for me. Over one of the speci-
mens, in a conspicuous corner, I saw printed large,
" Miller's Winged Fish." I may mention, but I am
afraid you will not care very much for the information,
that the large fragments of icthyolites found in Russia,
which, from the description of Murchison, I concluded
to be identical with those I have got from Thurso, are
altogether different from them ; so both my specimens
and the Russian ones are alike unique.

1 The time which I could not devote to the Museum,
— for it is open only on alternate days, — I spent in
general sight-seeing. I contrived to get to the Golden
Gallery of St Paul's, from which I saw London in the
form of a whole county covered with brick and smoke.
Its greatness, however, though it contains many fine
things, is merely the result of aggregation ; by adding
brick to brick and beam to beam London has been
made great. If we pit cities against each other, as the
English pit their boxers, weight for weight, Edinburgh,
for its weight and inches, is by much the greater city of
the two.

' By the way, you said nothing in your last of poor
Harriet. Tell her that I have put a kiss in the heart
of this round Q, which she must try to bring out
of it. This is a fine country for nuts, and I must get
some for her Halloween, brought to Archibald Place.
I did not get to the Liverpool Meeting. . . . From the
tone of the dissenting papers here regarding it, I have
lost all hope of its producing aught except bad speeches.

A SNOW STORM. 409

Voluntaryism has eaten the very pith out of Dissent ;
like a goodly tree eaten by white ants, it will yield to
the first shock of the tempest.'

The scene now changes again to the North of
Scotland.

' Cromarty, Dec. 15th, 1846.

' The snow in these northern regions lies very deep,
the mail-gig for the last three days has come in at
midnight, and at Inverness on Saturday last four-arid-
twenty hours passed during which no post, South or
North, entered the town. I had a short walk at noon
to-day with Mr Stewart ; we attempted going up as far
as Newton in the expectation of finding a beaten track
along what is usually so well frequented a road, but in
some places we found the snow-wreaths lying across
from side to side level with the fences, and so, after
some wading, were glad to turn back. Bill, like Yorick's
starling, "can't get out," but he requires to be well
watched, and, despite of his Granny's painful tending,
has already made several desperate bolts out into the
snow. His history since the storm came on has been
wholly barren of incident. He builds houses with
boards, and asks when there will be another Martinmas
market ? But he merely shares in the general stagna-
tion ; — the snow-blanket seems to deaden the very
surface of society here ; and so I cannot give you one
item of Cromarty news.

' In all likelihood I will pass both my Christmas
and New-Year here. My sleeping-closet is by no
means so cold and comfortless a place as you seem to
think it. The snow, by drifting against the window,
has caulked up the chinks, and I get quite snug every
night among the blankets. Would that our poor High-
landers at this dreary season of cold and starvation

410 MAN OF SCIENCE.

were but half as snug ! By the way, how comes it that
it is for the Irish the Edinburgh ladies are exerting
themselves ? The Irish are, to be sure, human creatures,
but they are human creatures of a considerably lower
order than the Scotch Highlanders, who are at least
suffering as much ; and they have surely not such a
claim on the Scotch. They will be better cared for,
too. They are buying guns, and will be by-and-by
shooting magistrates and clergymen by the score ; and
Parliament will in consequence do a great deal for
them. But the poor Highlanders will shoot no one, not
even a site-refusing laird or a brutal factor, and so they
will be left to perish unregarded in their hovels. I see
more and more every day of the philosophy of Cobbett's
advice to the chopsticks of Kent, " If you wish to have
your wrongs redressed, go out and burn ricks ; govern-
ment will yield nothing to justice, but a great deal to
fear ! "

< Thurso, 25th August, 1849.

' I have been greatly more fortunate in my voyage
than you were in yours. You, a good sailor, were sick ;
and I, a very bad one, had not a qualm. I see, how-
ever, that I am not the very worst of sailors. We had
several sea-sick ladies on board, and one or two sick
gentlemen, with a considerable batch of pale ones. We
were at the quay-head of Wick exactly twenty-four
hours after leaving that of Gran ton.

' Miss T — was regretting the absurdities of ,

which are, I see, very widely blown. Absurdity sticks to
some people by a kind of fate. I saw Dr McCrie imme-
diately before leaving Edinburgh ; he had just returned
from the South country and had brought with him an

exceedingly droll account of 's marriage. Tall

Mr - - dropped as if from the clouds upon the

MR W 'S MARRIAGE. 411

quiet of a Southland Free-Church Manse, accompanied
by a muffled lady — as broad as she was long, and con-
siderably advanced in life. To the broad lady Mr
- was, it would seem, to be married; and the
broad lady had a friend with her, — a grand person, —
captain, major, or colonel, with huge whiskers and an
air. The friend had never seen a Presbyterian marriage ;
and when the preliminary prayer was over he thought
all was done, and began to speak in a joking vein very
loud. " Marriage is honourable," said the minister, be-
ginning the proper business of the transaction. " Yes
it is, my boy," said the military man, clapping him on
the shoulder. The young people looked unutterable
things, and the minister was so much put out, that he
was in danger of sticking the whole concern.

' I found a sad accident which had just happened at
Wick the general subject of conversation on my arrival.
The Sheriff-substitute, a young Edinburgh gentleman,
has been drowned in boating on a long narrow lake, the
Loch of Watton, which skirts for three miles the Thurso
road. He was courting, it is said, a daughter of Sir
John Sinclair, and was sailing up the loch in a small
skiff to meet her, accompanied by a single boatman,
when a sudden squall caught the sail, and the skiff
first capsized and then went down, and boatman and
sheriff were both drowned. I saw men engaged as 1
passed the loch to-day in dragging for the body of the
boatman, — that of the sheriff was found the day
before. They perished in a quiet inland scene hardly
a gunshot distant from a grassy shore rising into green
fields/

Our two next letters, the first from Sir Roderick
Murchison, the second from Lord Ellesmere, referring,

412 MAN OF SCIENCE.

the one to the First Impressions, the other to the Foot-
prints of the Creator, require no introduction,

' Athenaeum Club, London, April 19th, 1847.

'Mr DEAR SIR,

'Many thanks for the acceptable present of
your First Impressions of England. I hope they may
not be the last, and that during your next visit you will
endeavour to find your Ross-shire contemporary, who is
located in Belgrave Square. Now, however, I am on
the wing for a year's Continental touring, and this time
it is the Mediterranean, Sicilian, and Spanish type
which allures me. I shall, however, be back for the
Oxford Meeting of the British Association, where I
shall give up the chair to my successor, and shall
doubtless have to undergo the annual persecution of the
able but bigoted Times.

( I feel deeply indebted to you, on public as well as
private grounds, for your vigorous defence of the noble
cause of science, and for the enlightened manner in
which you entwine it with Christianity. Such reason-
ing ought to put to shame the efforts of those who
would put down science as antagonistic to religion.

' I am also much flattered by your passing allu-
sions to my Silurian labours. On two points, however,
I have to offer critical remarks. The first of these is
purely personal, and may be considered as a little
symptom of Silurian (not Scotch) pride.

' In your excellent work you speak of Buckland
haranguing the philosophers of the British Association in
the Dudley Caves. Now, the fact is, that in virtue of
my labours on that ground, I was named generalissimo
of the expedition, and I executed my duties, I assure
you, like an autocrat. When all the barges, laden with

LETTER FROM SIR R. MURCHISON. 413

geologists, had entered the caverns, which were previously
filled with " Ladies and Gentlemen " of the neighbour-
hood, perched all around the lighted vaults, I com-
manded silence, and gave them a regular half-hour's
harangue on the structure of the Wren's-nest and the
surrounding tract. This address has been graphically
alluded to by Schonbein, the chemist (now so famous
for his gun-cotton), in a lively German work, descriptive
of his visit to England, and he specially adverts to my
military air and voice, the relics of the old peninsular
soldier. I have not the slightest jealousy towards my
dear and good friend Buckland, and if the den had
been tenanted by hyaenas I should have ceded my place
to him ; but being in the very heart of my Silurian, I
was necessarily the commandant. He, it is true, got
together some portion of the party, and after my
harangue he amused that detachment, whilst I led the
chief forces to the top of the Wren's-nest, and descanted
on the exterior face of the surrounding country. The
press got hold of his name, and forgot mine, so my
operations had no recording poet. I give you the hint
in case of a second edition, of which I doubt not.

' And now to a more material point. I am at this
moment very sensitive on everything Silurian, as my
old ally Sedgwick, after waiting 12 YEARS (i. e. since I
first proposed the Silurian classification), has made a
great onslaught on old Caractacus from the recesses of
Cambria. In other words, he now wishes to substitute
Cambrian for Lower Silurian. This is IMPOSSIBLE, and
no geologist will assent to it, for the plainest reason,—
that, as the fossils now known all over the world as
Lower Silurian are identical with those subsequently
found in Cambria, so all fairness and equity speak for
the conservation of the original name. I doubt not that

414 MAN OF SCIENCE.

you also will be of this opinion when you have thrown
your eye over my last publication in the May number
of the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. I
will send you a copy of this Memoir as well as of my last
words on Sweden, and also on the Silurian rocks in
Cornwall, if you will tell me to what London bookseller
I may address them ;* and I beg to call your special
attention to my conclusions on the paper on the Silurian
Rocks of Sweden. Pray read them first, and then my
reply to Sedgwick's new proposal. I have letters from
Russia, Scandinavia, Germany, France, and America,
all declaratory of firm adhesion to the Silurian faith.

' Alas ! for one of my generalizations founded on
negative evidence (of a very extensive kind, however) on
which you built. The Lower Silurian is no longer to
be viewed as an invertebrate period ; for the Onchus f
(species not yet decided) has been fixed in Llandeilo
Flags, and in the Lower Silurian Rocks of Bala. In one
respect I am comforted by the discovery, for the form is
so very like that of the Onchus Murchisoni of the
Ludlow Rocks, that it is clear the Silurian system is
one great Natural History series, as proved indeed by
all its other organic remains. Professor E. Forbes and
every palaeontologist is of this opinion, although the
system is divided into upper and lower groups. It
must be stated that ichthyolites are most rare, and very
peculiar in these protozoic rocks.

'P.S. I should like you to have seen the Cornish
ichthyolites, which are unlike anything known in the

* ' I will send them to your London publisher in Paternoster Row
whose name is on your title-page.'

f This so-called discovery misled both Sir Roderick and Hugh
Miller for the time. It led to the subsequent intention of cancelling
one of the chapters in ' Footprints of the Creator.'

LETTER FROM LORD ELLESMERE. 415

Devonian or Old Red, and which occupy a " quasi "
Upper Silurian place. (Fide my Memoii^,)

1 1 shall be in Bohemia all July clearing out a grand
Silurian Basin/

FROM LORD ELLESMERE.

' Worsley, Manchester, November 27th, 1849.

' I have on two grounds to apologize for the liberty
I take in addressing this letter to the author of
Footprints of the Creator. In the first place, I have
not the privilege of your acquaintance. In the second,
I am one of a numerous class of readers justly stigma-
tized as " dilettanti," who are reduced to take upon
trust statements of scientific facts, and whose opinion
upon questions of inference from such facts is of no
value or authority to others. I believe, however, I am
scarcely wrong in supposing that though your work is
addressed to readers of the highest class, its aim and
intention is not confined to such, and that a large
portion of it at least is intended for the use, instruction,
and protection of persons like myself. If so, in labour-
ing for the benefit of such persons to neutralize the
emanations of a poisonous book, you have, as seems to
me, done that which demands the gratitude of the
Christian world, and performed with signal felicity and
success the office of a sanitary commissioner of science.
I cannot speak of myself as one whom your work has
rescued from positive danger. I read the Vestiges with
disbelief and detestation, but it has been a deep satis-
faction to me to find such impressions justified and
buttressed by arguments which I could not supply, and
to feel assured that my own incredulity and aversion
are not based merely on my own ignorance and inca-

416 MAN OF SCIENCE.

pacity. The extensive diffusion of the work in question
forbids its being treated with silence and contempt, but
it is a positive and great misfortune, when the task of
answering such works is taken up by zealous but in-
competent men. This happened to a great extent in
the memorable instance of Gibbon's History, and he
gained an easy and pernicious victory over several
inferior scholars and feeble reasoners who hurried into
the fray. It is true, as you have remarked, that both
in England and Scotland the Church is adorned by men
competent to deal with the scientific questions at issue,
but he must be a bad churchman, whether in England
or Scotland, who is not thankful for the appearance in
the field of such a lay auxiliary as yourself. I have no
right further to occupy your time with my own ac-
knowledgments for pleasure and instruction received.

' P.S. A fortnight since, after finishing your volume,
I left it in the hands of an old and valued friend, who,
now in his 83rd year, at the close of a life of public
service and activity, is much addicted to such studies as
prepare him for another. He had read with pleasure a
well-meant but somewhat superficial work of Dr Wise-
man's, and I thought I was supplying him with some-
thing better. The following is an extract I have just
received from him : — " I wish I were knowing in geo-
logy, but unknowing as I am, it is not often I meet
with books so intensely interesting as I have found
Hugh Miller. It is a pleasure reading him, and scarcely
a less pleasure to think and reflect upon what he has
written. His work has caused me to reflect more than
almost any work I have ever read. It warms one's
heart to find such a true believer. It astonishes me
how a man of his antecedents can have taught himself

BIRTH OF HIS SON HUGH. 417

to write so beautifully, and to be so clear in all his ex-
pressions, and how he can have been so extensive a
reader. He amazes me throughout, and I am not sur-
prised that Murchison and Agassiz should esteem and
consider him so highly as they evidently do. I long to
fly off to the north to see and hear him talk, and if he
talks as well as he writes, what must be the charm of
living with him ! "

This note to his mother-in-law, on occasion of the
birth of his son Hugh, is worth printing on account of
the autobiographic touch respecting his own birth, and
the characteristically mournful reflection which follows.

»

c 2, Stuart Street, Edinburgh, 4 o'clock, Thursday afternoon.

' The doctor has just been with us, and he is well
pleased with the appearance of both mother and child.
Baby, in his introduction into the world, had a sore
struggle for life, and in pugilists' phrase, but with a
deeper meaning than theirs, was for about five minutes
" deaf to time." Accidents can scarce be hereditary ;
but my mother has told me that, when making my
dcibut, I refused to breathe for a still longer period.
Were all the future known to the little entrants such
refusals would, I dare say, be more common than they
are, and more doggedly persisted in.'

Miller was particularly gratified by the terms in
which the gift of the Footprints was acknowledged by
Professor Owen, and quotes, in the following letter to a
lady, the passage in which the work was mentioned by
that eminent philosopher.

' Unpopular as I supposed my little book was to
prove, the first thousand has gone off bravely, and I am
passing a second through the press. Some of the

voi . IT. 27

418 MAN OF SCIENCE.

letters regarding it are of a very gratifying character.
One, in especial, from the first comparative anatomist in
the world (Richard Owen) is singularly warm-hearted
and cheering ; and as you will not set it clown to the
score of vulgar vanity, I must just give you an extract,
partly in order to show you, as one of my pupils, that I
was not mistaken in supposing that the least popular
portions of my book would be exactly those to which a
certain class of students would attach most interest. " I
have just received and, setting all other things aside,
devoured your Asterolepis of Stromness ! I find it not
so hard and indigestible as it may prove to the Ves-
tigesians ! I have been instructed and delighted by it."
I have also derived a heartfelt encouragement from it.
It is almost the first contemporary work in which I have
found some favourite ideas of my own weighed out and
pronounced upon. This cheers one up after the de-
spondency that will, in spite of reason, creep over one
through the blank silence in which one's favourite works
are received by those in whose especial behoof they have
been cogitated and printed. I allude to the host of
estimable anatomists, anthropotomists, and zoologists
that we live and move amongst in our scientific coteries
of London." This, you will agree with me, is worth
whole volumes of ignorant criticism ; a newspaper re-
viewer, very favourable in the main, speaks of my
" rather tedious introduction ; " it was, however, not for
newspaper reviewers but for men such as Professor
Owen that that introduction was written ; and the Pro-
fessor, you see, does not deem it tedious.'

In the autumn of 1850 the annual meeting of the
British Association for the advancement of science was
held in Edinburgh. In the beginning of June the fol-
lowing note from Sir Roderick Murchison reached Miller.

SECRETARY TO THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 419

' 16, Belgrave Square, 31st May, 1850.

1 At a meeting of the Council of the British Associ-
ation held yesterday I was named President of section
C (or Geology and Geography), with jiourselfand James
Nicol as secretaries for our special science, and with A.
Keith Johnston for geography.

1 As I moved that you be placed in this office, and
as my motion passed unanimously (and indeed with ac-
clamation in a full meeting, Professor Kelland from
Edinburgh being present), I trust you will not allow
anything to prevent your accepting it. I honestly con-
fess that no honour could be more gratifying to me than
to occupy the geological chair in my native country, and
if I know that the author of the Old Red Sandstone will
be one of the secretaries, I shall be still more proud, for
I consider that we come from the same nook of land,
the Black Isle and Cromarty being inseparable/

He replied as follows :

'Accept my best thanks for the great and unex-
pected honour you have done me in proposing me as
one of the secretaries for the Geological Section of the
British Association at its coming meeting. I am afraid
my qualifications for the office are not of the highest
kind, my newspaper, too, will engage much of my time,
and my health for the last few years has not been very
strong ; but I feel that I could scarce decline the ap-
pointment without, at least, appearing to fail in respect
to the Council of the Association and in gratitude to
you. I shall, therefore, do my best to fulfil its duties,
trusting that the good nature of the Association may
excuse my shortcomings, and the activity and business
habits of my coadjutor, Professor Nicol, more than com-
pensate for them. I have, I think, some curious things
to set before the English geologists illustrative of the

420 MAN OF SCIENCE.

first ages of ganoidal existence, — fossils either without
duplicate, or in a better state of keeping than else-
where,— which may serve to show them that at least
one of the pagesf of the geological record (that which
you were the first to open) is more fully and clearly
written in the rocks of our native country than in per-
haps those of any other. My set of the remains of the
Asterolepis is, in particular, very curious and, I believe,
unique ; and though I do not know that I can say
much regarding them in addition to what I have
already said in my little work The Footprints, it may
be something to verify and illustrate by fossils so rare
and little known what in the work I had to illustrate
by but a set of greatly reduced woodcuts.

' I had the pleasure of hearing, a few days ago, from
Professor Agassiz. He is doing me the honour of
editing, at the request of a book publisher, an American
edition of my Footprints, and I am at present engaged
in making him a set of casts from some of my less
fragile specimens of Asterolepis, on which he may pos-
sibly found some of his notes. At least two of the
fossils, that of the interior and exterior surface of the
cranial buckler of this huge ganoid, come out with
beautiful effect in the plaster, and if I thought you
would attach any interest to them, I would have much
pleasure in sending you a pair. The interior surface,
when viewed in a slant light, is quite sculpturesque in
appearance. From a curious combination of plates, an
angel robed and winged seems to stand in the centre,
and the effect is at once singular, and, to at least the
geological eye, beautiful ; — so much so that I propose
getting a pair of them framed/

Hugh Miller was a tenderly affectionate parent, and
never, until the last year of his life, when the serenity

RHYME AND REASON. 421

of his temper was shaken by reiterated and agonizing
attacks of inflammation of the lungs, did he display the
least severity to any of his children. One or two speci-
mens may be given of the letters which, when absent
on his geological tours, he used to address to them.

TO HIS DAUGHTER HARRIET.

' Cromarty, 20th September, 1850.

4 You tell me you were " considering whether I
wrote anything in the Album at the John o' Groats'
Inn, and, if I did, what I wrote." Well, I did write in
it ; without adding my name, however ; and what I did
write was, though not poetry, a kind of verse. In one
respect, papa resembles a great many other grown-up
people ; he occasionally writes bad verses ; but then, un-
like many of the others, he knows the verses to be bad,
and does not make roundabout speeches in order to
create an opportunity of repeating them in company.
In all verse-writing a sort of marriage should take
place, — a marriage between the lady Rhyme and the
gentleman Reason ; but in many verses the parties do
not come together at all, and in many more the union is
far from being a happy one. It is only those Heaven-
made marriages that are happy, in which Genius enacts
the part of the priest. That in which I took a part in
the Inn at Huna was at best only a kind of humdrum
fisher-wedding ; — the bridegroom, though not quite a
fool, was decidedly commonplace, and the bride, if not
a fright, was at least plain.

" John o' Groats is a shapeless mound,

John o' Groat is dust ;
To shapeless mound and wormy ground,

Man, and man's dwelling, must ; —
Rottenness waits on the pomp of kings,

On the sword of the warrior canker and rust.

422 MAN OF SCIENCE.

" John o' Groat lives still,

Lives in another sphere ;
Evil his fare if his life was ill ;

Happy, if righteous his course when here.
Traveller, ponder on these things,
And depart in God's fear."

1 It is possible that the curious creature which Miss
Allardyce found in the salt-water pool may be the
Amphioxus or lancelet, — the lowest of all the fishes.
There is a figure of this creature in a book on Natural
History by Agassiz and Goold, which you will find, I
think, on one of the tables in my store-room. Like
many of our own species, but in a more literal sense, it
wants brains.

' When across the ferry two days ago, I explored
that sandy spit or point which runs into the sea, and is
known to the Cromarty fishers as " Majock's (i.e. Mar-
jorie's) Point." It seems to owe its formation to the
tides which run out and into the bay of Nigg, acted
upon by the high winds from the west, which are so
frequent in this part of the country ; and as it forms in
lagoons or salt-water lakes, it is a good place for mark-
ing how the vegetation of the land encroaches on that of
the sea, and for determining what the plants are that
bear to be covered by every tide. I found a salt-wort
to be the most abundant and the most encroaching, —
some of the plants were thriving outside the castings of
the sand worm.

' I have seen most of our friends here, and found
them, as usual, very kind; but I have fenced off all
the invitations I could, as I prefer my mother's potatoes
and fish, with full liberty to go about with my hammer
at all hours, to much better dinners, and the necessity
of being punctual to an hour, and then sitting up quite
proper in my chair for some four or five hours at a

ASSTNT. 423

time. I must apologize to you for this letter, which is
not at all so amusing as it might be ; but the day is
rainy and dull, and I am dull too.'

TO HIS SON WILLIAM.*

' Cromarty, August 24th, 1851.

' On the morning of Saturday I rose at five o'clock,
and set out on foot (from Assynt) on my way to the
Low Country, with the purpose of examining the marble
quarries of Ledbey ere the mail-gig, with which I was
to travel, should come up. The morning was lovely
beyond description. While all was in deep shade in
the valleys, the tops of the tall mountains gleamed like
fire to the rising sun ; and Loch Assynt, that seemed as
black and as polished as a jet brooch, had here and
there its patches of reflected flame. I passed one other
very pretty loch, not of great extent, but speckled with
green islands waving with birch and hazel, and abound-
ing in fish, that as I went by were dimpling it with a
thousand rings, and leaping for a few inches into the
air. I here met an English manufacturer in kilt and
hose, surrounded by half-a-dozen Highland gillies all
tightly breeched. I found the marble, white and grey,
rising amid the heath and long grass, like old snow on a
mountain-top in midsummer, and detached several speci-
mens. But I was fairly beaten off from examining the
deposit as thoroughly as I could have wished, by armies
of midges, that rose in clouds about my face every time
I bent down to strike a blow, and made it feel as if it
had been bathed in boiling water. There is perhaps no
place in the world in which these little creatures are
more troublesome than in the western parts of Suther-
land. I travelled on by the gig to Lairg, which I

* Now Lieutenant in the 37th Grenadiers in India.

424 MAN OF SCIENCE.

reached about two o'clock, and took in one meal break-
fast and dinner. When I was a boy a few years older
than you I used to spend some of my holidays in the
neighbourhood of this place ; and being desirous to
revisit the localities with which I was so well acquainted
of old, I determined on passing a day or two in the
Lairg Inn. But I was told by the landlord that his
house was quite full, and that he could not accommodate
me. " I have a plaid of my own ; could you not give
me the use of a sofa ? " I asked. The landlord looked
at me, and then beckoned me into a corner. " Mr M.,
you are a man of sense," he said. " All my bed-rooms
have been engaged for months by sporting gentlemen
from the South, and my public room is occupied chiefly
by their servants. The engaged rooms I cannot give
you ; and the servants are no company for you. Even
the very bed I can give you is in a double-bedded
room, occupied in part by Lord Grosvenor's valet. I
state to you the real case, while you are yet in time to
ride away by the mail to Golspie." I thanked the
landlord, who is really a very decent man, and deter-
mined that, as I have prosecuted my researches during
the last thirty years under great difficulties, the difficulty
of the servants in general, and of the valet in particular,
should not turn me back now. And so I took my
share of the double-bedded room. Papa thinks that his
status, such as it is, is that of the man of science, and
that it is so dependent on what he achieves for himself,
that it could not be improved by sleeping in the same
bed with a lord, nor yet depressed by going to bed in
the same room with a lord's valet. I had calculated on
attending church at Lairg ; — the Tree Church is only a
few hundred yards from the inn, and though a rapid
river lies between, the late Mrs Mackay of Rockfield

LETTERS TO HIS SON. 425

had given money to make a suspension-bridge over it,
just in order that the people on the Lairg side might
get easily to church. But on this Sabbath there was no
preaching, the minister being from home ; and though
the men of the district officiated, their addresses were
all in Gaelic. The father and grandfather of Mrs
Mackay's husband were, in succession, ministers in this
parish, and there is an interesting monument in the
churchyard to their memory, and to that of two of the
sons of the son, the one a captain in the army, who
" fell," says the epitaph, " in the moment of victory at
the muzzle of the enemies' cannon, at the memorable
battle of Assaye, fought between General Wellesley and
the Mahrattas ; " the other a commander in the navy,
of whom it is said that " his narratives of the shipwreck
of the Juno, and of his exertions in the Red Sea, where,
under God, he saved part of the 86th Regt., will com-
memorate his talents, fortitude, and humanity." Now,
regarding the narrative of the shipwreck of the Juno,
something curious can be told, in which you may take
an interest when you grow older. There is a very
famous description of a shipwreck in Byron's poems,
into which there are introduced many circumstances
new to poetry. And it was in this narrative that Byron
found almost all of them. Indeed, his description may
be in great part regarded as but a metrical rendering of
Commander Mackay's narrative.'

TO THE SAME.

' Assynt, August 20th, 1852.

' Harriet, you, and Bessie are the public for which I
write; while poor little Hugh, who is, I suspect, not
intelligent enough to feel any interest in papa's adven-
tures, must be regarded as that ignorant, but not un-

426 MAN OF SCIENCE.

cared-for portion of the community which education has
not yet reached. I broke off late on Saturday night in
the little inn of Huna ; — the Sabbath morning rose clear
and beautiful ; — I never saw the Orkney Islands look so
near from the main land; their little fields, at the
distance of many miles, gleamed yellow in the sun ; and
the tall Old Red Sandstone cliffs of Hoy, cliffs nearly a
thousand feet in height, were sharply relieved against the
sky, and bore a blood-hued flush of deep red ; while the
Pentland Frith, roughened by a light breeze, was in-
tensely blue. I walked on after breakfast to the Free
Church, and heard from Mr Macgregor two solid, doc-
trinal discourses. The congregation, however, was very
thin ; but I ought not to judge of it, I am told, by
present appearances, as many of the men connected
with it are at the herring-fishery. Still, however, it is
only half a congregation at best, the other half congre-
gation of the parish being in the Established Church.
Papa and his friends could not help being Free Church-
men, as you will learn when you get older ; we could
not avoid the Disruption ; but papa does sometimes
regret that the Disruption should in so many parishes
have, as it were, made two bites of a cherry ; that is,
broken up into two congregations a moiety of people
that would have made one good one, but no more.
After sermon, and after dinner, I walked on in the cool
of the evening towards Wick, which I reached about
nine o'clock. The little inn at Huna is far, far from
any butcher's shop ; and so a poor hen had to die every
day papa was there, in order that papa should dine.
There is an album kept at it, as I told Harriet two
years ago, in which all visitors write their names, and
whatever else may come into their heads ; and so it
contains, as you may think, a great deal of nonsense ;

' PAPA'S RHYMES.' 427

with here and there a witty thought, and here and there
a just sentiment. Papa wrote some not very good
rhymes in it about two years ago, and some not very
good rhymes on the present occasion ; though in the
space between the two visits he wrote only solid prose.
But those who pass evenings in the inn at Huna have
usually not much to do; and so many of them, in
imitation of those who have rhymed in the album
before them, set themselves to break the Queen's Eng-
lish into very clumsy lines, with not much sense in
them, that chime at their terminations. The following
formed papa's last effort.

" Right curious volume ! two long years have pass'd
Since I glanced o'er thy chequer' d pages last ;
And leaves then blank in thee are fill'd, rare book,
E'en in a way on which 'tis sad to look ;
So scant the wit, the wisdom seldom seen,
While dreary wastes of folly spread between.
Yes, sad, full sad, for, curious book, I see
Too true a picture of my life in thee ;
Folly in both prevails, in both how few
The points t' instruct the heart, or glad the view ;
In both the past admits of no recall,
E'en as the thing was done we stand or fall ;
The ill express'd we cannot well suppress,
Nor can we make the by-past nonsense less.
Yet must I hold, poor curious book ! that thine
Is e'en by much a harder fate than mine ;
For thee no new editions wait, — no Mind
Shall add the wisdom that it does not find ;
Raise into worth the grovelling and the low,
And mental force and moral weight bestow.
E'en faulty as thou art, thou still must be : —
A nobler dest'ny waits, I trust, on me ;
The Great Corrector shall revise my past,
And in a fairer mould its lines re-cast ;
For folly, wisdom ; strength for weakness lend,
And all my blots erase, and all my faults amend."

' So much for papa's rhymes. There are some
people who rhyme not much better than papa who
believe themselves to be poets ; but that is a mistake,

428 MAN OF SCIENCE.

and it usually does those who entertain it some harm.
They rhyme, and rhyme, and rhyme, and deem them-
selves neglected because the world does not buy and
praise their rhymes. But for rhymes such as theirs and
papa's the world has no use whatever ; the article bears
no money value in the market ; though to devote twenty
minutes or so, in two years, to the manufacture of it,
as papa does, is productive of no manner of harm.

' But I must pursue my narrative. I took the mail-
coach from Wick very early on Monday morning, and
travelled on, for the greater part of the way, under the
cloud of night to Helmsdale, where I passed a day.
On the morning of Wednesday I walked on along the
shore from Brora to Golspie, and saw at a place called
Strathstever a cave high up in a sandstone rock, to
which there ascended a flight of steps. A high wall
fenced round the bottom of the steps, but I contrived
to climb over it; and, ascending to the cave, found it
to be in part the work of nature, but also indebted to
art. The space within was about the size of a rather
large room, and there was a range of seats cut in the
live rock that ran all around it. I was told that in the
days of the late Duchess it used to be the scene of
many good pic-nics / and as it occurs in a sequestered
corner of the old coast line, with wild shrubs hanging
from the rocks all around, and with a green level
strip of land and the wide sea in front, one could, I
dare say, take one's dinner in it very sentimentally. I
passed Dunrobin Castle on my way ; — it is an immense
pile, on which there has been expended money enough
to purchase a large estate. But though a part of it,—
the part papa remembered of old, — be very ancient, and
though the additions be in the newest style, the general
effect is that of a very large fine upstart modern build-

A8STNT. 429

ing. The new has swallowed up and overborne the
old. I had to rise at a little after four o'clock next
morning, to take the mail-gig from Lairg to Assynt,
and reached the former place at breakfast-time, passing
through a fine valley, that which opens into the sea, at
the Little Ferry, for about sixteen or eighteen miles.
Along the flat bottom of this valley the sea must once
have flowed, and the precipices along its sides are very
steep and abrupt, as if they still retained the forms
given them by the waves ; but the bottom is occupied
by rich corn-fields ; and cottages and trees appear where
once canoes may have been.

' At Lairg I used to be well-acquainted, but it was
long, long ago ; and the people whom I knew were all away
or dead. On my way to Assynt I saw a gentleman in a
kilt, and, before the gig came up to him, set him down
from his dress as an Englishman. And an Englishman
he was, who had come out to the road to get his letters.
As a general rule Scotchmen — save pipers, who are paid
for it, and soldiers, who can't help it — don't wear the kilt.
Assynt is a great marble district, and it was to examine
the marble deposits with the rocks that lie over and
under them that papa has paid it the present visit. He
thinks he will be able to render it probable that the
thick, stratified beds (to which the marbles belong
represent those flagstones of Caithness which abound in
fossil fishes, and that the quartz-rock above and red
sandstone below were once the Old Red Sandstone of
the great conglomerate, and the deposits that overlie the
fish-beds. But you will be able to understand all
this a few years hence, should you live and attend to
your lessons. Assynt is remarkable for its fine springs.
They burst out of the limestone beds in volume enough,
some of them, to turn a mill. Their water, too, from its

430 . MAN OF SCIENCE.

great purity and clearness, forms a contrast to that of
the Highlands generally, Avhich is usually tinged with
peat. One of those (the largest spring papa ever saw)
is really a fine object. It comes bursting up out of the
earth, — a little river, very clear, and in summer very
cool, — though in winter it feels warm, and during hard
frosts smokes as if it had been heated over a fire ;
and rank grass and rushes spring up along its edges.
In the neighbourhood of Edinburgh it would be of
great value, and would more than supply all the city.
The day on which I date my letter (Friday, the 20th) I
have spent very agreeably in tracing out the relations of
the rocks here to each other ; and I now think I under-
stand the structure of Assynt, and have succeeded in
reading appearances which some of the elder geologists
misunderstand. But you would not much care to hear
about these. There is not an inhabited dwelling-house
in sight ; and the two shattered houses, and the wasted
brown hills, and the solitary country, where for hours
together not a human being may be seen, gives one the
idea of a world whose inhabitants have become extinct.
The old castle was the stronghold of the McLeods of
Assynt, and is famous as the place in which Montrose
was confined previous to his being sent off to Edinburgh
to be hanged. He was apprehended and delivered up
by one of the McLeods, — a transaction base in itself,
and which must have done the family no good when the
Restoration came on, for the lands of Assynt then
passed into another family, named Mackenzie. It was
the Mackenzies who built the comparatively modern
house ; but, selling the property to the old Earls of
Sutherland, the Mackenzies of Ross-shire were so angry
at them, that they came and burnt their house, and
houghed all their cattle. Those old times must have

LETTER FROM DUKE OF ARGYLL. 431

been very rough and uncomfortable ; and, I dare say, it
is better to be living now/

FROM THE DUKE OF ARGYLL.

' Inverary, October 16th, 1852.

' May I ask you whether you have examined in
detail the brecciated strata on the shore near Helmsdale
—on both sides ; and if so, whether you have formed
any opinion as to the position they occupy relatively to
the Brora Oolites, and the more Liassic-looking strata
along the shore-line from Dunrobin upwards ?

c That breccia appears to me to include no fragments
which are clearly referable to the Brora strata, although
it contains many which belong to the beds immediately
behind and below — on the line towards Dunrobin. Very
many, also, belong to the Caithness Flagstones — a por-
tion of the Old Red of which, I think, there is no vestige
remaining in situ now in Sutherland. I found in the
breccia a fragment containing a ganoid scale, apparently
that of the Dipterus like those at Banniskirk.

' The paste which cements this breccia seems to be
a calcareous mass of pounded shells, belemnites, &c. :
and this part of the breccia seems to me more referable
to a break-up of the Brora strata than any of the in-
cluded fragments.

' The remarkable continuity and uniformity of dip
in the shore strata from Dunrobin to the Ord, and their
total unconformability with the Brora beds, which
generally terminate in the cliffy banks of the old sea
beach — some distance from the present one — and are
much more horizontal, suggested to me that the latter is
a subsequent and superior formation, and that the
Helmsdale breccia represents the close of a period
embracing the Lias and some of the lower Oolites.

432 MAN OF SCIENCE.

' I did not observe any of the lignites and fossil
woods in situ in the breccia; but as all the other
pebbles of the beach seem to be derived from that
breccia, I conclude that they also do. But it strikes me
that both the woods and the corals must have been
already fossilized when they were pasted up in the
breccia. One or two specimens of the latter I found
firmly embedded amongst the other fragments.'

HUGH MILLER'S KEPLY.

' I regret that I had not the good fortune of meeting
your Grace this autumn at Helmsdale, as for the last
eight or ten years I have been in the habit of spending a
day in that neighbourhood every season, and could wish
to have some of my findings regarding the rocks which
form its framework tested by an eye so discerning as
that of your Grace. The locality, though of much geo-
logical interest, is one that opens its stores but slowly.
I visited it several seasons in succession ere I felt satisfied
that I really understood it ; and I still feel a desire to
go back upon my conclusions respecting it, and have
them put to the question.

' The conglomerate which at first sight seems so
puzzling, consists of numerous beds which decidedly
alternate with beds of argillaceous * strata, Liassic in their
character, but unequivocally, as your Grace suggests, of
the age of the Lower Oolite. The shale finely and
regularly laminated, and blackened by carboniferous
matter and abounding in fossils, must have been slowly
deposited on an undisturbed sea bottom, — whereas the
alternating beds of conglomerate, composed almost

* The word in Miller's manuscript is ' arenaceous,' but, on the
suggestion of Mr Carruthers of the British Museum, who has kindly
looked over the scientific chapters, I substitute ' argillaceous' as alone
compatible with the argument.

THE HELM SD ALE STRATA. 433

exclusively of Old Red Sandstone materials bound to-
gether by an Oolite cement, seem to represent periods
of great disturbance, during which the broken ruins of
some neighbouring coast composed mainly of the Caith-
ness Flagstones were spread to the depth of several feet,
and for great distances, over the previously quiet bottom.
And then another period of tranquillity took place, and
finely laminated shales were deposited over the rough
breccia until another paroxysm of violence overspread
them also with a breccia as rough as the underlying
one. And thus during a very protracted period the
process of alternate formations — quiet and disturbed
by turns — went on in what is now the Helmsdale Oolitic
basin; the entire basin from Port Gower to the Ord
consisting of successive beds of conglomerate and shale.
Should your Grace revisit the locality, it might be well
to walk out along the shore to the north-east of Helms-
dale for about three quarters of a mile, till you reach a
little cottage standing on a point. The shore below
consists of a very rough conglomerate bed — the upper-
most in the basin, — and you will have no difficulty in
convincing yourself, as you retrace the way backwards
through the space laid bare by the ebb, that that bed
overlies a bed of shale rich in characteristic fossils of
the deposit — such as Terebratula, Avicula, Serpula,
Belemnites, &c., and which overlies in turn another con-
glomerate bed, that overlies yet another shale bed.
And thus in regular succession till you reach the river
will you find bed succeeding bed — the remains and
evidence of many periods of tranquillity and of many
alternating paroxysms of violence ; and that some of
the paroxysms must have been strangely violent indeed,
you will find proof in the great size of some of the blocks
which the conglomerate contains. Within five minutes'

VOL. IT. 28

434 MAN OF SCIENCE.

walk from Helmsdale, immediately below a bulwark that
protects the road, there is a block of pale grey Old Red
Flagstone enclosed in the shelly paste whose upper
surface measures twenty-seven feet in length by twenty
in breadth. The same alternations of shale and con-
glomerate may be seen in passing eastwards from the
little cottage towards Navidale, where a few of the same
beds are laid bare in the descending order as are un-
covered in the Helmsdale direction, but the shore here
is much roughened by detached blocks, and the section
not so good. They may be seen, also, in the face of that
portion of the old coast-line under which the road runs
for rather more than a mile between Helmsdale and
Port Gower — the shale beds usually presenting a hol-
lowed and weakened appearance, while the conglomerate
stands out in bold and very rough cliffs, in some places
overlying, in others underlying, the shale beds.

* I am rather inclined to hold that the fragments in
the Helmsdale breccia, which your Grace regards as
Oolitic and of a quality similar to that of the Oolite
strata near Dunrobin, must be in reality Old Red, as I
have found in many of the exposed masses fossils — such
as Fucoids, jaws of Diplopterus, scales of Asterolepis,
&c., but never a single Oolitic organism, the Oolitic
organisms being restricted to the shelly paste which
connects them together. I am further of opinion that
the conglomerate does not represent one great break-up
of the system after its formation, but, as I have already
intimated, as many paroxysms of violence during the
deposition as it consists of alternating beds.

' On passing towards the south-west after quitting
Port Gower we again come upon the same beds of shale
and conglomerate as appear at the little cottage to the
east, and then, rising in the scale towards the middle of

THE HELMSDALE STRATA. 435

the south basin, we find beds of a later age than any of
those in the Helmsdale one. I have been unable to trace
them continuously, as the shore is much covered towards
the centre and south-western side of this passage by
sand and shale. The north-eastern side of the Brora
basin is equally obscured, and so I cannot regard myself
as acquainted with the deposits in succession from
Helmsdale to Brora. I think, however, there is evidence
that in the Helmsdale basin we have the base of the
system, — that there is evidence that, in the south
basin we have the same base overlaid to a considerable
thickness by higher and newer deposits, overlaid by
deposits still higher and newer till we ultimately reach,
in the bed of white stone of which the additions to
Dunrobin Castle have been built, the uppermost deposit
of the Oolite on the east coast of Scotland. But though
the upper bed occupies a curiously insulated position,—
the effect apparently of extensive denudation, — it lies, so
far as I can judge, conformably to the other rocks of the
basin. Sir Roderick Murchison, with whose elaborate
and valuable paper on the Sutherland Oolite your Grace
must be familiar, holds that some of the Navidale
conglomerates were formed by the upheaval of the
granite of the Ord in a period posterior to the formation
of all the Oolites, but it must be a very local conglom-
erate that has been so formed, — and not the conglom-
erate of Old Red Sandstone materials that alternates
with the shale beds.

'I have detected fossil wood in the conglomerate,
though not so frequently as coral. Three years ago I
saw a piece of wood projecting from a conglomerate
cliff immediately above the harbour at Navidale, and it
may be there still. Fossil trees were at one time very
abundant in the shale beds on both sides of the little

436 MAX OF SCIENCE.

cottage, but almost all the exposed ones were dug out
about ten or twelve years ago, and burned into lime.
I saw, however, this season, the stump of a very large
tree projecting from the wasted surface of a shale bed
that, in the year 1842, had of itself furnished a whole
kiln-full. As to the question of the period of the petri-
faction of these woods, it must, I fear, be deemed a hard
one. They were, however, evidently petrified in the
tranquilly deposited shale ; and if so, why not in both the
underlying and overlying conglomerates, whose cement-
ing paste is so much more calcareous ? But this
special question, like not a few of the others raised, will
be found to hinge on the pressing one, Do the con-
glomerates in reality alternate with the tranquilly de-
posited, fossil-bearing shales ? I trust that, should
your Grace revisit Helmsdale, you will find materials
for its solution in the section exposed between that
place and the little cottage/

During the year 1853 a large proportion of the
chapters of Hugh Miller's autobiographical work appeared
in the Witness. In the beginning of 1854 the book
was published under the now well-known title, My
Schools and Schoolmasters. Its success was immediate
and decisive. Literary men were glad to meet Miller in
a field from which controversy of every kind was ex-
cluded, and to mark the skill with which he wielded the
instruments of pure literary art. Their disposition was
to pronounce it his most valuable work. Readers will
with interest peruse the two following letters on the
subject.

FROM MR ROBERT CHAMBERS.

' 1, Doune Terrace, March 1, 1854.

* I cannot think of confining my thanks for your

LETTER FROM MR R. CHAMBERS. 437

volume to the few hurried words I had an opportunity
of saying last week. Not that I am excitedly grateful
for the kind reference you have made to myself, but
because I have read your first 350 pages with a heart
full of sympathy for your early hardships and efforts,
and an intense admiration of the observant and intelli-
gent mind which I see working in that village boy on
the shore of the Cromarty Frith. I cannot refrain from
congratulating you on the publication of this book,
which I consider as yet your best, and the one that will
prove most enduringly useful, interesting, and popular—
simply because yourself have been the best phenomenon
you have ever had to describe. I cannot refrain from
congratulating you on the triumphs you have achieved
over the great difficulties of your early position, which
now appear to me far beyond anything I had previously
imagined. And believe me, I am most cordially sin-
cere when I offer you my best wishes for the remainder
of a career, the early part of which has been so credit-
able to you. Be assured that Scotland has few dearer
living names at present than Hugh Miller, and must
henceforth feel the deepest interest and concern in
everything you do.

1 Your autobiography has set me a thinking of my
own youthful days, which were like yours in point of
hardship and humiliation, though different in many im-
portant circumstances. My being of the same age with
you, to exactly a quarter of a year, brings the idea of a
certain parity more forcibly upon me. The differences
are as curious to me as the resemblances. Notwith-
standing your wonderful success as a writer, I think
my literary tendency must have been a deeper and
more absorbing peculiarity than yours, seeing that I
took to Latin and to books both keenly and exclusively,

438 MAN OF SCIENCE.

while you broke down in your classical course, and had
fully as great a passion for rough sport and enterprise
as for reading — that being, again, a passion of which I
never had one particle. This has, however, resulted in
making you, what I never was inclined to be, a close
observer of external nature — an immense advantage in
your case. Still I think I could present against your
hardy field observations by frith and fell, and cave and
cliff, some striking analogies in the finding out and
devouring of books, making my way, for instance, through
a whole chestful of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which
I found in a lumber garret ! I must also say, that an
unfortunate tenderness of feet, scarcely yet got over,
had much to do in making me mainly a fireside student.
As to domestic connections and conditions, mine being
of the middle classes were superior to yours for the
first twelve years. After that, my father being unfortun-
ate in business, we were reduced to poverty, and came
down to even humbler things than you experienced. I
passed through some years of the direst hardship, not
the least evil being a state of feeling quite unnatural in
youth, a stern and burning defiance of a social world in
which we were harshly and coldly treated by former
friends, differing only in external respects from our-
selves. In your life there is one crisis where I think
your experiences must have been somewhat like mine ;
it is the brief period at Inverness. Some of your ex-
pressions there bring all my own early feelings again to
life. A disparity between the internal consciousness of
powers and accomplishments and the external ostens-
ible aspect led in me to the very same wrong methods
of setting myself forward as in you. There, of course,
I meet you in warm sympathy. I have sometimes
thought of describing my bitter, painful youth to the

LETTER FROM MR CARLYLE. 439

world, as something in which it might read a lesson ;
but the retrospect is still too distressing. I screen it
from the mental eye. The one grand fact it has im-
pressed is the very small amount of brotherly assist-
ance there is for the unfortunate in this world. I

remember hearing the widow of Mr tell how

she had never been asked by any relation of either
herself or her husband to accept of a five-pound
note, though many of them were very well off. The
rule is to leave these stricken deer to weep them-
selves away unsuccoured. I have the same experience
to relate. Till I proved that I could help myself no
friend came to me. Uncles, cousins, &c., in good
positions in life — some of them stoops of kirks, by-the-
by — not one offered, or seemed inclined to give, the
smallest assistance. The consequent defying, self-rely-
ing spirit in which, at sixteen, I set out as a bookseller
with only my own small collection of books as a stock-
not worth more than two pounds, I believe — led to my
being quickly independent of all aid ; but it has not
been all a gain, for I am now sensible that my spirit of
self-reliance too often manifested itself in an unsocial, un-
amiable light, while my recollections of "honest poverty"
may have made me too eager to attain and secure
worldly prosperity. Had I possessed uncles such as yours
I might have been much the better of it through life.

' Pray accept with lenity these hurried and imper-
fect remarks, into which I have been led by a sort of
sympathetic spirit, almost against my own sense of
propriety/

FROM Mil CARLYLE.

' 5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, 9th March, 1854.

' I am surely much your debtor for that fine Book

440 MAN OF SCIENCE.

you sent me last week, which was welcome in two
ways, the extrinsic first, and now the intrinsic ; for I
have now read it to the end (not a common thing at all
in such cases), and found it right pleasant company for
the evenings I stole in behalf of it ! Truly I am very
glad to condense the bright but indistinct rumour label-
led to me by your Name, for years past, into the ruddy-
visaged, strong-boned, glowing Figure of a Man which
I have got, — and bid good speed to, with all my heart !
' You have, as you undertook to do, painted many
things to us ; scenes of life, scenes of Nature, which
rarely come upon the canvas ; — and I will add, such
Draughtsmen, too, are extremely uncommon, in that and
in other walks of painting. There is a right genial fire
in the Book, everywhere nobly tempered down into
peaceful radical heat, which is very beautiful to see.
Luminous, memorable ; all wholesome, strong, fresh and
breezy, like the " Old Red Sandstone Mountains " in a
sunny summer day : — it is really a long while since I
have read a Book worthy of so much recognition from
me, or likely to be so interesting to sound-hearted men
of every degree. I might have my objections and ex-
ceptions here and there (not to the matter, I think, how-
ever, if sometimes to the form) ; but this is really the
summary of my judgment on the business. And so,
once more, I return you many thanks, as for a Gift that
was very kind, and has been very pleasant to me/

In the spring of 1854 Miller lectured in Exeter Hall,
London, to the Young Men's Christian Association.
The following notes of his visit to the metropolis occur
in a letter to Mrs Miller of February 9th :—

c I was safely delivered of my Address between the
hours of eight and ten on Tuesday evening (skilfully

HIS LONDON LECTURE. 441

assisted by Mr Allon), and am now as well as could be
expected. Mr Allon is a clergyman, but an Independ-
ent one.

' I had a noble audience of, as the Morning Adver-
tiser says, five thousand persons, and I carried them
with me throughout. During the earlier stages of the
Address they were attentive, which I hardly expected,
as my preliminary matter was somewhat scientific and
dry, and throughout the concluding part rapturous in
their applause. On the whole, a more successful address
was never delivered in the great Hall. Allon' s pronunci-
ation was beautiful, and showed me better than a
hundred lessons the faults of my own. He read, too,
with great vigour, and gave to my style the proper
classical effect.

' I dined on the Tuesday at Dr James Hamilton's,
and met several members of his Session, — among the rest
our old friend, James Robertson, who was making kind
inquiries after you. I began to-day with a wild-goose
chase after Mr Searles Wood, the geological concholo-
gist ; but, after driving to Kentish Town, found only a
vacant house, and that he had removed to Egham. I
have, however, had my shells determined for me by a
still higher authority, whom I fortunately encountered at
the British Museum, — Deshayes, the greatest concholo-
gist in the world. I find I would soon get very tired of
London.'

In June of the same year he was again in Cromarty,
and we may glean a jotting or two from his letters.
The town was now sinking into decay, and the light of
the past touched the prospect for his eye with melan-
choly hues.

« Cromarty, 18th June, 1854.

' Cromarty is fast becoming a second " Deserted

442 MAN OF SCIENCE.

Village/' and seems chiefly remarkable, at present, for its
fallen houses and its vacant streets. The laird was call-
ing upon me, and we had a long conversation together.
He purposes having some memorial over his mother's
grave in the old chapel, and I gave him a rude sketch of
the remains of the old Gothic inclosure around the spot,
as this existed thirty years ago. Two buttresses oc-
cupied each corner of a rectangular erection which stood
on a broad sloping base, and showed, a little higher
up, a portion of a massive moulding. He kindly invited
me to dine at Cromarty House, but the invitation I of
course declined. Till I get stronger I must take care
and avoid dinners, save very quiet ones with my mother.

1 Among the other things changed for the worse in

Cromarty is the old captain's house. seems to

have dealt by it as he usually does by other good texts.
The shrubs and trees on the green in front are all cut
down, the hillock in the centre levelled, and a stiff, bare
stone wall built in front. The place, in short, just looks
the thing which it has become, — a commonplace
Moderate manse. But the change is merely repre-
sentative of what is taking place, under the name of im-
provement, in the district generally. The line old
woods and picturesque hedges are away, and bare corn-
land with raw dry-stone fences occupy their place.

£ The bairns will, I trust, have good collections of
Portobello shells ere my return, and will be able to stand
an examination on their names. I had a brief walk two
days ago along the shore, to the west of the factory, and
found the group of shells strewed along the beach
essentially different from the Frith of Forth one.
Astarte sulcata was the prevailing shell, Lucina borealis
was also very common, and I found in tolerable abund-
ance Nuclea nucleus and some specimens of Saxicava

REMINISCENCES. 443

borealis. I must remember to bring to the chiidren a
few shells which, though common here, are rare at
Portobello.

' I have just returned from a walk along the hill-
side. I have been in the old chapel and seen poor
Eliza's little tomb-stone, half buried in long grass ; I
have looked out on the sea from the " Broad Bank/' and
down upon the Dripping Cave and the Lover's Leap ;
and in looking back on more than twenty years when we
used to meet, evening after evening, among the trees,
I felt how surely life is passing. It is now more
than fifteen years since we buried Eliza. The hill is
changed, like all else about Cromarty, and our haunt,
right over the Doocot Cave, with its scattered beech-trees
and its thick screen of tall firs, is now a bare, heathy
slope, without shrub or tree. The view, however, from
the corner part of the hill down upon the town and bay
is still fine as ever, — the forest trees, which are still
spared, are in fresh leaf, though Ben Wyvis continues
to retain his patches of snow, and the winding outline of
the Frith is so much beyond the reach of improvement
that it cannot be spoiled.'

It probably tended to deepen the pensiveness of his
mood at this time that he found one of his dearest and
oldest friends battling stiffly with the res angusta domi.
How, thought Miller, can I contrive to assist him ? He
well knew that a friendship of forty years did not give
him, in dealing with a proud spirit, the right to offer a
pecuniary gift. He would try, he wrote Mrs Miller,
whether a loan might not be accepted. Mrs Miller,
hastily reading his letter, mistook his meaning, and
thought, while cordially sympathizing, that the loan had
been applied for. He wrote as follows in reply.

444 MAN OF SCIENCE.

1 Cromarty, 15th July, St Swithin's day (mingled sunshine
and shadow, with showers in the distance), 1854.

' I fear I must have sadly misled you by what I

said regarding " trying to lend a score of pounds or

so." From your remark I infer that you think that he
wished to borrow. No such thing. I have, since I wrote
you, offered him the use of the sum proposed, and he
has point-blank refused receiving it. Trusting to be
able to work himself out of his present difficulties, he
believes that the spur of necessity might come to be
very considerably blunted were I his creditor, and so he
chooses rather for the present to be indebted to others.
We must riot give things wrong names. There is not
only honesty but high honour in such a determination ;

—nay, Christian principle of a considerably more genuine
kind than that which leads so many vain Christians of
the common type to come under unnecessary obligation
to their neighbours. Possessed of the necessaries of
life, they become beggars for the sake of its gentilities ;

—beggars for the sake of unexceptionable bonnets, and
supernumerary frills, and the ability of playing Italian
music on the piano ; and fashionable saints charitably
minister to their fashionable wants by enabling them in
pure charity to enjoy " the vanities of life." Depend on't
there is an abyss of humbug in this direction.'

Some years previously to the period at which we
have now arrived, he received a letter from certain
students of Marischal College and University, Aberdeen,
asking him to permit himself to be nominated as can-
didate for the Lord Rectorship. Here is his reply.

' I am deeply sensible of the great honour you do me
in entertaining the purpose you intimate of proposing me
as a candidate for the Lord Rectorship of Marischal
College and University. In present circumstances, how-

CHAIR OF NATURAL HISTORY. 445

ever, the honour is one which I beg respectfully to
decline. I am, perhaps, not quite without apology for
having done but little for literature and science com-
pared with what I had once hoped, and still wish to do ;
— but I am conscious that what I have yet accomplished
is but little, — and you will, I trust, attribute to the right
feeling my determination of accepting no place to which
my claim on the score of merit might with justice be
challenged. The last ten years of my life have been
exceedingly busy ones, nor were the harassing occupa-
tions in which they were spent of a nature very favour-
able to acquirement of the more solid or thought of the
profounder kind. In that period, however, I was en-
abled to give to the public two little works, — one de-
scriptive of the second period of vertebrate existence on
our planet, and one an examination of those evidences
which connect the first beginnings of life in the remote
past with the fiat of a Creator, — that have been favour-
ably received by men of science on both sides of the
" Atlantic. And should there be some ten or twelve
years of active life, or a greater time still, before me, I
may, I trust, succeed in doing for the geology of Scot-
land what may render me at least more worthy than now
of an honour in connection with some of our Scottish
Universities such as that which, in your too partial
kindness, you at present propose. Trusting that you
will sustain my reasons for declining your very gratifying
proposal both as valid themselves and as proffered in
good faith, I am, gentlemen, &c.'

In 1853 the chair of Natural History in the Uni-
versity of Edinburgh fell vacant. It was the place
which, of all others, Hugh Miller would have been
gratified to fill. The crisis of the Church controversy
had long been past, and the position of the Free Church

446 MAN OF SCIENCE.

was thoroughly established. He felt that he had
earned a right to comparative repose, and that mind
and body required it. A large proportion of his
countrymen agreed with Lord Dalhousie in his Lord-
ship's brief and emphatic opinion on the subject of the
chair : — ' I have written to Lord Aberdeen as strongly
as I can in favour of Hugh Miller's claims, and I shall
consider that the best man amongst us for this chair is
passed over should he not be chosen.' With all respect
to the memory of the eminent naturalist who received
the appointment, we may be permitted to hold that, in a
Scottish University, no man could have so deeply stirred
the enthusiasm of geological students as the author of
the Old Red Sandstone. Professor Edward Forbes, how-
ever, had the advantage of being thirteen years the
younger man, and this advantage may have turned the
scale. The disappointment was deeply felt by Miller.

In 1855 Lord Breadalbane offered him, through Dr
Guthrie, the office of Distributor of Stamps and Col-
lector of the Property Tax for Perthshire. Income
' about £800 per annum — may be more/ the holder
being required to disburse from £200 to £300 yearly in
office expenses. c It is not an onerous duty,' wrote his
Lordship ; ' residence at Perth will be necessary, but
occasional absence is permitted, and five or six weeks'
holidays during the year. All I should ask of Mr Mil-
ler would be to come and see me at Taymouth as often
as possible, for I am very anxious to know him, and to
cultivate his acquaintance.' Dr Guthrie handed Lord
Breadalbane's note to Miller, and, after considerable
hesitation, he replied to it in these terms :—

' It is with heartfelt gratitude that I tender your
Lordship my sincere thanks for the kindness you have
shown me in proposing to recommend me to an office so

DR M'COSH'S RECOLLECTIONS. 447

important and respectable as that of Distributor of
Stamps for Perthshire. My utter lack of any claim,
personal or political, on your Lordship, makes me, I
trust, all the more sensible of such a spontaneous exer-
tion of goodness on my behalf. I find, however, that,
partly from a too facile disposition, and partly from that
rigidity of mind and habit which, making itself felt in
most cases after the period of middle life has been
passed, usually renders men turned of fifty unfit to take
up a new profession to any good effect, I would be but
ill-qualified for the efficient performance of the duties of
an office of such responsibility and care. I would, I
have too much reason to fear, break down under the
difficulties and responsibilities of a course of exertion
which might seem to many even less laborious and ex-
citing than the one in which I am at present engaged,
and thus fail to do justice to your Lordship's kind
recommendation. And so, with a sense of your good-
ness which will, I trust, remain with me through life, I
respectfully and gratefully decline availing myself of
that offer of exerting your influence on my behalf which
you have so generously made me through my kind
friend, Dr Guthrie.'

At this point it will be convenient to take in those
recollections of Hugh Miller for which my acknow-
ledgments are due to Dr McCosh.

DR M'COSH'S RECOLLECTIONS.

' I HAVE been requested to write out some recollec-
tions of my old friend, and I have a melancholy pleasure
in complying.

1 The name of Hugh Miller first became known to
me, as it did to Scotchmen generally, by his Letter from

448 MAN OF SCIENCE.

One of the Scotch People to Lord Brougham. Multi-
tudes rejoiced when they heard soon after that the
friends of Non-Intrusion and Spiritual Independence
had made arrangements for his conducting a newspaper
in Edinburgh. They felt that from that day the cause
received an accession of strength. We were particularly
pleased to find that from the first, and to the end, he
maintained an attitude of independence, not only of poli-
ticians, but of Church leaders. The movement had
hitherto assumed too much of an ecclesiastical aspect.
No doubt it had in it all along the popular element of
Non-Intrusion ; but the Spiritual Independence side
was the one mainly dwelt on in Church courts ; the
Scottish people did not always understand what was
meant by overtures to the General Assembly about inde-
pendence of the civil courts ; and not a few entertained
the suspicion that the ministers were seeking for power
to themselves which would set them above the law of
the land, in the settlement of ministers. Certain it is
that the cry of the clergy did not always carry with it
the popular sympathy ; and there were times and places
in which public meetings called to support it were put
down by mob-opposition. It was most important that
at that crisis the grand old cause of Scotland should
have one of the people to support it, and a shout of joy
burst out all over Scotland when Hugh Miller came
forth as the champion of popular rights. The newspaper
was published twice a week, and Wednesdays and Satur-
days, the publishing days, were looked forward to by
many, because they brought the Witness. The paper
was read not so much for its news, nor even its reports
of Church courts, as for its leading articles. Many a
retired country minister living, perhaps, in the midst of
a body of farmers, who had no appreciation of the

DR M'COStfS RECOLLECTIONS. 449

questions at issue, had his spirit aroused as by a trumpet
clang by the powerful appeal made to him, and he
paused in the midst of writing his sermon on the
Saturday to read the leading article. The day labourer
or weaver could not afford to take the paper, but he
was grateful when some one, minister or elder, lent it
to him. The literary men in our Universities had, as a
whole, a deep suspicion of the movement, and did not
like to be thought readers of the stone-mason's paper,
but were glad when they could get furtive glances at it,
and were obliged to acknowledge its literary superiority.
Erom a very early date Hugh Miller's name became a
household one in the best families of Scotland. The
common people never called him Mr Miller — they
would no more have done this than they would have
called Robert Burns by the name of Mr Burns ; they
identified themselves with him and identified him with
themselves by calling him Hugh Miller. They felt as
if he still carried his chisel and his hammer, and as if
he were now forming and fashioning, by firm and manly
stroke, a nobler edifice than ever his mason's tools had
constructed. I was in circumstances to know the feel-
ing of Scotland at the time, and I am convinced that
the old national cause which was defeated in 1843, but
which gained the victory in its defeat — as, with rever-
ence be it spoken, the cause of Christ did when He was
crucified — was indebted, among the great mass of the
people, to Hugh Miller as much as to any other man.

' I read his paper from the first, but shy as I have
ever been to court the great men whom I admired, I
was not personally acquainted with him till 1850. That
year I published my first work, The Method of Divine
Government. I had made up my mind to meet failure
as well as success ; and I believe that if the work had

VOL. ii. 29

450 MAN OF SCIENCE.

met only with popular neglect I would have clung to it
the more resolutely, as the father will dote the more
lovingly on that daughter in whom the silly beaux see
no merits. I had fortified myself against both praise
and blame ; but there were two men in Edinburgh
about whose good opinion I felt somewhat sensitive :
these were Sir William Hamilton and Hugh Miller. I
asked my publishers to send a copy of my work to each.
Meanwhile the public scarcely knew what to make of
my big, and, as some deemed, pretentious book. The
Athenceum noticed me contemptuously, evidently with-
out reading me — it praised some of my works after-
wards, when I had earned a reputation. My very
friends shook their heads, and were expecting a failure.
Now it was at this time, when readers were hesitating
which side to take, that the two Edinburgh giants spoke
out, and spoke out courageously ; not uttering am-
biguous oracles, which would make them right whatever
the way in which the public might ultimately decide. I
was not known at the time beyond a limited district in
the north of Forfarshire, and the south of Kincardine-
shire ; I believe neither of the eminent men referred to
had ever heard of me before ; and this led them to ex-
aggerate my merits. I feel in this distant land a deep
gratitude to the many kind Scottish friends who helped
to bring my book into notice ; but I feel most to the
great Scottish metaphysician ; and with him, and above
him, to the man who spoke first, to Hugh Miller.

' I felt now as if I ought to seek the acquaintanceship
of Hugh Miller. This was brought about by our mutual
friend, the Rev. Dr Guthrie, who invited him to meet
me at dinner. And this may be the fittest place for
describing his outward appearance as it first came under
my notice. In dress he neither affected a slovenly care-

DR M' COSH'S RECOLLECTIONS. 451

lessness nor a prim gentility. It was very much the
dress worn on Sundays by the better class of tradesmen
and upland farmers. It must be confessed that at first
sight he had somewhat of a shaggy appearance, relieved,
however, by a look of high independence and an air of
indomitable energy and perseverance. He was a man
of the highest type throughout ; but if he had a counter-
part in any of the lower animals it was in the noblest of
the dog tribe, such as Landseer loves to paint, as in his
Dignity as contrasted with Impudence. Yet he was
withal wonderfully shy, and unwilling to seem to be
seeking the favour of any man. A little incident may
show what I mean. Dr Guthrie and I had been walking
together on the day on which he had asked him to meet
me at dinner ; and when we were at some distance we
saw him approaching the door. " Let us run," says Dr
Guthrie ; " for if he goes to my house and finds me not
in he will set off; " and we did run to catch him. I
remember another circumstance illustrating the same
point. I was talking to him of the litterateurs of Edin-
burgh, great and small. He did not seem to have much
intimacy with them. We talked of Lord Jeffrey, of
whom he spoke kindly and respectfully. " He ex-
pressed," he said, " a wish to make my acquaintance
when I came to Edinburgh ; but as he did not call on
me I did not see my way to call on him, and we have
not had much intercourse." I happened to be in his
house one forenoon when he was expecting a call from
Sir Roderick Murchison in the afternoon. He was too
proud a man to make any boastings about it ; but it was
evident that he was highly gratified by the proffered
visit ; and he had his splendid museum in the highest
possible order to show it to the distinguished geologist.
He had a heart to cherish a sense of favours when be-

452 MAN OF SCIENCE.

stowed without any condescension, or endeavour to in-
terfere with his independence, but certainly with no
stomach to seek favours even from those who would
have been most willing to grant them.

1 We met at dinner on the day I have referred to.
Beside Dr Guthrie, Mr Miller, and myself there were
only one or two others present. Dr Guthrie restrained
his usual flow of mingled manly sense, humour, and
pathos to allow his friend to speak freely ; and he had
soon to go out to a congregational meeting. So I had
the great man to myself for the evening, and he under
no restraint. I have observed that in large promis-
cuous companies he was apt to feel awkward and re-
strained, and to retire into himself, and sit silent. But
when there wTere only a few persons present, and these
of congenial tastes, his conversation was of the most
brilliant description. You saw the thoughts labouring
in his brain as distinctly as you see the machinery in a
clock when the clock work is in a glass case. That
evening we talked of subjects that were familiar to him,
and which I was at that time studying, such as the
typical forms which Professor Owen was detecting in
the vertebrate skeleton, and the possibility of reconciling
them with the doctrine of final cause and the mutual
adaptation of parts. He was not sure about some points,
and my delight was to set his mind a working. He
afterwards brought out his matured views in a very
brilliant article which he wrote, reviewing a paper of
mine in the North British Revieiv. But that night his
thoughts came out tumbling with a freshness, an origin-
ality, and a power, which somewhat disappeared when he
came to write them out in elegant English.

' Prom that date he expected me to go out to Porto-
bello or Musselburgh and see him when I went to

DR M'COSHS RECOLLECTIONS. 453

Edinburgh, which I commonly did once or twice a year.
I took care not to intrude upon him the night before the
bi-weekly issue of his paper ; but I always found him
welcoming me on the Wednesday or Saturday night
when the hard work of composition was off his mind.
On these occasions he showed me his museum with the
feeling of a boy showing his toys to his companion.
We sometimes, but not often, talked of Church matters ;
but it was evident that having to write and speak so
much about them he rather kept off them with me—
except, indeed, that he was ever ready to speak of the
great religious cause of the freedom of the Church, as
imbedded deep in the hearts, even as it was in the
history, of Scotchmen, and certain in the end to
triumph. Sometimes we talked of geology and religion
and the difficult problems which they started. At times
I introduced a topic new to him, as on one occasion
Comte's Classification of the Sciences and the Positive
Philosophy, not so well-known then as now. It was ex-
tremely interesting to watch his mind grasping the new
ideas, apprehending but not yet fully comprehending
them. In next paper he had an article on the subject,
but it is evident that his mind had not yet settled down
into clearness, and the written composition had not the
full expanse of the conversation. Had he lived he would
certainly have grappled with the Positive Philosophy as
he did with the Vestiges of Creation.

' Having great confidence in his singleness of purpose
and his far-sighted wisdom, I consulted him when I
was about to be called to the Chair of Logic and
Metaphysics in Belfast, stating to him my difficulty
about giving up my pastoral work. He gave me a
clear and unequivocal advice. " If a man," says he, " has
decidedly a high heaven-bestowed gift, — even if it

454 MAN OF SCIENCE.

should be that of a mason or mechanic, he should
exercise it to the glory of God." " You have," he was
pleased to add, " such a gift ; go and use it, and God
will open spheres of usefulness to you."

'The last conversation I had with him was in the
early autumn of the year before his decease. He was
completing his last work, The Testimony of the Rocks,
and we went over the topics discussed in it. I was
struck then, as I ever was, with his powerful memory and
his special acquaintance with the English literature of
last century — I suspect it was the literature most
accessible to him in his younger years. He could quote
verbatim long passages from the poets of that epoch,
illustrating points casting up in the conversation. As
we took the usual walk through his museum he freely
allowed that the apparent breaks between the various
geological epochs and animals were being fast filled up
by new geological discoveries, and showed me some
examples as we went along. It was evident to me that
he was setting himself to a thorough grappling with
these facts, and to a consideration of their relation to
the great truths of natural and revealed religion. Often
do some of us wish that he had been spared to take his
place in the more formidable conflicts of these times.

' In common with not a few others, I looked on Hugh
Miller as the greatest Scotchman left after Thomas
Chalmers fell. These two men differed in many points,
but they were essentially kindred spirits : they were
alike in their high aims ; in their lofty genius ; in the
moving power of their writings ; in their partiality for
the study of the works of God ; in their deep reverence
for the word of God ; in their desire to unite science
and religion, and attachment to the principles of the
Church of Scotland. What Chalmers did for the older

DR M'COSITS RECOLLECTIONS. 455

sister, astronomy, Miller has done for the younger,
geology, in wedding her to religion. Both lived for the
purpose of elevating their countrymen and their race ;
and in order to effect this end both* laboured to promote
the Church's independence and the freedom of its
members. Each had his own field of influence ; each
had a class of minds on whom he exercised a burning
and enduring power for good. Most appropriately, now
that their day's work is done, do they sleep side by side
in the same grave-yard.

' I am tempted to compare Miller, and when I com-
pare him, to contrast him with another eminent Scotch-
man, Robert Burns. Both were sprung from the nobler
order of the Scottish peasantry ; neither was originally
educated as a scholar ; both rose to the highest eminence
in the midst of difficulties which led the one as well as
the other seriously to propose emigrating to America ;
both had a deep love for Scotland and her common
people ; both will go down through all coming ages as
household words, and as representatives of the intelligence
of the sons of toil in their native land ; and both were
characterized by a noble modesty and a manly inde-
pendence of nature, — " Owre blate to seek, owre proud
to snool." But with the resemblances there were differ-
ences. In respect of native genius they rank in my
view equally high; but the complexion and bent of
that genius differed in the two individuals. No one
would compare any poetry published by Hugh Miller
with the poetry of Robert Burns; though there are
passages of very high poetic power in all the prose
works of Miller. Let us only look at that bold sketch
of a proposed Epic towards the close of the sixth
Lecture of his Testimony of the Rocks, in- which he
represents Lucifer, son of the morning, cast down on the

456 MAN OF SCIENCE.

Pre- Adamite earth, while yet a half-extinguished volcano :
then, as ages roll on, moving amidst tangled foliage and
ravenous creatures, horrid with trenchant tooth and
barbed sting, and enveloped in armour of plate and
scale, marking all the while and wondering at the pro-
gressive work of God, as animal follows plant, and man
succeeds animal, and seeking to frustrate it by diabolical
wiles, which, however, only fulfil the eternal counsels of
Heaven, and issue in the crowning work, the descent
and death and ascension of the Incarnate Son of God.
Greater as a poet, Robert Burns cannot be placed as a
thinker, or a man of science, or a writer of prose, on the
level of Hugh Miller. Dugald Stewart expressed his
surprise to find Burns form so correct an idea of the then
prevailing theory in Edinburgh which referred all
beauty to the association of ideas, a theory which
seems to have gained the momentary assent of Burns in
spite of his own better sense and truer feeling : — " That
the martial clangour," he says, " of a trumpet had some-
thing in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime, than
the twingle-twangle of a Jew's-harp ; that the delicate
flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is
heavy with the tears of dawn, was infinitely more
beautiful and elegant than the upright stalk of the
burdock, and that from something innate and inde-
pendent of all association of ideas, — these I had set
down as irrefragable orthodox truths, until perusing
your book shook my faith." No one who had conversed
with Hugh Miller would have expressed surprise that
he was capable of understanding such truths. He must
have been in the clouds himself, who, in talking with
him, did not confess that Hugh Miller could soar as
high as he; and keep well-balanced pinions all the while.
He had no difficulty in understanding the Association

DR M'COSH'S RECOLLECTIONS. 457

Theory, and many other theories of Hume and Brown
as well ; and in brushing away them and some other
meagre or misty explanations by a few brief but cogent
facts and arguments. In his works he has combined,
as no working man ever did before, lofty speculation
with rigid science, and irradiated the whole with the
confiscations of poetry. Nor is it to be omitted that
there is a far more important point of difference between
the Ayrshire ploughman and the Cromarty mason.
Both were men of naturally strong passions ; but where
the one yielded to the temptations that assailed him,

" And thoughtless follies laid him low,
And stained his name,"

the other resisted with all his might. As I conversed
with Hugh Miller, or after parting with him, with his
words of power still ringing in my ears, often have I
felt, and said too — but not in his hearing — "What an
amount of mischief would that mighty man have done
had he, say on his being tempted by his brother masons
at Niddry, given way where he stood firm ; had he, like
Burns, joined the foes of evangelical religion, instead of
becoming its defender ; or had he, when at one time
tempted to scepticism, abandoned the religion of the
Bible, with ' its grand central doctrine of the true hu-
manity and true Divinity of the adorable Saviour ' (to
use Miller's language), and gone after some plausible
form of nature- worship or man -worship." I feel as if
his country and his Church had not, when he was yet
alive, been sufficiently grateful to God for raising such
a man to guide aright so large a portion of the thinking
mind of Scotland at a most critical era in its history.

' Every man in Scotland had heard of Hugh Miller.
Noble Lords were in the way of pointing their sentences
and securing a plaudit by an allusion to him. The artizan

458 MAN OF SCIENCE.

and peasant felt that he was one of themselves, and one
who (unlike some others sprung from their ranks) never
felt ashamed of them, or his connection with them. The
infidels knew him well, for many a hard blow had he
dealt them ; and they were obliged to respect while they
feared him. The religious community recognized him
as in certain departments the ablest, as he was the most
disinterested, defender of the faith. Scientific men re-
cognized in him one who could cope with them in their
own department, who knew the facts as well as they,
and could reason them out with greater power. Literary
men acknowledged in him a brother who could mould
a sentence or turn a period with the best of them. The
ablest and boldest man in the country would have felt
his knees shaking at the thought of engaging in a con-
troversy with the stone-mason. Even those who had
no learning relished him ; and some have earnestly
wished to be better scholars that they might under-
stand him ; and some have made themselves scholars
by spelling their way through his writings. Thinkers
in no way inclined to agree with him in his ecclesi-
astical or political opinions, took the Witness because
they liked to have thoughts awakened within them;
and even those who were not particularly disposed to
think read his writings for the sake of their pictorial
power and noble sentiment. One of the most distin-
guished assemblies I ever looked on met in the City
Hall of Glasgow in September, 1855, to hear the open-
ing Address of the President, the Duke of Argyll, to
the British Association for the Promotion of Science.
There were present a very large number of the savans
of the age, and mingling with them a number of others
quite sufficient to make the audience a singularly pro-
miscuous one, — shrewd merchants who traded with the

DR M'COSH'S RECOLLECTIONS. 459

ends of the earth, and other not less excellent merchants
who were not particularly shrewd, and who were con-
versant with little other literature than the Glasgow
Herald, and along with them their wives and daughters,
some of them blue stockings, but others — quite as useful
members of the family — who knew cookery vastly better
than geology. In addressing the assembly, the noble Duke
gave us a panoramic view of a number of the most dis-
tinguished scientific men of the day, and an epitome of
their discoveries. Many of them were cheered as their
names passed in brief review ; but there were two whose
names called forth the loudest and most repeated shouts.
The one of these was a prince in rank, even as he is
a prince in science. Prince Lucien Bonaparte, the
cousin of the then ally of England in the Russian war,
received a cheer worthy of Glasgow. There was just
one other who was acclaimed by so loud a burst ; and
some of us observed with interest that in his case the
cheer came from every heart, and from a greater depth
in the heart : that cheer was in honour of one — we need
not name him, but when his name was pronounced it
moved the vast assembly simultaneously like an electric
shock — of one of Nature's nobles, made noble not by the
hand of man, but by the evident mark of God upon him.
' But Fame was not the idol before which this great
man bowed. The love of reputation was but an under-
current in his soul. He lived to do a work, but it was for
the glory of God and the good of mankind. I watched
him with interest, as many did, in the meetings of the
Geological Section of the British Association ; and I ob-
served that he sat, and stood, and spoke, and moved
with the most perfect simplicity. There was no bravado
on the one hand nor mock humility on the other ; there
was no courting of popularity, no tricks to draw atten-

460 MAN OF SCIENCE.

tion ; no looking round to see if men and women were
gazing at him. He received the advances of distin-
guished individuals with deference, and was gratified
by them ; but there was no fawning or flattery on his
part, and he received in precisely the same manner (as
some of us can testify) the most obscure of his old friends,
and assumed towards them no airs of superiority or of
patronage. Whatever might be the situation in which
he was placed, one felt in regard to him that the fiddlers
struck up the right tune, when after his health was
drunk at a parting dinner at Cromarty they played, " A
man's a man for a' that." But I would not be exhibiting
his full character if I did not add, that, bending before
no man, he ever bowed in lowliest reverence before his
God ; that seeking no patron, climbing by no dirty arts,
and determined to be dependent on no man, he ever felt
and acknowledged his dependence on a Higher Power.

* Princeton, New Jersey, U. S., Jan. 1870.'

461

CHAPTER IV.

CLOSING SCENES.

rilHE last time I saw Hugh Miller in his own house
JL he mentioned to me that his capacity for work was not
what it once had been. He used, he said, to write an article
at a sitting ; he now liked to do it in two, relieving
himself by a walk in the interval. This was in the sum-
mer of 1855, and the weakness which even then was
stealing over him continued, month by month, to in-
crease. The mason's disease — the presence of particles
of stone in the lungs — augmented the torturing irritation
of repeated inflammatory attacks in this most sensitive
organ. The tendency to brood — to live in a world of
thought, and meditation, and phantasy, apart from that
of living men — which he had manifested from child-
hood, grew upon him as his physical energies decayed.
That imaginative timidity, also, which had made a man
who, if confronted by a lion, would have looked it down,
arm himself with pistols against the assassin who might
lurk in the recesses of a wooded glen, or haunt a lonely
road at midnight, fed itself on the accounts of garotte
robberies, house-breakings, outrages by ticket-of-leave
men, of which, in the autumn of 1856, the newspapers
had more perhaps than the dismal average. Hugh

462 MAN OF SCIENCE.

Miller sympathized with Mr Carlyle in his views as to
the necessity of subjecting to a rigorous discipline our
professional criminals, and the folly of leaving men
whom repeated conviction has proved to be incorrigible
to prey upon the community. He wrote upon the sub-
ject in the Witness, and it was much in his mind. A
slight circumstance was sufficient to give the matter a
personal turn, and to convince him that he was himself
exposed to danger. In a corner of the grounds at Shrub
Mount, Portobello, where he now resided, a building
had been reared under his direction for the accommoda-
tion of his beloved specimens, and he was impressed
with the idea that it might be broken into and robbed
by the prowling miscreants who were never absent
from his imagination. One evening his eldest boy,
having been in the garden after dark, returned with the
news that he had seen a lantern moving among the trees,
and had heard whispered voices. Miller went out to
survey the ground ; and though nothing appeared to be
amiss, the attention of the household was awakened,
and night after night the children and the servants had
tales to tell of mysterious sounds having been heard and
strange sights having been seen. All this influenced
his imagination, and pistol and sword were ever in
readiness to repel attack.

At this time Mrs Miller and her husband occupied
different sleeping apartments. A severe illness had
almost deprived Mrs Miller of the use of her limbs, and
it was not without great pain that she could go up-
stairs. It was therefore necessary for her to have her
bed-room on the ground floor. For him, on the other
hand, the air of an upper apartment was considered best,
and he slept in a small room adjoining his study, on
the second floor. Every morning and evening, during

HIS ALARMS. 463

one of his illnesses, Mrs Miller ascended to his room,
1 at the cost of an hour's severe pain,' to minister to his
wants. At other times, when his strength permitted,
and her limbs were powerless, he would carry her in his
arms to her sofa, ' in the kindest and tenderest manner/

One night Mrs Miller was startled by her husband
bursting into her room at midnight, with fire-arms, she
thinks, in his hand, and asking in a loud voice whether
she had heard unusual noises in the house. She answered
composedly that she had heard nothing. He went into
his eldest daughter's room, and made the same inquiry.
Soothed apparently by the result, he retired to his own
room.

An incident occurred at this time, which had
the effect of partly setting his mind at rest. Lord
and Lady Kinnaird resided during the winter of 1856
in a villa by the sea-side at Portobello, and a cordial
intimacy had sprung up between them and Mr and
Mrs Miller. Lord Kinnaird, hearing of Miller's appre-
hensions for his collection, presented him with a man-
trap which some sagacious inventor had recently offered
to the public. The combination of gentlest philan-
thropy with chronic dread of burglars appears to have
struck this ingenious person as not infrequent, and the
man-trap which he devised had the engaging property of
holding the robber fast without hurting him. Lord
Kinnaird and Mr Miller set up this trap at the porch of
the Museum, and the fears of the latter were consider-
ably allayed.

There were other matters, however, besides this
imaginative excitement on the subject of robbery, which,
as the months of autumn were succeeded by those of
winter, occasioned deep anxiety to Mrs Miller. The
time was approaching when the Testimony of the RocJcs

464 MAN OF SCIENCE.

was to see the light, and her husband was working at it
with indomitable resolution. His activity had always
been high-strung, but there was now a feverish in-
tensity in his application which amazed and saddened
Mrs Miller. He had been on the whole a calm and
regular worker, had loved the morning air and devoted
the hours of night to slumber ; he now moved rest-
lessly about during the day, as if unable to concentrate
his thoughts, and only as the darkness fell aroused his
intellectual energies and compelled them to their task.
Night after night, in spite of entreaties, he commenced
his toil when the rest of the family retired to rest.
Through the long silent hours his tired and throbbing
brain was forced by his iron will to forge link after link
in the argument he was drawing out. Sometimes, when
Mrs Miller awoke in the morning, she heard, as she
thought, the servants beginning their work, but found
that it was her husband leaving his. The slightest
noise distressed him. That his nerves were in a state
of disorder Mrs Miller could not doubt, but the dread
which tormented her was that of apoplexy. Of insanity
she never thought until the appearance of other symp-
toms, but the vision of Hugh Miller struck down by
apoplexy and carried into the house constantly haunted
her. At night, before bidding him farewell, she would
linger, on one pretence or another, trying to find an op-
portunity to remonstrate against his vigils, but she saw that
he was nervously irritable, and she often feared to speak,
lest the evil she wished to abate might be aggravated.

Although any one who was constantly and closely
with him could not but remark the change which had
taken place, his manner with friends who saw him in
occasional interviews remained unaltered. Perhaps a
deeper tone of earnestness mingled in the genial flow

PRAYER OF JOHN KNOX. 465

of conversation with which he entertained every visitor,
and the reverence and godly fear which lay at the very
roots of his being became more than usually conspicuous.
On Thursday, the 18th of December, a friend who had
a long conversation with him, ' never enjoyed an inter-
view more, or remembered him in a more genial mood/
On the Saturday following, another friend from Edin-
burgh found him in the same state. True to a
habit which had characterized him from his youth,
of leading the conversation to some book or topic which
was occupying his mind, he repeated with deep feel-
ing a prayer of John Knox's, which, he said, ( it had
been his frequent custom to repeat privately during
the days of the Disruption/ There was no name
which represented more for Hugh Miller than that
of John Knox. The Scotland of Knox and the Puri-
tans was the Scotland which he loved ; the Church of
Knox was the Church for which he had toiled when
his strength was in its meridian and when his dawn-
ing fame first thrilled him with rapture ; the faith of
Knox was the faith to which, after Hume and Voltaire
and Lamarck had done their worst, he still anchored his
soul. This is the prayer which was passing through the
mind of Hugh Miller on that Saturday : — ' O Lord
God Almighty and Father most merciful, there is none
like Thee in heaven nor in earth, which workest all
things for the glory of Thy name and the comfort of
Thine elect. Thou didst once make man ruler over all
Thy creatures, and placed him in the garden of all
pleasures ; but how soon, alas ! did he in Thy felicity
forget Thy goodness ? Thy people Israel, also, in their
wealth did evermore run astray, abusing Thy manifold
mercies ; like as all flesh continually rageth when it
hath gotten liberty and external prosperity. But such

VOL. ii. 30

466 MAN OF SCIENCE.

is Thy wisdom adjoined to Thy mercies, dear Father,
that Thou seekest all means possible to bring Thy
children to the sure sense and lively feeling of Thy
fatherly favour. And, therefore, when prosperity will
not serve, then sendest Thou adversity, graciously cor-
recting all Thy children whom Thou receivest into Thy
household. Wherefore we, wretched and miserable
sinners, render unto Thee most humble and hearty
thanks that it hath pleased Thee to call us home to Thy
fold by fatherly correction at this present, whereas in
our prosperity and liberty we did neglect Thy graces
offered unto us. For the which negligence, and many
other grievous sins whereof we now accuse ourselves
before Thee, Thou mightest most justly have given us up
to reprobate minds and induration of our hearts, as
Thou hast done others. But such is Thy goodness, O
Lord, that Thou seemest to forget all our offences, and
hast called us of Thy good pleasure from all idolatries
into this city most Christianly reformed, to profess Thy
name, and to suffer some cross amongst Thy people for
Thy truth and Gospel's sake ; and so to be Thy wit-
nesses with Thy prophets and apostles, yea, with Thy
dearly beloved Son Jesus Christ our Head, to whom
Thou dost begin here to fashion us like, that in His
glory we may also be like Him when He shall appear.
O Lord God, what are we upon whom Thou shouldst
show this great mercy ? O most loving Lord, forgive
us our unthankfulness and all our sins, for Jesus Christ's
sake. O heavenly Father, increase Thy Holy Spirit in
us, to teach our hearts to cry Abba, dear Father ; to
assure us of our eternal election in Christ; to reveal
Thy will more and more towards us ; to confirm us so
in Thy truth that we may live and die therein ; and
that, by the power of the same Spirit, we may boldly

HIS LAST SUNDAY. 467

give an account of our faith to all men with humbleness
and meekness, that whereas they backbite and slander
us as evil-doers, they may be ashamed and once stop
their mouths seeing our good conversation in Christ
Jesus, for whose sake we beseech Thee, 0 Lord God, to
guide, govern, and prosper this our enterprise in as-
sembling our brethren to praise Thy Holy name. And
not only to be here present with us Thy children ac-
cording to Thy promise, but also mercifully to assist
Thy like persecuted people, our brethren, gathered in
all other places, that they and we, consenting together
in one spirit and truth, may (all worldly respects set
apart) seek Thy only honour and glory in all their and
our assemblies. So be it ! '

Next day Mr and Mrs Miller went to church in the
forenoon, and, on the way home, he remarked that the
wind was cold, and that he did not feel well, and asked
whether she would remain at home with him in the
afternoon. She consented, adding that she was very
tired, and that one of her limbs pained her. Mrs
Miller usually went to church in a basket phaeton,
but did not use it that day, and her husband observed
affectionately that he wished he could carry her. In a
lane opening on the main road, a few yards from the
gate of Shrub Mount, there was a poor woman who,
some days previously, had met with an accident, and
Mrs Miller now said that she would go and inquire for
her, remaining not more than a few minutes. An ex-
pression of pain crossed his face, as if he disliked the
momentary separation.

The time of the afternoon service, the rest of the
household being in church, was passed by Hugh Miller
and his wife in solemn, thoughtful converse. The reader
knows what she was to him. She had been his friend,

468 MAN OF SCIENCE.

respected for her intellect, honoured for her character,
before he loved her ; and when he did love her, it was
with the intense and passionate devotion of a strong
man, who never loved woman but one. Had he never
loved her, he might never have laid down the mallet
and the chisel, or quitted Cromarty. They had known
fair and foul weather in their wedded life, but on the
whole it has been a fitting sequel to those old days
when his ' gentle blue eyes ' would ' melt with be-
nevolence and a chastened tenderness/ looking into
hers, while the green leaves softened the sunlight
above, and the summer wave threw its shattering crystal
at their feet. His trust and pride in her had never
changed, and she held to the last the throne of his
affections, supreme and apart from any other human
being. On this Sunday afternoon he was in his most
tender and confidential, which was always also his re-
ligious, mood. No secular matters were spoken of, but
in what he said on spiritual things Mrs Miller observed,
what she had recently noticed in his prayers at family
worship, ' an increasing earnestness, a child-like hu-
mility, a more entire reliance upon the merits of the
Saviour to blot out all sin, a more awful sense of
God's immediate presence/ His affection was so ardent
that Mrs Miller regarded it with something of sur-
prise. He suddenly seized her hand, and kissed it with
a manner she had never seen before. ' There was
in it a great deal more than affection, — an air of court-
liness, so to speak, indescribable.' In pondering on
this action, Mrs Miller has asked whether it could pos-
sibly have had the meaning of a farewell. Comparing it
with the strange and painful expression which flitted
across his countenance as they came from church, she is
persuaded that he was haunted by the dread of some

HE CONSULTS DR BALFOUR. 469

prostrating stroke, and that there were sensations in his
brain which gave him the idea that it might be near.
He was certainly haunted by some great terror; but
it was not the fear of apoplexy, it was the fear of an
overmastering paroxysm of insanity. He spent the
evening quietly, reading a little book on a religious
subject, and writing a brief notice of it for the paper.

On Monday morning Mrs Miller made her way up-
stairs before breakfast, and met him on the top of the
stairs. He said that he had passed a bad, restless
night. At breakfast, which only Mrs Miller and his
eldest daughter partook with him, his conversation was
animated and copious. He ate nothing, however, merely
swallowing a cup of tea, and his mind was evidently
occupied with his sensations in the night. He spoke of
sleep-walking, and told an anecdote of a student who
had left his room, clambered on the roof, entered an
adjoining house, divested himself, night after night, of
his shirt, and hidden the garments, to the number of
half-a-dozen, in a cask of feathers. Breakfast over,
he recurred to the subject which had never been
from his thoughts. ' It was a strange night/ he said ;
' there was something I didn't like. I shall just throw
on my plaid, and step out to see Dr Balfour/ Dr Bal-
four lived in Portobello, and was in customary attend-
ance upon Mr Miller and his family. The proposal of
her husband astonished Mrs Miller. During his whole
life he had shown the utmost reluctance to take medical
advice, and this was the first time she had ever known
him speak of going voluntarily in quest of a doctor.
She cordially approved of his determination, and, at
about ten o'clock, he presented himself to Dr Balfour.

Of the consultation which followed Dr Balfour has
given a full report. ' On my asking/ says the Doctor,

470 MAN OF SCIENCE.

' what was the matter with him, he replied, " My brain
is giving way. I cannot put two thoughts together to-
day : I have had a dreadful night of it : I cannot face
another such : I was impressed with the idea that my
museum was attacked by robbers, and that I had got
up, put on my clothes, and gone out with a loaded pistol
to shoot them. Immediately after that I became un-
conscious. How long that continued I cannot say ; but
when I awoke in the morning I was trembling all over,
and quite confused in my brain. On rising I felt as if
a stiletto was suddenly, and as quickly as an electric
shock, passed through my brain from front to back, and
left a burning sensation on the top of the brain, just
below the bone. So thoroughly convinced was I that I
must have been out through the night, that I examined
my trousers, to see if they were wet or covered with
mud, but could find none. I was somewhat similarly
affected through the night twice last week, and I ex-
amined my trousers in the morning, to see if I had been
out. Still, the terrible sensations were not nearly so
bad as they were last night. Towards the end of last
week, while passing through the Exchange in Edinburgh,
I was seized with such a giddiness that I staggered,
and would, I think, have fallen, had I not gone into an
entry, where I leaned against the wall, and became
quite unconscious for some seconds." Dr Balfour in-
formed him that he had been overworking his brain, and
agreed to call at Shrub Mount on the following day to
make a fuller examination.

Mr Miller had no sooner left the house to seek I)r

Balfour, than Mrs Miller, turning to her daughter, said :

— ' There is something unusual the matter with your

papa. I cannot be satisfied without more advice. I

am quite certain he would make some difficulty about

PROFESSOR MILLER CONSULTED. 471

it; therefore you and I will go up by the 12 o'clock
coach, and make an appointment with Professor Miller
to come down here/ When Mr Miller returned, he
mentioned that he had a funeral to attend at two o'clock,
and would go to Edinburgh by the 12 o'clock coach.
She told him that she and Miss Miller, having some-
thing to do in town, were to go at the same time. He
inquired particularly what was their errand, and Mrs
Miller, ' acting under a stern and inexorable necessity/
put him off with the statement that they wished to see
a picture then being exhibited in Prince's Street. The
picture was there, they wished to see it, and they
actually did so on this occasion ; but the principal
object of their trip to town remained unseen in the
background. Professor Miller, 'with his usual quick
decisive kindness/ said, ' I'll be down to-morrow at three
o'clock/ Mrs Miller arranged that Dr Balfour should
come at the same hour.

When she returned home, she found her husband
already there, resting on the sofa in the dining-room.
He told her what he had been doing since they parted,
dwelling especially on the precautions which he was
using to avoid taking cold. In return, he wanted to
know exactly what his wife and daughter had been
about in town. ' We saw the picture, as we intended/
' Nothing else ? ' Was that really your chief business ? '
Mrs Miller saw that a suspicion of the true state of
affairs had crossed his mind. She feared his serious
displeasure, and thought it possible that, if not treated
with frankness, he might keep out of the way and defeat
her main aim. W^ith hesitation, therefore, and placing
her hand on his forehead, ' Don't/ she said, ' be dis-
pleased. I went likewise to Professor Miller to ask him
to come and see you. He is to come at three to-morrow.

472 MAN OF SCIENCE.

You won't object — you won't throw any obstacle in the
way — if it were only to relieve my mind ? ' He made
no answer, and remained silent for a considerable time.
At the moment he was, Mrs Miller thinks, displeased ;
but the shadow soon passed from his face, and during
the evening he was in his gentlest, kindest mood.

Next morning Mrs Miller again met him at the top
of the stairs before breakfast, and was relieved to find
that he had passed a better night. Immediately after
breakfast he began to correct the last proofs of the
Testimony of the RocJcs. About midday he became
restless, and she feared that he might make some move-
ment which would prevent the consultation. The day
was bitterly cold, with drizzling rain. She made pre-
tences to be near him, watchful lest he should slip away
unnoticed. At last he proclaimed his intention of going
up to town to anticipate Professor Miller's visit. ' I
cannot bear/ he said, 'taking him down in this way.
You know his generosity, and he has so much to do—
'Well, believe me/ replied Mrs Miller, 'there's not
much he has to do he would put in competition with
coming to see you when you need it. Just look at the
day. You know that if you go out, you will bring on
another inflammatory attack in your chest, and then I
shall have done more harm than good. Do stay now,
and let things go on, if you never do again.' ' Well/
he answered, ' I will.' Mrs Miller was passing his
chair at the moment, and putting her hand into the
shaggy hair which he used to wear on the top of his
head, she gave it a slight tug, ' half a caress, half a play-
ful rebuke for his contumacy/ while she thanked him
for complying. ' Don't/ he said mildly, ' it hurts me/

The medical gentlemen arrived and the interview
commenced. 'We examined his chest/ — such is Pro-

PROFESSOR MILLERS REPORT. 473

fessor Miller's report, — ' and found that unusually well ;
but soon we discovered that it was head-symptoms that
made him uneasy. He acknowledged having been
night after night up till very late in the morning,
working hard and continuously at his new book,
" which," with much satisfaction he said, " I have
finished this day." He was sensible that his head had
suffered in consequence, as evidenced in two ways :
first, occasionally he felt as if a very fine poniard had
been suddenly passed through and through his brain.
The pain was intense, and momentarily followed by
confusion and giddiness, and the sense of being very
drunk, unable to stand or walk. He thought that a
period of unconsciousness must have followed this, — a
kind of swoon, but he had never fallen. Second, what
annoyed him most, however, was a kind of nightmare,
which for some nights past had rendered sleep most
miserable. It was no dream, he said : he saw no
distinct vision, and could remember nothing of what
had passed accurately. It was a sense of vague and yet
intense horror, with a conviction of being abroad in the
night wind, and dragged through places as if by some
invisible power. " Last night," he said, " I felt as if I
had been ridden by a witch for fifty miles, and rose far
more wearied in mind and body than when I lay down."
So strong was his conviction of having been out, that he
had difficulty in persuading himself to the contrary, by
carefully examining his clothes in the morning to see if
they were not wet or dirty ; and he looked inquiringly
and anxiously to his wife, asking if she was sure he had
not been out last night, and walking in this disturbed
trance or dream. His pulse was quiet, but tongue foul.
The head was not hot, but he could not say he was free
from pain. But I need not enter into professional

474 MAN OF SCIENCE.

details. Suffice it to say, that we came to the conclusion
that he was suffering from an overworked mind, dis-
ordering his digestive organs, enervating his whole
frame, and threatening serious head affection. We told
him this, and enjoined absolute discontinuance of work,
—bed at eleven, light supper (he had all his life made
that a principal meal), thinning the hair of the head, a
warm sponging-bath at bed-time, &c. To all our com-
mands he readily promised obedience. For fully an
hour we talked together on these and other subjects, and
I left him with no apprehension of impending evil, and
little doubting but that a short time of rest and regimen
would restore him to his wonted vigour.'

It may occur to many to ask how it could happen
that medical men so circumspect, so vigilant, so able as
Professor Miller and Dr Balfour, having become ac-
quainted with these symptoms of insanity, did not sug-
gest that precautions should be taken, to the extent at
least of removing fire-arms from the person and presence
of their patient. Miller's fear of robbery had returned
in all its force. A revolver lay nightly within his reach.
A broad-bladed dagger was ready to his hand. At his
bed-head lay a naked sword. Why were not these
taken away ? The reply is that, though paroxysms of
madness had already visited Miller, he had revealed no
trace of suicidal mania, and the circumstances under
which his mental disorder had originated were not such
as to suggest alarm. His brain had been overworked ;
but the labour which had shaken his nerves and sapped
his strength, had been congenial to him ; and his con-
versation was that of one who looked with hope and
with interest to the future. His intellect, besides, apart
from the maniacal belief which at moments oppressed
it, that he was made the sport of demons in the night,

FLITTING PAROXYSMS. 475

was strong and clear. That powerful action of the
mind may take place even when it is under the spell of
overmastering mania is demonstrated by the fact that
Cowper wrote in a single day, while suffering ' the most
appalling mental depression/ the Castaway, a poem
which, in the masculine brevity of its narrative, and the
concentration of its tragic power, is altogether masterly.
Listening to the conversation of Hugh Miller, which,
even while he described the agonies that tortured him,
attested the vigour of his faculties, the medical gentle-
men never thought it possible that intensity of mental
horror might suddenly paralyze his will, and deprive
reason of control over his actions. It is so easy to be
wise after the event ! so difficult to forecast the steps of
destiny ! The riddle of the Sphynx, once we know its
solution, looks childishly simple ; and yet it took an
(Edipus to read it.

Professor Miller and Dr Balfour having left Shrub
Mount, it was now time for dinner. The servant entered
the -dining-room to spread the table, and found Mr
Miller alone. The expression which once or twice
already had been observed on his features was again
there. His face was so distorted with pain, that she
shrank back appalled. He lay down upon the sofa,
and pressed his head, as if in agony, upon the cushion.

The paroxysm flitted by, and when Mrs Miller
returned to the dining-room he was in apparent health.
She naturally shared the hopeful anticipations which
Professor Miller had expressed, and her mind would
dwell with comfort on the regimen and rest which were
now, by medical authority, to be brought to bear upon his
case. After dinner the conversation turned upon poetry.
Miss Miller, ' then just blooming into womanhood, be-
tween sixteen and seventeen years of age/ was at the

476 MAN OF SCIENCE.

time attending classes, and among other tasks, had
to produce verses upon given themes. She consulted
her father upon her performances, and he would take
the opportunity of delivering a chatty little lecture upon
poetry, taking down from the shelf the works of some
well-known author, to serve for the illustration of his re-
marks. This evening the subject of lecture was Cowper,
one of his supreme favourites. He ranked the bard of
Olney, both in poetry and in prose, among the great
masters of the English language. The verses on Yardley
Oak he would often refer to, as evincing the wonderful
power with which Cowper could bend the roughest words
to suit his purposes of delineation and of melody. The
lines are perhaps the fittest which a critic could select
to illustrate the genius of Cowper. They have that
brief, decisive force by which, at his best, he recalls
the mighty touch of Dryden, with a vivid, eye-to-eye
truth to nature which reminds us that Cowper, if the
poetical child of Dryden, was the poetical sire of Words-
worth.

' Thou wast a bauble once ; a cup and ball,
Which babes might play with ; and the thievish jay,
Seeking her food, with ease might have purloined
The auburn nut that held thee, swallowing down
Thy yet close-folded latitude of boughs,
And all thine embryo vastness, at a gulp.
But fate thy growth decreed ; autumnal rains
Beneath thy parent-tree mellowed the soil
Designed thy cradle ; and a skipping deer,
With pointed hoof dibbling the glebe, prepared
The soft receptacle, in which, secure,
Thy rudiments should sleep the winter through.'

The vein of reflection, too, obscured by no mysticism
yet touching on deep things, which runs through the
piece, would please Miller.

' While thus through all the stages thou hast pushed
Of treeship — first a seedling, hid in grass ;

TUESDAY EVENING. 477

Then twig ; then sapling ; and, as century rolled
Slow after century, a giant bulk
Of girth enormous, with moss-cushioned root
Upheaved above the soil, and sides embossed
With prominent wens globose — till at the last
The rottenness, which Time is charged to inflict
On other mighty ones, found also thee.

What exhibitions various hath the world
Witnessed, of mutability in all
That we account most durable below !
Change is the diet on which all subsist,
Created changeable, and change at last
Destroys them. Skies uncertain now the heat
Transmitting cloudless, and the solar beam
Now quenching in a boundless sea of clouds ;
Calm and alternate storm, moisture and drought,
Invigorate by turns the springs of life
In all that live, plant, animal, and man,
And in conclusion rnar them. Nature's threads,
Fine passing thought, even in her coarsest works,
Delight in agitation, yet sustain
The force that agitates, not unimpaired ;
But worn by frequent impulse, to the cause
Of their best tone their dissolution owe.'

Mrs Miller's little Christmas volume, Cats and Dogs,
which has since been highly popular, was then passing
through the press. Mr Miller took a lively interest in
it, and gave a warmly favourable opinion of its qualities.
He now asked the children if they knew Cowper's lines
To a Retired Cat, and, on their answering in the nega-
tive, read them with sprightly appreciation. The cat, it
may be remembered, finding an open drawer, lined with
the softest linen, concludes that it has been prepared
expressly for her accommodation, falls fast asleep in it,
is immured by the chambermaid, and is in danger of
being starved.

'That night, by chance, the poet watching,
Heard an inexplicable scratching ;
His noble heart went pit-a-pat,
And to himself he said—" What's that ? "
He drew the curtain at his side,
And forth he peep'd, but nothing spied ;

478 MAN OF SCIENCE.

Yet, by his ear directed, guessed

Something imprisoned in the chest,

And, doubtful what, with prudent care,

Resolved it should continue there.

At length, a voice which well he knew,

A long and melancholy mew,

Saluting his poetic ears,

Consoled him and dispelled his fears ;

He left his bed, he trod the floor,

He 'gan in haste the drawers explore,

The lowest first, and without stop

The rest in order to the top.

For 'tis a truth well known to most,

That whatsoever thing is lost,

We seek it, ere it come to light,

In every cranny but the right.

Forth skipped the cat, not now replete

As erst with airy self-conceit,

Nor, in her own fond apprehension,

A theme for all the world's attention,

But modest, sober, cured of all

Her notions hyperbolical,

And wishing, for a place of rest,

Anything rather than a chest.

Then stepped the poet into bed

With this reflection in his head :

Beware of too sublime a sense

Of your own worth and consequence.

The man who dreams himself so great,

And his importance of such weight,

That all around in all that's done

Must move and act for him alone,

Will learn in school of tribulation

The folly of his expectation.'

The father reading and remarking — the children
with happy faces and merry trills of laughter clustered
round his knee — the mother tranquillized and hopeful
after her terrible anxieties of the preceding days — such
is the spectacle which, on this Tuesday evening, two days
before Christmas, 1856, we behold in the home of Hugh
Miller. Mrs Miller was making tea, when she heard
his voice ' in tones of anguish ' reading The Castaway.
Here are a few of the verses.

THE CASTAWAY. 479

' Obscurest night involved the sky,

The Atlantic billows rolled,
When such a destined wretch as I,

Washed headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home for ever left.

' Not long beneath the whelming brine,

Expert to swim, he lay ;
Nor soon he felt his strength decline,

Or courage die away ;
But waged with death a lasting strife,
Supported by despair of life.

( He long survives who lives an hour

In ocean, self-upheld :
And so long he, with unspent power,

His destiny repelled ;
And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried — " Adieu ! "

' At length, his transient respite past,

His comrades, who before
Had heard his voice in every blast,
Could catch the sound no more.
For then, by toil subdued, he drank
The stifling wave, and then he sank.

* No poet wept him : but the page

Of narrative sincere,
That tells his name, his worth, his age,

Is wet with Anson's tear ;
And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalize the dead.

* I therefore purpose not, or dream,

Descanting on his fate,
To give the melancholy theme

A more enduring date :
But misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another's case.

' No voice divine the storm allayed,

No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effectual aid,

We perished, each alone :
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.'

480 MAN OF SCIENCE.

Mrs Miller, however, was not alarmed. She felt
that her husband, in capacity of critic and reader, was
merely bringing out by sudden and skilful contrast the
range of Cowper's power, now archly droll, now sternly
tragical. He turned, last of all, to the Lines to Mary,
and, at certain of the verses, she could perceive half-
stolen glances at her over the page.

1 Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,
Are still more lovely in my sight
Than golden beams of orient light,
My Mary !

' For could I view nor them nor thee,
What sight worth seeing could I see ?
The sun would rise in vain for me,
My Mary !

* Partakers of thy sad decline,

Thy hands their little force resign ;
But, gently pressed, press gently mine,
My Mary !

4 Such feebleness of limb thou prov'st,
That now, at every step thou mov'st
Upheld by two, yet still thou lov'st,
My Mary !

* And still to love, though pressed with ill,
In wintry age to feel no chill,

With me is to be lovely still,

My Mary ! '

Early in the evening, as might have been expected
after that agitating day, Mrs Miller began to feel
weary. She went to the kitchen and gave particular
orders about his bath ; then, returning to the sitting-
room, she remarked to him that she was ' very, very
tired' and would be forced to leave him sooner than
usual. ' Now/ he said, ' that I am forbidden ale or
porter, don't you think that in future I might have a
cup of coffee before going to bed ? ' With some hesita-
tion she assented, and promised that the coffee should

TUESDAY NIGHT. 481

be brought him. The good-night kiss followed, and she
retired to slumbers which were probably the deeper on
account of the excitement and fatigue, the anxieties
and consolations, of the preceding day. Miller went
up-stairs to his study. At the appointed hour he took
the bath, but, alas ! his intense repugnance to physic
prevailed over him, and the dose of prescribed medicine
was left untouched. From his study he went into his
sleeping-room and lay down upon his bed.

At what hour can never be ascertained, but either
in the dead of night or in the grey dawn of morning, he
arose from the bed and half dressed himself. Then the
trance of paroxysmal horror again came over him, and
the maniacal persuasion which had for days been
haunting him drove him mad. He rushed to the table,
and, on a folio sheet of paper, on the centre of the page,
traced the following lines :

'DEAREST LYDIA,

' My brain burns. I must have walked ; and
a fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the
horrible thought. God and Father of the Lord Jesus
Christ, have mercy upon me. Dearest Lydia, dear
children, farewell. My brain burns as the recollection
grows. My dear, dear wife, farewell.

' HUGH MILLER.'

The iron resolution and courage of the man appeared
even in the maniac. He wore a thick woven seaman's
jacket over his chest. This he raised on the left above
the heart, and, applying the muzzle of his revolver, fired.
The ball perforated the left lung, grazed the heart, cut
through the pulmonary artery at its root, and lodged in
the rib on the right side. The pistol slipped from his
hand into the bath which stood close by, and he fell

VOL. II. 31

482 MAN OF SCIENCE.

dead instantaneously. The body was found lying on
the floor, the feet upon the study rug.

A post-mortem examination having been made, the
following report was the result :—

' Edinburgh, December 26, 1856.

' We hereby certify on soul and conscience, that we
have this day examined the body of Mr Hugh Miller, at
Shrub Mount, Portobello.

' The cause of death we found to be a pistol-shot
through the left side of the chest ; and this, we are satis-
fied, was inflicted by his own hand.

' From the diseased appearances found in the brain,
taken in connection with the history of the case, we have
no doubt that the act was suicidal under the impulse of
insanity.

< JAMES MILLER,
'A. H. BALEOUR,
<W. T. GAIRDNER,
<A. M. EDWARDS.'

It is a melancholy satisfaction to reflect that, in no
case of suicide which ever took place, can the evidence of
insanity have been more express or conclusive. Had
no trace of disease been found in the brain — had no
word written by Hugh Miller at the last attested mad-
ness— the overwork to which he had subjected himself,
the excitement to which he had been a prey, would
have afforded adequate grounds for believing him insane.
But the actual mania which was gaining the mastery
over him had been defined by himself some days before
his death ; and this mania, namely, that he was driven
by witches or demons in the darkness, is specified be-
yond possibility of mistake or doubt, in the thrilling
words, ' I must have walked? That even when he was

HIS EXPRESSION IN DEATH. 483

the victim of mania, the tenderness of his nature sur-
vived, that he could still discriminate the supremacy
of his affection for the wife of his youth, that the cry
of his heart, when reason was eclipsed in madness and
the shadow of death fell on the reeling brain, rose clear
to God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, will
be dwelt on with sad interest by those whom Hugh
Miller taught to love him with inexpressible love.

' The body,' writes Dr Hanna, who was one of the
first to see it, ' was lifted and laid upon the bed.
We saw it there a few hours afterwards. The head lay
back, side-ways on the pillow. There was the massive
brow, the firm-set, manly features, we had so often
looked upon admiringly, just as we had lately seen
them, — no touch nor trace upon them of disease,—
nothing but that overspread pallor of death to distin-
guish them from what they had been. But the expres-
sion of that countenance in death will live in our
memory for ever. Death by gun-shot wounds is said
to leave no trace of suffering behind ; and never was
there a face of the dead freer from all shadow of pain,
or grief, or conflict, than that of our dear departed
friend. And as we bent over it, and remembered the
troubled look it sometimes had in life, and thought
what must have been the sublimely-terrific expression
that it wore at the moment when the fatal deed was
done, we could not help thinking that it lay there to
tell us, in that expression of unruffled majestic repose
that sat upon every feature, what we so assuredly
believe, that the spirit had passed through a terrible
tornado, in which reason had been broken down ; but
that it had made the great passage in safety, and stood
looking back to us, in humble, grateful triumph, from
the other side/

484 MAN OF SCIENCE.

The excitement occasioned by the event throughout
Scotland was tremendous, and no such funeral had taken
place in Edinburgh since that of Chalmers. He was laid
in the Grange cemetery, near the spot where Chalmers
rests.

' From a large number of letters received by Mrs
Miller on the occasion of her husband's death, the three
which follow are selected for publication.

' Tavistock House, London, Thursday, April 16th, 1857.

1 DEAR MADAM,

' Allow me to assure you that I have received
the last work of your late much-lamented husband with
feelings of mournful respect for his memory and of
heartfelt sympathy with you. It touches me very
sensibly to know, from the inscription appended to the
volume, that he wished it to be given to me. Believe
me, it will fill no neglected place on my book-shelves,
but will always be precious to me, in remembrance of a
delightful writer, an accomplished follower of science,
and an upright and good man.

* I hope I may, dear Madam, without obtrusion on
your great bereavement, venture to offer you my thanks
and condolences, and to add that, before I was brought
into this personal association with your late husband's
final labour, I was one of the many thousands whose
thoughts had been much with you.

1 Yours faithfully and obliged,

1 CHARLES DICKENS/
MRS HUGH MILLER.

' Chelsea, April 15th, 1857.

' MY DEAR MADAM,

' Last night I received a Gift of your sending,
which is at once very precious and very mournful to me!

LETTER FROM MR CARLYLE. 485

' There is for ever connected with the very title of
this Book the fact that, in writing it, the cordage of a
strong heart cracked in pieces ; that the ink of it is a
brave man's life-blood ! The Book itself, I already see,
is full of grave, manly talent, clearness, eloquence,
faithful conviction, inquiry, knowledge ; and will teach
me and others much in reading it : but that is already
an extrinsic fact, which will give it a double significance
to us all. For myself, a voice of friendly recognition
from such a man, coming to me thus out of the still
kingdoms, has something in it of religion ; and is strange
and solemn in these profane, empty times.

' In common with everybody, I mourned over the
late tragic catastrophe ; the world's great loss, especially
your irreparable and ever-lamentable one : but as for
him, I confess there was always present, after the first
shock, the thought that at least he was out of bondage,
into freedom and rest. I perceived that, for such a
man there was no rest appointed except in the countries
where he now is !

' Dear Madam, what can we say ? The ways of
God are high and dark, and yet there is mercy hidden
in them. Surely, if we know anything, it is that " His
goodness endureth for ever." I will not insult your
grief by pretending to lighten it. You and your little
ones, yes, you have cause, as few have had, to mourn ;
but you have also such assuagements as not many have.

' With respectful sympathy, with many true thanks
and regards, I remain,

' Sincerely yours,

'T. CARLYLE/

486 MAN OF SCIENCE.

' Denmark Hill, April 9th, 1857.

' MY DEAR MADAM,

' I received yesterday evening the book which
I owe to the kindness of your late husband, and which
I receive as from his hand ; with mingled feelings, not
altogether to be set down in a letter, even if I could
tell you them without giving some new power of hurt,
if that be possible, to your own sorrow. But there are
one or two things which I want to say to you. Hu-
manly speaking, I cannot imagine a greater grief than
yours, or one which a stranger should more reverently
or more hopelessly leave unspoken of, attempting no
word of consolation ; and yet I can fancy that there is
one point in which you may not yet have enough
regarded it. To all of us, who knew your late hus-
band's genius at all, — to you, above all, who knew it
best, — it seems to me that the bitterest cruelty of the
trial must lie in the sense of his work being so unac-
complished, of all that he might have done, had he
lived ; and of the littleness of the thing that brought
about his illness and death. It seems so hard that a
little overwork, a few more commas to be put into a
page of type, a paragraph to be shortened or added, in
the last moment, should make the difference between
life and death. Perhaps your friends have dwelt too
much — if they have attempted to help you at all — on
ordinary beaten topics of religious consolation, not, it
seems to me, applying to the worst part of this sorrow,
and they may not have dwelt enough on what does
fully bear upon it, namely, the general law of Pro-
vidence in God's " strange work." We rarely see how
small the things are which bring about what He has
appointed, nor do we see, generally, the strange loss,
which takes place continually, of the powers He gives.

LETTER FROM MR RUSKIN. 487

If you could see this, you would not feel that He had
set you up as a mark, and spared no arrows. That
which has befallen you, though you do not think it, is
yet the common lot of man. The earth is full of lost
powers ; no human soul perishes, but, if you could only
read its true history, you would find that not the
thousandth part of its possible work had been done ;
that even when the result seemed greatest the man
either was or ought to have been conscious of irre-
parable failure and shortcoming ; that, in the plurality
of cases, the whole end and use of life had been more or
less lost, and, in many cases, in the cruelest way, by
accident or adversity. And in like manner, if you
could only see the origin of all diseases, you would see
that what we called a natural disease, and received as
an inevitable dispensation, did in reality depend on
some pettiest of petty chances (I speak humanly) ; on
the man's having untied his neckerchief near a window,
when he should not; on his having stopped at the
street-corner in an east wind to talk to a friend for half
a minute ; on his having worried himself uselessly about
an overcharge in a bill ; nothing is so trivial, but it
may be the Appointed Death- Angel to the man. And
when once you feel this fully (my own work has taught
me this more than most men's, for no wreck is so fre-
quent, no waste so wild, as the wreck and waste of the
minds of men devoted to the arts), when once you feel
it, and understand that this waste, which seems so won-
derful to us, is intended by the Deity to be a part of
his dealing with men (just as the rivers are poured out
to run into their swallowing Death-sea, only a lip here
and there tasting them), and that this law of chance,
which seems so trivial to us, is as entirely in His hand
as the lightning and the plague-spot ; then, while to

488 MAN OF SCIENCE.

all of us who are still counting the hours, the truth is a
solemn one ; to those who mourn for their dead, it
ought not to be a distressing one. It is only to our
narrow human view that anything is lost or wasted.
God gave the mind to do a certain work, and withdrew
it when that work was done ; we, poor innocents, may
fancy that something else should have been done ; so
assuredly, in all cases, it should ; but in no special and
separate instance can we say, — here is a destiny pe-
culiarly broken, here a work peculiarly unfulfilled. I
read that God will say to his good servants, " Well
done," but not, " Enough done." It is only He who
judges of and appoints that " enough."

' Pardon me if I pain you by dwelling on this, but I
know that many persons do not feel this generalness in
human shortcoming ; we are all too apt to think every-
thing has been right if a man lives to be old, and
everything lost if he dies young.

' I have not been able to look much at the book
yet, but it seems a noble bequest to us.

'Believe me, my dear Madam, always respectfully
and faithfully yours,

' J. RUSKIN.'

I was personally acquainted with Hugh Miller only
in the few last years of his life. I knew that my rela-
tives in the Highlands were on terms of intimate friend-
ship with him, and that I could be introduced to him
whenever I chose ; but I had a vague feeling that I
could know him most advantageously by thoroughly
studying one or more of his books. I used to attend
the lectures delivered in connection with the Edin-
burgh Philosophical Institution, and it was on its
platform that I first had full view and hearing of

A UTHORS RECOLLECTIONS. 489

Hugh Miller. The spell of his personality fell upon me *
at once. The large shaggy head, the massive bust, the
modest grandeur of demeanour, the unmistakable im-
press of power on calm lip and in steadfast eye, the look
of originality and rugged strength about the whole man,
arrested and enchained me. There breathed around him,
also, a certain indefinable influence of gentleness and
noble affection. You felt that he was honest and good.
The mood of admiring indifference with which I had re-
garded him gave place to ardent interest. His language,
clear, idiomatic, melodious, derived zest from his pro-
vincial accent, and I shall never forget the moment
when he concluded a classically picturesque and beauti-
ful passage, descriptive of an ancient Scottish forest,
with the words, ' the exe hed been buzzy in its gleds,'
i. e. the axe had been busy in its glades. I now lost no
time in becoming personally acquainted with Hugh
Miller. My welcome was cordial ; I soon felt myself at
home in his society and household ; and would look in
not unfrequently of an evening, taking part in his
favourite meal, supper, and engaging with him in free
and varied conversation.

One of the first things I noted in the domestic
circle to which I had been introduced was the harmoni-
ous and seemly relation subsisting between husband
and wife. There was no trace of intellectual dictator-
ship on his part ; he carefully considered and highly
valued every remark of Mrs Miller's. On her side
there was reverence for his mental power, without
the slightest sacrifice of independent judgment, and
with an obvious and lively delight in argumentative con-
versation. At times, in the friendliest tone, she would
hint to him that some part of his dress might be improved,
and pleasant little banterings — 'netted sunbeams' on

490 MAN OF SCIENCE.

'the surface of the stream, showing the depth of the flow
of conjugal happiness beneath, — -would occur upon the
subject. I remember, for instance, that his hat was
once pronounced exceptionable, and that, by way of
providing himself with an ally against Mrs Miller on the
point, he had trained his son Hugh, just beginning to
toddle and to lisp, to say,

' Papa has got a very bad hat,
And many a word he hears about that.'

The impression formed in my mind was that Mr and
Mrs Miller were on exactly those terms on which it was
desirable and beautiful that a man eminent in the in-
tellectual world and his wife should be.

By Hugh Miller's manner to myself I was fascin-
ated, and not a little surprised. He talked little and
heard much. It seemed to please him to observe the
lights cast on subjects by a younger mind ; the line of
my culture, also, was somewhat different from his own,
for I then cared comparatively little for science, and was
in a perpetual glow of enthusiasm about Shelley, Keats,
Tennyson, Carlyle, and Ruskin ; and my opinions, quietly
allowed to gush forth in the artless gabble of youth,
may have interested him as natural curiosities. Happily
I have forgotten my own remarks, unhappily also most
of his. He never spoke on the impulse of the moment,
though he never hesitated. The opinion had been con-
sidered long before, and put into its place in his
memory ; and it was brought out with a calm pre-
cision which suggested that he had ceased to discuss
the subject. His gentleness, his willingness to listen,
his intellectual tolerance and fine kind sympathy, took
captive my heart. This man, I felt, whatever else he
may or may not be, is a born gentleman. The idea
got hold of my mind, and in a sketch of Hugh Miller

A UTHORS RECOLLECTIONS. 49 1

contributed to an Edinburgh magazine at the time, I
dwelt on it at some length. The passage, slightly ab-
breviated, may as well be printed here. It conveys, in
spite of juvenility of expression, a more vivid notion of
what then struck me in his deportment than any words
I could now use.

•'Perhaps the highest compliment, all things con-
sidered, which we can pay to Hugh Miller is this,—
that he is in the best sense a gentleman, that he is
truly and strictly polite. True politeness is one of the
rarest things ; it may be met with in the hut of the
Arab, in the courtyard of the Turk, in the cottage of the
Irishman ; and it is excessively scarce in ball-rooms. It
is independent of accent and of form ; it is one of the
constant and universal noble attributes of man, wherever
and howsoever developed. We venture to define it thus :
Politeness is natural, genial, manly deference, with
delicacy in dealing with the feelings of others, and
without hypocrisy, sycophancy, or obtrusion. This de-
finition excludes a great many people. We cannot agree
that Johnson was polite ; that is, if politeness is to be
distinguished from nobleness, courage, and even kindness
of heart ; in a word, from everything but itself. Burns
was polite, when jewelled duchesses were charmed with
his ways ; Arnold was polite, when a poor woman
declared that he treated her like a lady ; Chalmers was
polite, when every old woman in Morningside was
elated and delighted with his courteous salute. But
Johnson, who shut a civil man's mouth with ' Sir, I per-
ceive you are a vile Whig/ who ate like an Esquimaux,
who deferred so far to his friends that they dared to
differ with him only in a round-robin, was not polite.
Politeness is the last touch, the finishing perfection, of a
noble character. It is the gold on the spire, the sun-

492 MAN OF SCIENCE.

light on the corn-field, the smile on the lip of the
noble knight lowering his sword-point to his ladye-love.
It results only from the truest balance and harmony of
soul. We assert Hugh Miller to possess it. A duke in
speaking to him would know he was speaking to a man
as independent as himself ; a boy, in expressing to him
an opinion, would feel unabashed and easy, from his
genial and unostentatious deference. He has been ac-
cused of egotism. Let it be fairly admitted that he knows
his name is Hugh Miller, and that he has a colossal head,
and that he once was a mason ; his foible is probably
that which caused Napoleon, in a company of kings, to
commence an anecdote with " When I was a lieutenant
in the regiment of La Fere." But we cannot think it
more than a very slight foible ; a manly self-conscious-
ness somewhat in excess. Years in the quarry have not
dimmed in Hugh Miller that finishing gleam of genial
light which plays over the framework of character, and
is politeness. Not only did he require honest manli-
ness for this ; gentleness was also necessary. He had
both, and has retained them; and therefore merits
fairly

" The grand old name of gentleman." '

It was impossible to be long in Miller's company
without perceiving the ardour of his devotion to science.
He considered literature inferior to science as a gym-
nastic of the mind. For the facile culture of the age he
had great contempt, and ranked both religion and labour
as stimulating, training agencies for mind and character,
higher than what is commonly called education. 'As
for the dream,' he says in one of his books, ' that there
is to be some extraordinary elevation of the general
platform of the race achieved by means of education, it
is simply the hallucination of the age, — the world's

AUTHORS RECOLLECTIONS. 493

present alchemical expedient for converting farthings
into guineas, sheerly by dint of scouring/ All that
he had won had been won by stern effort, and he had
no faith in royal roads to any kind of attainment.

Supremely devoted to science, he naturally regarded
men eminent in science as standing higher than men
eminent in literature. I recollect that once when the
claims of Scotland to honour in the world of intellect
were on the carpet, I remarked that, at all events,
the first man of mind for the time being was a Scotch-
man. ' Who is that, Mr Bayne ? ' he asked. My
reply was prompt and decisive, ' Thomas Carlyle ! '
' Ah, no ! ' he said with great deliberation, ' Carlyle is
not the greatest living man/ 'Who, then?' I inquired.
He would not name any one, but repeated ' Ah, no !
Mr Bayne, Carlyle is not the greatest/ From some-
thing in his manner at the moment the impression was
conveyed to me that he would not have been surprised
to hear himself named as the greatest of living Scotch-
men. I gathered, also, from some of his remarks which
I cannot precisely recall, that, if forced to say who was,
in his opinion, the most remarkable man of the day, he
would have sought him among the servants of science
rather than among the cultivators of literature. He
recognized Carlyle's great powers, however, and sym-
pathized with many of the views of Rhadamanthus as
to the superficiality and sentimentalism of the time. He
more than half approved of Carlyle's stern views as to the
treatment of criminals, and would have liked to see our
grim disciplinarian try his hand upon a few drafts from
the ' devil's regiments of the line/

Once or twice Mr Gilfillan was mentioned. Miller
had a friendly feeling towards him and expressed
admiration of his brilliancy, but thought it overdone.

494 MAN OF SCIENCE.

Mr G.'s style, he said, had an amount of ornament dis-
proportioned to his thought. It suggested to him a
lady's dress so stiffened with jewellery that it could stand
without anybody in it. We once spoke of Professor
Aytoun's satire on Mr Gilfillan. Miller had not seen it,
and was interested by my account of the production. I
mentioned that the satirized critic, Apollodorus, is repre-
sented as writing to eminent men, and commenting thus
upon the manner of their reply :

( What have they answered ? Marry, only this,
Who, in the name of Zernebock, are you ? '

He laughed heartily. There were, I added, far harder
things in the poem. Apollodorus, for example, was in-
troduced soliloquizing : —

' Why do men call me a presumptuous cur,
A vapouring blockhead, and a turgid fool,
A common nuisance and a charlatan ? '

This sharply displeased him. ' That is too severe,' he
said. He became silent, showed no disposition to
continue the conversation, and seemed to brood in-
dignantly on the cruelty of the words. I am not sure
that it would have been safe at that moment for Mr
Aytoun to have come into the presence of Hugh
Miller. ' There was/ says Professor Masson, in his
masterly sketch of his friend, ' a tremendous element of
ferocity in Hugh Miller. It amounted to a disposition
to kill. He was a grave, gentle, kindly, fatherly, church-
going man, who would not have hurt a fly, would have
lifted a child tenderly out of harm's way in the street,
and would have risked his life to save even a dumb
creature's ; but woe betide the enemy that came athwart
him when his blood was up ! In this there was more of
the Scandinavian than of the Celt. It appeared even in
his newspaper-articles. At various times he got into

AUTHOR'S RECOLLECTIONS. 495

personal controversies, and I know no instance in which
he did not leave his adversary not only slain, but bat-
tered, bruised, and beaten out of shape. It seemed to
be a 'principle with him — :the only principle on which
he could fight — that a battle must always be a rout-
ranee, that there could be no victory short of the utter
extermination of the opposed organism. Hence, in the
course of his editorial career, not a few immense, un-
seemly exaggerations of the polemical spirit, — much
sledge-hammering where a tap or two would have suf-
ficed. A duel of opinions was apt to become with him
a duel of reputations and of persons.'

This is strongly put. I have not found in Hugh
Miller anything amounting to a disposition to kill.
But he possessed a huge capacity of wrath, and that
love of adventure, of danger, of battle, which distin-
guishes his nation. It has often occurred to me that
he had in him the making of a great general. His eye
would have embraced in a moment the points of a
position, and his spirit would have risen into clearness
and stern joy in proportion as difficulty and peril in-
creased. He would have inspired his men with abso-
lute faith in him, as a rock to stand, as an avalanche to
charge.

It was frequently late at night when I took leave,
and he would insist on giving me convoy from Stuart
Street, near Portobello, where he lived at the time, to
the outskirts of Edinburgh. We used to part at the
Calton Hill. On one occasion he pulled out a pistol,
and remarked that he was prepared if any one should
attack us. Having no thought of danger, I was much
surprised. By way of explanation, he gave me an
account of his adventure when walking by night be-
tween Wolverton and Newport Pagnell, as detailed in

496 MAN OF SCIENCE.

the First Impressions. The district was at the time in-
fested with ruffians and blackguards, who had come to
see a prize-fight between Gaunt and Bendigo for the
championship of England. ' About half-way on/ says
Miller, ' where the road runs between tall hedges, two
fellows started out towards me, one from each side of
the way. " Is this the road," asked one, " to Newport
Pagnell?" "Quite a stranger here," I replied, without
slackening my pace ; " don't belong to the kingdom,
even." "No?" said the same fellow, increasing his
speed as if to overtake me; "to what kingdom, then?"
" Scotland," I said, turning suddenly round, somewhat
afraid of being taken behind by a bludgeon. The two
fellows sheered off in double-quick time, the one who
had already addressed me muttering, " More like an
Irishman, I think ; " and I saw no more of them. I
had luckily a brace of loaded pistols about me, and had
at the moment a trigger under each fore-finger.' He
first carried pistols when conveying the Bank's money
between Cromarty and Tain. Soon after coming to
Edinburgh, he commenced a series of investigations in
the Lothian coal-field, which brought him into lonely
places where he believed that suspicious characters
might lurk. He took with him his fire-arms, therefore,
and I should suppose that, in subsequent years, he was
seldom abroad in the night without them.

In conversation, as in his books, he was sensitively
orthodox. I once spoke with enthusiastic admiration
of that famed vision of Jean Paul's, in which the author,
with a view to symbolizing the horror of atheism, in-
troduces Jesus Christ looking up into a blank universe,
one vast hollow eye-socket, emptied of its eye, and
wailing for His Eather. Miller would see in the piece
nothing beyond the poetical expression of a lofty Uni-

AUTHORS RECOLLECTIONS. 497

tarianism, and maintained that Jean Paul intended to
deny the Divinity of Christ. His Unitarianism might
be more spiritual than that common in England, but
Unitarianism it was. Mrs Miller and I took the op-
posite view, arguing that it was legitimate in the
imaginative dreamer to introduce Christ as the re-
presentative of created being, and to illustrate the
ghastliness of atheism by letting us see Him, a home-
less orphan, filling with moans the black hollow of
the universal night ; but Miller held to his point.

We did not speak often of the Church contro-
versy or the Disruption ; but once, in his most earnest
mood, he expressed that opinion as to the Jehu-like
driving of the Evangelical leaders which I formerly
mentioned. It was easy to perceive that he trans-
ferred to the Edinburgh Radicals that dislike with
which he had regarded those of Cromarty. He was
a steadfast Whig, but his sympathies were more with
Conservatism than Radicalism. One of his profoundest
enthusiasms was for the poetry of Burns, and I have
heard him declaim one of Burns 's grandest passages,—
that about Scotland in the Vision, — with great fervour
and deep rhythmic intonation. His memory seemed
to be full of English poetry, and, at sauntering times, in
waiting for omnibuses or the like, he would pour out
stanza after stanza with astonishing profusion. The last
conversation I ever had with him was at Shrub Mount
in 1855, when we walked about the garden in earnest
talk. There was a great noise at the time about the
antiquity of the human race, and the question whether
mankind have proceeded from one local centre, or from
more than one. He agreed with me in considering the
question of man's antiquity of slight importance com-
pared with that of the unity of the race ; and cordially

VOL. n. 32

498 MAN OF SCIENCE.

assented to the proposition that the relationship of
men to Christ is a matter of infinitely more consequence
than their relationship to Adam.

I had not much intercourse with Hugh Miller, but,
such as it was, I treasure the recollection of it with
reverent affection. Here was a man to inspire infinite
trust, a sterling, incorruptible man, with whom one
would like to stand shoulder to shoulder in the eddies
of a stubborn fray. Incapable of malignity, his sympa-
thetic sensibility vibrating in fine response to every
touch of right sentiment, his intellectual interest playing
over the whole field of human life and every province of
nature, he had only to be known in order to be loved.
He was very gentle, very kind, but you felt that, in the
calm background of his mind, like a lion slumbering
by a rock, slumbering but not asleep, lay a grand sense
of moral rectitude, which, if wrong was threatened or
baseness done, could spring forth in crashing ire.

I can now see that my impressions of him, not in-
correct so far as they went, were essentially first impres-
sions. With this biography I have been fitfully engaged
for ten years, often interrupted in the work, and forced
to go again and again over the same ground. The
delay may have been in some respects inconvenient, but
it has had the advantage of making me live all these
years in constant converse with Hugh Miller. Nothing,
I believe, of considerable importance, which he did,
said, thought, or felt, has escaped me, although, of
course, it was only a portion of those materials which
could be used in this book. The better I have known,
the more deeply have I revered, the more entirely have
I loved him, A man of priceless worth ; fine gold,
purified sevenfold ; delicate splendour of honour, sens-
itive and proud ; perfect sincerity and faithfulness in

HIS GENIUS. 499

heart and mind. He never failed a friend. His comrade
of the hewing-shed sits down at his table when he has
become one of the most distinguished men of his time ;
another friend is discovered to be at hand-grips with
fortune, and he applies himself, with cunning delicacy,
to solve the problem of inducing him to accept assist-
ance. This was the -manner and habit of the man.

Of his power of brain, — of his genius and originality,
— his books, viewed in connection with the circum-
stances of his career, are the living witnesses. To their
testimony must be added the fact of the great influence
he exerted upon his contemporaries, the personal
weight, the intellectual mass and magnitude, he was
felt to possess. Professor Masson, commenting on the
curious notion of a Fleet Street oracle, that he was
devoid of genius, has declared his conviction that, ' if
the word was applicable to the description of any mind,
it was to the description of Hugh Miller's/ If we
estimate the amount of obstruction which lay between
the mason lad of Gairloch and Niddry, and the Hugh
Miller of Edinburgh, whom Murchison, Lyell, Agassiz
hailed as a brother, we shall admit that the opinion is
not, primd facie, unreasonable. I take liberty to add
that, if genius means an indefinable something, con-
ferred by nature, inimitable, incommunicable, never
given twice in exactly the same form and colour, — a
power of enchantment which all men feel, but no man
can quite describe, — then the critic who denies genius
to Hugh Miller does not understand his craft. He
owed, without question, much to culture. Twenty
years of study and practice, assiduous reading, careful
self-correction, were required to perfect his prose style
and to give him the complete command of it which
he ultimately obtained. But all this only brought

500 MAN OF SCIENCE.

into clearness and use the gift born with him, a gift
traceable in his earliest letters, a gift of tempered
mental strength, of brightly keen perception and broad
imaginative vision, a rare gift of expression, in subtly-
modulated sentence, and exquisitely-felicitous image,
and solemn harmony of sense and sound, and tenderly-
brilliant colour lighting up the whole. Mr Robert
Chambers proved himself to have the true critical eye
when he referred, at a very early period of their inter-
course, to the singular interest attaching to all he wrote.
The omniscient little critics who deny him genius may
imitate that if they can ; it secured Miller a large and
intelligent audience throughout the civilized world, an
audience whose ear he caught so soon as his power was
revealed, and which, thirty years after the publication
of the Old Red Sandstone, continues to extend.

So far as I can penetrate the charm of his composi-
tion, it lies mainly in the fine continuity of it, in the
absence of all jerking, jolting movement, in the callida
junctura not of word to word merely, but of sentence to
sentence, thought to thought, illustration to illustration.
An author's peculiar excellence, if we have rightly dis-
criminated it, will give us a hint as to where we should
look for his besetting fault, and in reading Miller long
at one time, we may find in his billowy regularity and
smoothness of movement a sense of monotony. Yet on
the whole there is a marvellous enchantment in his
books ; the breath of the hills is in them, the freshness
of the west wind and the sea. Shall we not now venture
to decide — the question was left open when it last came
before us — that it was advantageous for him to break
away from school, and betake himself to the caves and
the wood ? Nature is the only safe nurse of genius ;
education is indispensable, but even the education must

HIS ED VGA TION. 501

be suggested by nature, and come at her prompting.
Shakspeare was an educated man ; he had a large know-
ledge of the books of his time ; but all generations
would have been poorer if his brain had been drugged
in boyhood with the trite erudition of Universities.
Books came to Miller at the right moment ; when he
had already so filled his mind with Nature's imagery
that they could do no more than genially assist him to
use it. To read him is like taking a walk with him ;
we are never far from the crags and the waters, the
dewy branch and the purple heather. Compare this
with the prim urban elegance of Jeffrey, or the hard
vehemence, like rainless thunder, or the full gallop of
cavalry, of the style of Sir William Hamilton, and you
will begin to realize how much Hugh Miller owed to the
circumstance that his Alma Mater was his mother earth.
As a naturalist, also, and as a geologist, his power came
essentially from the same source. The hours on the
ebb shore with Uncle Sandy, the tracing of the subtle-
ties of life among the minute denizens of the crystal
pools, the watching of the race of the waves when the
tide turned, first slowly, tentatively, listlessly, each
timorous wavelet with its lifted handful of dusty sand,
then in hurrying clamorous advance of leaping foam
and marshalled surge along the reaches of the shore,—
the long years of toil in the quarry, and of wandering
among the hills, to mark the fellowship of the rocks,
and learn the joints and curvature of the bones of the
world, — these gave him his intuitive sympathy with
Nature's ways, his geological eye to discern how THE
ARCHITECT had put together this and that bit of the
planet. ' The thing was done so,' he could say, ' and
not in the way you mention ; you can fold up your
theoretical demonstration when you please.'

502 MAN OF SCIENCE.

May we not call his life, first and last, beautiful,
august, heroic ? From his father, whose very image he
in his later years became, he derived the ground- work of
his character, and for the education of conscience he was
primarily indebted, though he little knew it at the time,
to his Uncle James. In early manhood he was encom-
passed with hardship, with coarseness, with manifold
temptation. His soul took no taint. He rose superior to
every form of vulgarity, the vulgar ambition of wealth,
the vulgar ambition of notoriety, the vulgar baseness of
sensuality and licence. He aspired to fame, but it was
to fame which should be the ratification of his own
severe judgment. ' I have myself,' he said, ' for my
critic ; ' and while the decision of this sternest censor
was even moderately favourable, no sneers could de-
press, no applause elate him. His course, thencefor-
ward, was a steadfast pursuit of truth and of knowledge,
an unwearied dedication of himself to all that he believed
to be true, and honest, and lovely, and of good report.
In the meridian of his years, he threw himself into the
noblest religious movement of his time, impelling and
directing it, a movement which he largely contributed
to carry to a triumphant issue. As his science had
begun in converse with nature, so he carried on the
study day by day and year by year, traversing thou-
sands of miles for express purposes of observation, and
at all moments, at home or in the field, he was awake with
keenest vigilance to the powers of nature at work around
him. Modern in all his habits of study, he did not, in
tracing the surface light of science, forget that Divine
mystery which nature shadows forth. God in the uni-
verse was for him a reality as forceful and present as
for those Hebrew psalmists whom it inspired with the
ublimest strains in existence. The autumn blast raised

CONCLUSION. 503

his mind to One that walketh on the wings of the wind :
at His look the earth trembled in the throes of earth-
quake, and at His touch the volcano smoked.

Hugh Miller stands alone, so far as I am aware, among
self-educated men of recent times, first, in the thorough-
ness of his education, the technically disciplined and
ordered thinking to which he attained, secondly, in the
absence from his books and letters of all extravagance,
histrionism, paradox, of all trace of that furious, teeth-
gnashing humour which has been so much in vogue in
our century. Great instincts of order and of common
sense, inherited from his father, allied him to what \vas
stable in the institutions of his country. Religion,
integrity, continence, moderation, obedience, — all those
virtues against which the waves of modern anarchism
beat wild, — saw him fighting behind their bulwark.
They are shallow critics who recognize genius only, as
Uriel recognized Satan, by the violence of its gestures
and the devilishness of its scowl ; in healthful times
men of genius have neither affected a perverse sin-
gularity, nor taken as their dialect an everlasting
snarl. That Hugh Miller was a man of genius would
never have been called in question had his works not
been so free from the distempers of genius.

THE END.

JOHN CHILPS AND SON, J'KINTERS.

i

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The life and letters
of Hugh Miller.

PHYSICAL

SCIENCES

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v.2

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[Bayne, P.

The life and letters
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1871

UMWERSITY OF CALIFORNIA