HUGH MILLER

PREFACE

In the absence of material dealing especially with his last years in Edinburgh a complete Life of Hugh Miller will probably never be attempted. I am informed by his daughter, Mrs. Miller Mackay, F.C. Manse, Lochinver, that the letters and materials sent out to Australia to form the basis of a projected biography by his son-in-law and daughter disappeared, and have never been recovered. The recent deaths of his son and of others who knew Hugh Miller in Cromarty and in Edinburgh still more preclude the appearance of a full and authentic presentation. To the scientist the works of Miller will ever form the best biography; to the general reader and to those who, from various causes, regard biography as made for man and not man for biography some such sketch as the following may, it is believed, not be unacceptable.

To treat Hugh Miller apart from his surroundings of Church and State would be as impossible as it would be unjust. Accordingly the presentation deliberately adopted has been from his own standpoint—the unhesitating and undeviating traditions of Scotland.

Geology has moved since his day. In the last chapter I have accordingly followed largely in the steps of Agassiz in the selection of material for a succinct account of Miller's main scientific and theological standpoints or contributions. My best thanks are due to Principal Donaldson of the University of St. Andrews for looking over the proof-sheets; to Sir Archibald Geikie, Director-General of the Geological Survey, London, for his admirable reminiscence of his early friend contained in the last pages of this work; and to my friend J. D. Symon, M.A., for the bibliography of Miller in the closing appendix.

W. K. L.

Aberdeen, April 1896.

CONTENTS

HUGH MILLER

  CHAPTER I

EARLY DAYS—IN CROMARTY

The little town of Cromarty lies perched on the southern shore of the entrance to the Firth of that name, and derives its name from the Cromachty, the crook or winding of the magnificent stretch of water known to Buchanan and the ancient geographers as the Ecclesiastical History, 'in which the very greatest navies may rest secure from storms.' In the history of Scotland the place is scarcely mentioned; and, indeed, in literary matters is known only from its association with the names of Hugh Miller and the rare figure of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, who had followed Charles II. to the 'crowning mercy' of Worcester fight, to land at last in the Tower. But for the silence of history the imagination or the credulity of the knight has atoned, by the production of a chronicle which rivals fairly the Ecclesiastical History of the old wandering Scottish scholar Dempster, who had in Italy patriotically found the Maccabees to be but an ancient Highland family. According to Urquhart, whose translation of Rabelais has survived his eccentric disquisitions in genealogy and history, Alypos, the forty-third lineal descendant of Japhet, was the first to discover Cromarty, and, when the Scythians under Ethus pitched on the moor bounding the parish on the north, they had been opposed by the grandson of Alcibiades; in proof of which Sir Thomas could triumphantly point to remaining signs of 'trenches and castrametation' with a confidence which would have won the heart of Jonathan Monkbarns in The Antiquary.

The population of the district is essentially a mixed one, and strongly retains the distinctive features of the Scandinavian and the Gael. From Shetland to the Ord of Caithness, the population of the coast is generally, if not wholly, of the former type. Beyond the Ord to the north of the Firth of Cromarty, we find a wedge of Celtic origin, while from the southern shore to the Bay of Munlochy the Scandinavian element again asserts itself. Thus, as Carlyle escaped being born an Englishman by but a few miles, the separation from the Celtic stratum was, in Miller's case, effected by the narrow single line of the one-mile ferry. In later years, at all events, he would refer with evident satisfaction to his Teutonic origin. There was, as we shall have occasion to notice, a certain Celtic lobe of imagination on the mother's side, but in his mental and political character the great leading features of the other race were undoubtedly predominant.

Whence Buchanan drew the possibilities of great fleets in the Firth of Cromarty is unknown unless he had in his memory some of the vessels of the old mariners, such as Sir Andrew Wood and the bold Bartons, or even the 'verrie monstrous schippe the Great Michael' that 'cumbered all Scotland to get her to sea.' Certain it is that for many a day its position had marked out the town as the natural centre of a coasting trade, though shortly after the Union the commerce of the place which had been considerable had declined. The real commencement of the prosperity of the place was due to the energy of a native, William Forsyth, whose life Miller has sketched in a little memoir originally drawn up for the family, and subsequently republished in his Tales and Sketches under the title of 'A Scottish Merchant of the Eighteenth century.' Forsyth had been appointed by the British Linen Company, established about 1746 in Edinburgh to promote the linen trade, its agent in the North throughout the whole district extending from Beauly to the Pentland Firth. The flax which was brought in vessels from Holland was prepared for use in Cromarty, and distributed by boats along the coast to Wick and Thurso. In the early days of the trade the distaff and the spindle were in general use; but Forsyth's efforts were successful in the introduction of the spinning-wheel, though the older means of production lasted far into this century in the west of Ross and in the Hebrides. The coasting schooners of the agent were the means of introducing into the town teas and wines, cloth, glass, Flemish tiles, Swedish iron, and Norwegian tar and spars. The rents of the landed proprietors were still largely paid in kind, or in the feudal labour by which the Baron of Bradwardine managed to eke out a rather scanty rent roll. In this way the mains or the demesnes of the laird were tilled and worked, and the Martinmas corn rents were stocked in a barn or 'girnal,' like that of the Antiquary's famous John of legend, often to cause a surplus to hang on the hands of the proprietor, until the idea was fortunately devised of exporting it to England or to Flanders for conversion into malt.

Ship-carpentry or boat-building upon a humble scale had been long established, and the coasting trade lay between the North, Leith, Newcastle, and London. The Scottish sailors then on the eastern coast enjoyed a strong reputation for piety, such as, we fear, their descendants have not maintained. John Gibb of Borrowstouness, the antiquary may remember as the founder of the now forgotten sect of Gibbites or 'sweet singers,' who denounced all tolls and statutory impositions, abolished the use of tobacco and all excisable articles, and finally made a pilgrimage to the Pentland Hills to see the smoke and the desolation of Edinburgh as foretold by their founder. The wardrobes and scrutoires of the local cabinet-maker, Donald Sandison, enjoyed a reputation through the North, and were, far into this century, found in the houses of Ross, together with the old eight-day clocks made in Kilwinning. But the great founder of its modern prosperity was George Ross, the son of a small proprietor in Easter Ross, who, after amassing a fortune as an army-agent as the friend of Lord Mansfield and the Duke of Grafton, had in 1772 purchased the estate of Cromarty. When he started his improvements in his native district, there was not a wheeled-cart in all the parish, and the knowledge of agriculture was rude. Green cropping and the rotation of crops were unknown, and in autumn the long irregular patches of arable land were intersected by stretches of moorland that wound deviously into the land, like the reaches of the Cromarty and the Beauly Firths. Though long opposed by tenacious local prejudices, he at length triumphed over the backward habits of the people, who yoked their oxen and their horses by the tail, and who justified their action by an appeal to the argument from design, and by a query as to what other end in creation such tails had been provided? Ross also established in the town a manufactory for hempen cloth, and erected what at the time was the largest ale-brewery in the North. A harbour was built at his own expense, and a pork trade of a thriving nature set on foot, wheat reared, the rotation of crops introduced, a nail and spade manufactory set up, and lace manufactures brought from England. Such, then, was the condition of Cromarty at the beginning of the present century.

Far different was that of the surrounding Highlands. Protestantism had been at an early period introduced into Ross and Sutherland by its Earls and by Lord Reay. The Earl of Sutherland had been the first to subscribe the National Covenant in Greyfriars; and, after the suppression of the first Jacobite rising, Sir Robert Munro of Fowlis, as commissioner of the confiscated estates, had set himself to the creation of parishes and presbyteries in remote districts, where the Church of Scotland before had been unknown. In the better class of houses the old Highland fireplace, like a millstone, still occupied its place in the centre, with no corresponding aperture in the roof for the smoke. In the Western districts the greatest distress prevailed, for the country was at the parting of the ways in a time of transition. About the beginning of the present century the results of the French Revolution began to make themselves felt. Through the long war the price of provisions rose to famine price, and the impecunious Highland laird, like his more degenerate successor that battens on the sporting proclivities of the Cockney or American millionaire, set himself to the problem of increasing his rent-roll, and the system of evictions and sheep-farming on a large scale commenced. The Sutherland clearances forced the ejected Highlanders to Canada and the United States, while the poorer classes drifted down from the interior to the already overpopulated shore-line, where they eked out, as crofters or as fishermen, a precarious existence without capital or the acquired experience of either occupation, and laid the seeds of the future crofter question. The manufacture of kelp, which for a time rendered profitable to many a Highland proprietor his barren acres on a rocky shore, was not destined to long survive the introduction of the principles of Free Trade. The potato blight succeeded finally in reducing the once fairly prosperous native of the interior to chronic poverty and distress.

On the West Coast, the heavy rainfall is unfavourable to agriculture on any extended scale. From Assynt to Mull the average rain-gauge is thirty-five inches, and the cottars of Ross were threatened with the fate of the Irish in Connemara, through periodic failures in the herring fishery and liabilities for their scanty holdings to their landlords. Miller found the men of Gairloch, in 1823, where the public road was a good day's journey from the place, still turning up or scratching the soil with the old Highland cass-chron, and the women carrying the manure on their backs to the fields in spring, while all the time they kept twirling the distaff—old and faded before their time, like the women in some of the poorer cantons the traveller meets with in Switzerland. Their constant employment was the making of yarn; and, as we have seen, the spinning-wheel was for long as rare as the possession of a plough or horse. The boats built for the fishing were still caulked with moss dipped in tar and laid along the seams, the ropes being made of filaments of moss-fir stripped with the knife, while the sails were composed of a woollen stuff whose hard thread had been spun on the distaff, for hemp and flax were practically unknown. Such, in 1263, had at Largs been the equipment of the galleys of Haco,

Such, too, had been the traditional custom for centuries after of the boatbuilders in the Western Highlands.

In Cromarty, then, on the 10th of October 1802, Hugh Miller was born—in a long, low-built six-roomed house of his great-grandfather, one of the last of the old buccaneers of the Spanish Main, who had thriftily invested his pieces of eight in house-property in his native place. His mother was the great-granddaughter of Donald Roy of Nigg, of whom, as a kind of Northern Peden or Cargill, traditions long lingered. In his early days, Donald had been a great club and football player in the Sunday games that had been fostered in the semi-Celtic parish by King James's Book of Sports, and which, it may be remembered, had been popular in the days of Dugald Buchanan of Rannoch at a time when the observance of the seventh day and of the King's writ never ran beyond the Pass of Killiecrankie. At the Revolution, however, Donald had become the subject of religious convictions; and when, on the death of Balfour of Nigg in 1756, an unpopular presentee, Mr. Patrick Grant, was forced upon the parish, resistance was offered. Four years before this, Gillespie of Carnock had been deposed on the motion of John Home, author of Douglas, seconded by Robertson of Gladsmuir, the subsequent historian of Charles V., for his refusal to participate in the settlement of Richardson to Inverkeithing; and when some of the presbytery, in fear of similar proceedings, had met for the induction, they found an empty church and an old man protesting that 'if they settled a man to the walls of that kirk, the blood of the parish of Nigg would be required at their hands.' For long the entire parish clung to the Church of Scotland, but never could they be induced to enter the building again, and so they perforce allied themselves to the Burgher Secession. Thus early was the non-intrusion principle made familiar to Miller, and thus early were made manifest the miserable effects of the high-handed policy which, begun in the long reign of Robertson, was destined a century later to have such disastrous results.

In early youth his father had sailed in an East Indiaman, and during the intervals of his Indian and Chinese voyages had learned to write and add to his nautical knowledge stores of general reading and information not then common among sailors. Storing up, instead of drinking, his grog-money, he drove a small trade with the natives of these countries in little articles that had excited their curiosity, and for which, hints his distinguished son, the Custom-house dues were never very punctually or rigorously paid. Pressed, however, by a man-of-war that had borne down upon the Indiaman when in a state of mutiny, after a brief experience of the stern discipline of the navy not yet tempered by the measures of reform introduced after the mutiny of the Nore, he returned when not much turned thirty to Cromarty, where his savings enabled him to buy a coasting sloop and set up house. For this the site was purchased at £400, a very considerable sum in those days, and thus his son could, even in the high franchise qualifications after the Reform Bill, exercise the right of voting for the Whig party. The kelp trade, of which we have spoken, among other things engaged the efforts of his father, who had been appointed agent in the North and Hebrides for the Leith Glass-works. Driven by a storm round Cape Wrath and through the Pentland Firth, the vessel, after striving to reach the sheltered roadstead of the Moray Firth, was forced to put in at Peterhead. On the 9th of November 1807 he set sail, but foundered with all hands, by the starting, as was believed, of a plank. During more than one hundred years the sea had been the graveyard of the family: Miller's father, grandfather, and two grand-uncles had been all drowned at sea.

At the time of his father's death the son had just by one month completed his fifth year. At that time happened the circumstance which he himself relates, and which we mention here in this place both for the interest attaching to it in the history of his own mental development, and for various subtle psychological reasons to which we shall advert later, and which cannot fail to be observed by the careful student of his works. The last letter to his wife had been written by his father from Peterhead, and on its receipt, 'the house-door, which had been left unfastened, fell open, and I was despatched from her side to shut it. I saw at the open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female: they bore a livid and sodden appearance; and, directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was only blank transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond. I commemorate the story as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting to explain it.' In after years he would say of such mental or visual hallucinations that they were such as 'would render me a firm believer in apparitions, could I not account for them in this way, as the creatures of an imagination which had attained an unusual and even morbid strength at a time when the other mental faculties were scarcely at all unfolded.' In this connection the similar case of Chatterton need only be alluded to, but the question will be treated again in describing his later years.

Like Burns, Carlyle, and Scott, Miller seems to have borne the powerful impress, mentally and physically, of his father. Yet, like the mothers of the first two, Mrs. Miller bequeathed to her son his store of legend and story and the imagination that was thus so early awakened. The new house which his father had built remained for some little time after his death untenanted; and, as the insurance of the sloop was deferred or disputed by an insolvent broker, his mother had recourse to her needle as the means by which she could best support her family. Three children had been born, and her brothers came to her assistance and lightened her task by taking her second daughter, a child of three, to live with them. Both of the girls died of a fever within a few days of each other, the one in her twelfth, and the other in her tenth year.

Of these two uncles, the James and Sandy of his Schools and Schoolmasters, Miller has spoken with deserved affection and loyalty. To them he confesses he owed more real education than ever he acquired from all other sources; and, belonging as they do to the class of humble and worthy men that seems pre-eminently the boast and pride of Scottish life, they will merit a detailed account. Of this type some little knowledge had been made known by Lord Jeffrey in his review of Cromek's Reliques, where such men as the father of Burns and those of his immediate circle were first introduced to their proper place as those 'from whom old Scotia's grandeur springs.' In his own Reminiscences, Carlyle has added to our acquaintance with these men through his sketch of his own father and others, who are, says Professor Blackie, the natural outcome of the republican form of our Scottish Church government, and of the national system of education so early developed by Knox and the first Reformers.

The elder of the two brothers, James, was a harness-maker in steady employment in the surrounding agricultural district, so that from six in the morning till ten at night his time would be fully occupied, thus leaving him but scanty leisure. But, in the long evenings, he would fix his bench by the hearth, and listen while his nephew or his own younger brother or some neighbour would read. In the summer, he would occupy his spare hours upon his journeys to and from his rural rounds of labour in visiting every scene of legend and story far and near, and so keen were his powers of perception and ready expression in matters of a historical and antiquarian nature, that his nephew regrets he had not become a writer of books. Some part of this information, however, he has attempted to preserve in his Scenes and Legends.

To the younger brother, Alexander, he seems to have been even more indebted. If to the one he owed his gift of ready and natural expression, it was to the other that he was indebted for his powers of observation. Originally educated as a cart-wright, he had served for seven years in the navy, sailing with Nelson, witnessing the mutiny at the Nore, the battle of Camperdown under Duncan, and sharing the Egyptian campaign of Abercromby. Even on his discharge, he was still ready in 1803 to shoulder a musket as a volunteer, when Napoleon at Boulogne 'armed in our island every freeman.' The scientific interest, too, of the man may be judged from the fact that in the Egyptian expedition, during the landing, he managed to transfer a murex to his pocket from the beach, and the first ammonite which formed the nucleus of his nephew's geological collection was also brought home from an English Liassic deposit. Facts like these and the presence of such men should go far to dispel much of the cheap sentiment introduced into the current of Scottish life by writers such as Smiles and others, who profess to be ever finding some 'peasant' or 'uneducated genius' in the subjects of their all too unctuous biographies. Such a class has really no existence in Scotland, and between such men as Miller, Burns, or even the unfortunate and sorely buffeted Bethunes, there is a great gulf fixed when they are sought to be brought into relation with men like John Clare and Robert Bloomfield. All the Scotchmen, born in however originally humble circumstances, had the advantage of education at the parish school; and, slight though in some cases the result may have been, it yet for ever removes the possibility of illiteracy which the English reader at once conjures up at the sound of such surroundings. The more the critic studies the facts of Burns' early years and education, and the really remarkable stock of information with which he was to rouse the honest wonder of Dugald Stewart—his mathematical attainments and his philosophical grasp, not to mention his possession of a very powerful English prose style that makes every line of his Letters really alive and matterful—the less we shall hear of peasant genius and untaught writers. We question if one half of the members of the Edinburgh bar, such as Lockhart has described them at the arrival of Burns in Edinburgh, had reached such an amount of general and poetical literature as that easily held in command by the poet. We have heard an old schoolfellow of Edward Irving and Carlyle at the burgh school of Annan remark on the misconception of Froude as to the true social rank of their respective parents. Horace and Burns seem, as Theodore Martin has shown, not unlike in the matter of their fathers, and the possession of such sets their children far out of that circle of contracted social and moral surroundings in which the biographers of the Smiles class have too long set them.

The knowledge of his letters Miller seems, like the elder Weller, to have acquired from a study of the local signboards, and in his sixth year he was sent to a dame's school, where he spelt his way through the old curriculum of a child's education in Scotland—the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament. He managed to discover for himself the story of Joseph; and even in the old six-volume edition of Lintot the genius of Homer was early made manifest. The Pilgrim's Progress, evidently in some such form as Macaulay has described, made for the cottage, followed; and, in course of time, the collection of books which his father had left was eagerly devoured. Among them were Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels—both never so familiar in Scotland to boys as they are in England—Cook's Voyages, John Howie of Lochgoin's Worthies, the Voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Byron, 'my grand-dad's narrative' of the poet. It was not till his tenth year that he became, as he says, 'thoroughly a Scot,' and this was effected by a perusal of Blind Harry's Wallace, that 'Bible of the Scottish people,' as Lord Hailes has called it, following or anticipating the remark by Wolf as to the similar position of the Iliad and the Odyssey among the Greeks. No one now need be informed about the influence that quaint old work had produced in Burns, and through him on the subsequent re-awakening of the national spirit at the end of the eighteenth century. Barbour's Bruce has remained the possession of the scholar and the antiquary, while this work of the old minstrel, literally 'sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment,' as Bentley had said of his great predecessor, has had an abiding influence on literature, and on the national character. 'Up to Crummade (Cromarty) and through the Northland' had blind Harry, with a fine patriotism, and, we fear, a total disregard for geography, made his hero effect a raid. When a man has got a view from Dan to Beersheba in which to smite the enemy hip and thigh, he need not be troubled with a few outlying counties.

The parish school of Cromarty which Miller attended numbered about a hundred and twenty boys and girls. The windows of the building fronted the opening of the Cromarty Firth, recalling at least by 'the mystery of the ships' the Portland of Longfellow's own early days. The tax of twenty peats to the school from the Highland boatmen paid for every boat in the trade recalls the salary of the public hangman of Inverness and Aberdeen, and the dues often formed the subject of debate between the boys and the irate Gaels, who did not fail to retort the taunt of the hangman's perquisite. The schoolmaster was a worthy that might have sat for the figure of Jonathan Tawse in Dr. Alexander's Johnny Gibb, and was, though a fair scholar, rather inefficient as a disciplinarian and teacher. Yet it was his boast—one now, alas, in these days sadly becoming obsolete—that he sent forward more lads to the bursary competition at the Northern university than any other teacher, and his 'heavy class' of a few boys in Latin was increased by his persuading the willing Uncle James to set Miller to the Rudiments in that time-honoured volume by Ruddiman, who had in his own days been a first bursar at Aberdeen. The teaching of Latin had been one of the props to education introduced by the Reformers, and so distinct had been the little note of pedantry, perhaps in this way fostered, that Smollett makes the barber in Roderick Random quote Horace in the original, and Foote in a farce has made a valet insist on its possession as a shibboleth of nationality. We need but mention the favourite quotations in the ancient tongue by the Baron of Bradwardine and Dugald Dalgetty as a reminiscence of his own old days 'at the Marischal College'; while Miller also could remember an old cabinet-maker who carried for the sake of the big print a Latin New Testament to church. But no more with him than with Darwin could the linguistic faculty be stimulated. The Rudiments he thought the dullest book he had ever seen, and though in after-life he regretted the lost opportunity that at five-and-twenty might have made him a scholar and thus have saved ten of the best working years of his life, it may be doubted if in his case the loss amounted to more than in the case of Macaulay, who affected to bewail his loss of mathematics. In their truest form, scholars, like naturalists, are born and not made, nor will any labour in the linguistic field yield much to the scientist. The poet Gray wisely lamented the loss of time in his own case through forced labour at mathematics, a remark not even yet fully appreciated in Scotland, where the system of general excellence—that system under which Johnson so happily remarked that, while each man got a bite, no one got a bellyful—has too long stunted the learning of the country and proved the bane alike of her schools and universities. 'As for Latin, I abominate it,' we find him writing from Cromarty in December 1838, in a letter now before us, 'and ever did since I burnt my Rudiments.'

More congenial amusement he found in the exercise of his story-telling faculty. When the master's back was turned, the Sennachie, as the master called him, would gather round him the other boys and narrate to them the adventures of his uncle, the story of Gulliver, and the shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe, or even the mysteries of Mrs. Radcliffe. When the sixty volumes of his father and the hundred and sixty of his uncles had been consumed, he fell in with a collection of essayists from Addison to Henry Mackenzie, the influence of which, along with Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, remained to the last as a powerful impress upon his prose style. But he was rapidly finding his national and true school. The Hill of Cromarty, part of De Beaumont's Ben-Nevis system, and the rich Liassic deposit of Eathie, were his favourite haunts, and his uncle Alexander, after his own work was done, would spend with him many an hour in the ebb tide. To the training thus acquired from this untaught naturalist he owed much of his own close powers of observation, which led, however, well-nigh to a fatal termination through an adventurous visit to the Doo-cot caves, from which he was rescued late at night during a high tide. This formed the subject of his first copy of juvenile verse, which was recited 'with vast applause' by the handsomest girl at the Cromarty boarding establishment kept by Miss Elizabeth Bond. In her own early days she had known the father and mother of Scott; and, when in 1814 she had published her Letters of a Village Governess, she had dedicated them to the great novelist, who later on in the midst of his own troubles, living in lodgings away from Abbotsford, could yet remember to send her ten pounds 'to scare the wolf from the door,' as he cheerily remarked, when she had found the truth of her own saying that it was hard for a single woman to get through the world 'without a head'—unmarried.

His reading at this time received a curious extension through there falling into his hands a copy of Military Medley belonging to a retired officer, and on the shore he would carry out plans of fortification as therein set forth by the great French engineer Vauban. With sand for towers, and variegated shells and limpets for soldiers, he worked his way through the evolutions of troops, and no reader of Scott will fail to remember the similar action by Sir Walter which, in the introduction to the third canto of Marmion, he describes as taking place at Sandy Knowe, in the air of the Cheviots, near the old tower of Smailholme that 'charmed his fancy's waking hour':—

Nor will he fail to note the exact and characteristic point of difference in the two children, and how in each the child was father of the man. So early in both was the natural instinct of the future historian and the geologist awakened.

At a later period he seems rather to have become an unruly lad, and to have proved too much for his relations to manage. He was in the stage when such boys run away to sea or enlist, and his father's own calling might, from its well-nigh hereditary nature, have been thought to be the one most likely to be adopted. He enjoyed a somewhat dangerous reputation through carrying a knife and stabbing a companion in the thigh, but these escapades may in later years have been unconsciously heightened by remorse for wasted opportunities, and which in his case we have seen to amount to little or nothing. But the circle of his own companions was changing or breaking up, and it became necessary to decide on the future. His mother, after being a widow for well-nigh a dozen years, had married again, and he determined on being a mason, an occupation which he thought would, by his being employed in labour at intermittent seasons, afford him plenty leisure. Against this resolution both his uncles stoutly protested, and were prepared to assist him to the Northern university. 'I had no wish,' he says, 'and no peculiar fitness to be either lawyer or doctor; and as for the Church, that was too serious a direction to look in for one's bread, unless one could necessarily regard one's-self as called to the Church's proper work, and I could not.' His uncles agreed to this view of the case; and so, reluctantly, the proposed course was abandoned. 'Better be anything,' they said, 'than an uncalled minister.' His was not the feeble sense of fitness possessed in such a high degree by the presentees to Auchterarder and Marnoch. As a member of the Moray nation he would naturally have proceeded to King's College in Aberdeen, then at the very lowest ebb of its existence as regards the abilities, or the want of them, of the wondrous corps of professors who filled its chairs. Carlyle in his Sartor has drawn certainly no flattering picture of the Edinburgh of his days, and his friend Professor Masson in the early volumes of Macmillan's Magazine has put before us the no less wonderful spectacle of the Marischal College of his own student life; nor would the state of King's College about 1820 yield much material for respect. The professoriate was grossly ignorant and conceited, and nepotism was rampant. As a child, we can recall the last expiring flicker of the race, and when we add that one aspiring graduate had published a pamphlet to refute Newton, and that the theology was of the wintriest type of even Aberdonian moderatism, couched in the most remote imitation of the rhetorical flights in The Man of Feeling, we have said enough to show that Miller certainly lost nothing by non-attendance at the classes in Aberdeen.

But it was not without reluctance that his resolve to become a mason was allowed by his uncles. However, at last, there being another uncle on the mother's side who was a mason contracting for small jobs, and who employed an apprentice or two, he was bound apprentice for three years, from February 1820 to November 1822 and entered on the trade of mason and quarryman, for in the North the combination was constant. Long after, in the Old Red Sandstone he has described his first day's experience in the sandstone quarry, when, in that early spring morning and with a heavy heart, he set out to experience his first battle in the stern school of the world:

He was to experience constant fits of depression and exhaustion, which caused sleep-walking; and though this after a time passed away, it was yet in later years to recur with fatal effects. In his master he was fortunate. He was one who would fully have come up to Carlyle's standard of his own father, 'making a conscience of every stone he laid.' Unconsciously, also, the apprentice was laying the foundations of the educated sense of sight so essential to the mason, and which was to stand him in excellent service in later years of geological ramblings. But the life was a hard one, from the surroundings in which the trade of a north-country mason had to be carried on. Living in a small village, where the lack of steady employment was naturally often felt, he had to eke out a living by odd jobs in the country, building farm-steadings or outhouses, with but scanty shelter and in surroundings too often unfavourable to comfort or morality. His experience of the bothy-system thus acquired by personal hardship he was in later years to turn to account in his leaders in The Witness—'I have lived,' he says, 'in hovels that were invariably flooded in wet weather by the over-flowings of neighbouring swamps, and through whose roofs I could tell the hour at night, by marking from my bed the stars that were passing over the openings along the ridge.' He was now to feel the truth of his uncles' warnings in dissuading him from the occupation. They had pointed to a hovel on a laird's property, who had left it standing that at some future date it might be turned to profit when he should have a drove of swine, or when a 'squad' of masons would pass that way. The life which had been introduced by the large farm system had been criticised already by Burns, who in the jottings of his Highland Tour had been struck by the superior intelligence of the Ayrshire cottar to the stolid boorishness of the agricultural labourer in the districts of the Lothians and the Merse. Recent legislation has largely mitigated the evils of the system which, even in a higher scale of comfort, has received a stern indictment in the eighth chapter of Dr. William Alexander's excellent work which we have before quoted, and to which, as the classic of the movement with which Miller's life is associated, we shall again refer. 'Better,' said Cobbett, who had studied it during a brief sojourn in the country, 'the fire-raisings of Kent than the bothy system of Scotland.'

Even geological rambles and communings with the Muse afforded but scant alleviation of the hardships endured. During rainy weather the food would often be oatmeal eaten raw, at times with no salt save from a passing Highland smuggler, or consist of hastily prepared gruel or brochan. In time he learned to be a fair plain cook and baker, so as at least to satisfy the demands of the failing teeth of his old master. Accordingly, he was not sorry when the three years of his apprenticeship closed, and as a skilled labourer he could retire about the Martinmas of 1822 to Cromarty, where his first piece of work was a cottage built with his own hands for his aunt.

In 1823 he was with a working party at Gairloch, and was there for the last time to experience the discomforts in the life of the working mason when employed by a niggard Highland laird. Forced from the barn in which they were at first domiciled into a cow-house to make room for the hay, they found themselves called upon to convert the materials of this hovel into the new building upon which they were engaged. This they effected by demolishing the entrance gradually, and hanging mats over it, leaving themselves ultimately to the cold October wind which not even Miller's experiences as a boy of the caves in the Sutors of Cromarty could render tolerable. But he had begun to see that the sphere of constant employment was narrow and narrowing in his native place, and, as the building mania in the South at the time seemed to afford a better opening for a steady workman, to Edinburgh accordingly he resolved to betake himself.

There was the additional reason in a desire to free the family from the burden of a house on the Coalhill of Leith, which had long before fallen to his father through the legacy of a relative, and which had threatened, through legal expenses, lack of tenants, and depreciated value, to become a serious legacy indeed. The parish church of North Leith had been erected, and he had been rated as a heritor for a sum so considerable that the entire year's rental of the dilapidated tenement was swallowed up, together with most of his savings as a mason. He had come of age when in the miserable hovel at Gairloch we have described, and was now competent to deal with his luckless property. Setting sail in the Leith smack running between Cromarty and that port, he entered the Firth of Forth four days after losing sight of the Sutors. He saw with interest Dunottar Castle and the Bass Rock chronicled in the well-known lines of his friend, Dr. Longmuir of Aberdeen. Indeed the latter had for him peculiar associations through one of the Ross-shire worthies in the times of Charles II.—James Fraser of Brea;—for, when the sun set on the upland farm on which he had been born, Miller knew that it was time to collect his tools at the end of his day's labour. In 1847, when he visited the rock on the geological expedition which he has commemorated by his paper on the structure of the Bass, his thoughts again reverted to Fraser, and to two other captives from his own district, Mackilligen of Alness and Hog of Kiltearn. His uncle James had at an early period introduced him to Burns and Fergusson, while from his boyish days the old novel of Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, had been no less familiar than from the pages of David Copperfield we know it to have been to Dickens. It was, therefore, with no small interest that he caught his first view of Arthur Seat and the masts of the shipping in the harbour of Leith. It was still the veritable Auld Reekie' of Fergusson, preserving its quaint distinctiveness by the happy blending of the divisions of the old town and the new—the old town through which, says Lockhart, the carriage of Scott would creep at the slowest of paces, driven by the most tactful and discriminating of Jehus, while every gable and buttress in what a recent prosaic English guide-book denominates the most dilapidated street in Europe would crowd its storied memories upon the novelist and poet of the Chronicles of the Canongate. To the last, like Carlyle, he preserved the memory, ever a landmark to the patriotic Scot, of his first day in the old 'romantic town' of Sir Walter, and of his impressions of the most picturesque of European capitals.

  CHAPTER II

IN EDINBURGH—THE CROMARTY BANK

He had not long to experience what Gilbert Burns said was to his brother the saddest of all sights, that of a man seeking work. He had called on the town-clerk to see whether some means could be devised of setting himself free from the property when, on mentioning his occupation, he was not only told the prospect of a sale was not so hopeless as he had expected, but was introduced to a builder erecting a mansion-house in the south of Edinburgh. He lodged in the village of Niddry Mill, and found his experience of life among metropolitan labourers the very reverse of favourable.

His not very high opinion of the working classes, for, as we shall see, Miller remained a Whig to the last with a wholesome horror for Radicals and Chartists, was doubtless due to the circumstances under which he found himself, and not to any feeling of superiority on his part. The social condition of the working classes was then on the eve of transition, and the organisation of even skilled labour was but in a rudimentary condition. In Edinburgh at least, the better class of mechanics sought within the walls of the city a more remunerative sphere for their labour, so that it was only the inferior body of workmen that was found on the outskirts. At first, he was subjected to a good deal of low and petty tyranny from his fellow-labourers, which was not calculated to improve his opinion of the class. Some slight relief, however, he managed to find in the new geological surroundings—the carboniferous deposits—and by observation and theory he made his way to some good results in his own science, at a time when there was no map, manual, or even geological primer in existence. The policies of Niddry and walks in the ruins of Craigmillar were a solace from the drunken and intemperate habits of the men, whose forty-eight shillings for the fortnight's wage were soon consumed by Sunday drives to Roslin or Hawthornden, or by drinking bouts in the lower rookeries of the High Street. There still largely prevailed the convivial habits such as Fergusson has described as characteristic of the Edinburgh of his day, the tavern 'jinks' alluded to by Scott in Guy Mannering, and by Lockhart in his Life of Burns. In the taverns the landlords kept a cockpit or a badger as a necessary part of their attraction. Employment being constant through the pressure of the building mania prevalent throughout this year, the masters were largely at the mercy of the men, so that strikes were rife and the demands of the workers exorbitant. Altogether it was no favourable school for Miller to learn regard for his own class. Again and again, to the end, do we find not undeserved denunciations of the dangers of Chartism, and his own reiterated belief that for the skilled workman there is no danger, and for the thriftless no hope.

The collier villages round Niddry have long since disappeared. The seams have for all practical purposes been worked out, or have been given up as unprofitable. There he found the last surviving remains of slavery in Scotland, for the older men of the place, though born and bred 'within a mile of Edinburgh toun,' had yet been born slaves. The modern reader will find much curious information upon this subject in Erskine's Institutes; but, in passing, we may recall the fact that Sir Walter Scott has mentioned the case of Scott of Harden and his lady, who had rescued by law a tumbling-girl who had been sold by her parents to a travelling mountebank, and who was set at liberty after an appeal to the Lords, against the decision of the Chancellor. Scott was assoilzied; but, even as late as 1799, an Act of Parliament had to be passed dealing specially with this last remnant of feudal slavery—the salters and the colliers of Scotland. The old family of the Setons of Winton had, along with others, exercised great political influence and pressure on the Court of Session, and had repeatedly managed to defeat or evade measures of reform. A law had even been passed enacting that no collier or salter, without a certificate from his last place, could find work, but should be held as a thief and punished as such, while a later ordinance was that, as they 'lay from their work at Pasche, Yule and Whitsunday, to the great offence of God and prejudice of their masters,' they should work every day in the week except at Christmas! Clearly there was no Eight Hours Bill in Old Scotland.

His lodging was a humble one-roomed cottage in Niddry, owned by an old farm-servant and his wife. The husband, when too old for work, had been discharged by his master, whose munificence had gone the length of allowing residence in the dilapidated building, on the understanding that he was not to be held liable for repairs. The thatch was repaired by mud and turf gathered from the roadside, and in this crazy tenement the old man and his wife, both of whom had passed through the world without picking up hardly a single idea, were exposed to the biting east winds of the district. A congenial fellow-lodger was fortunately found in the person of another workman, one of the old Seceders, deep in the theology of Boston and Rutherfurd, and such works as had formed the reading of his uncles in Cromarty, for at this time the sense of religion, at least among the humbler classes, was well-nigh confined to the ranks of dissent. Many of the inhabitants of the place were or had been nominal parishioners of 'Jupiter' Carlyle of Inveresk. But the doctor had not been one to do much for the social or religious advance of his people. Jupiter, or 'Old Tonans,' as he was called from sitting to Gavin Hamilton the painter for his portrait of Jupiter, had been the fanatical defender of the theatre at a time when his friend John Home, the writer of Douglas, had been compelled by public opinion to seek relief from pulpit duties, and a more fitting sphere for his rants of 'Young Norval on the Grampian Hills' in the ranks of the laity. Carlyle and his friend Dr. Hugh Blair were constant patrons of the legitimate drama in the old playhouse in the Canongate, when the burghers at night would 'dauner hame wi' lass and lantern' after the manner described with such power by Scott in the Tolbooth scene of Rob Roy. On one occasion, the doctor had, for once in his long life, to play the part of non-intrusionist, when he repelled vigorously with a bludgeon the attempt of some wild sparks to force an entry into his box! Missions he denounced in the spirit of a fanatical supporter of the repressive régime of Pitt and Dundas. He trusted to the coming of Christ's Kingdom by some lucky accident or sleight of hand, 'as we are informed it shall be in the course of Providence.' He had no belief in 'a plan which has been well styled visionary.' In the closing years of his own life, the very slight modicum of zeal for the discharge of his ministerial duties ebbed so low that he left these entirely to an assistant, and spent the Sunday on the Musselburgh race-course. Yet this is the man whom Dean Stanley with exquisite infelicity selects as one of the heroes of the Church of Scotland. In the picture of old 'Jupiter' there is something that recalls the belief of the erratic Lord Brougham, when he voted against the Veto Act and the right to protest against unsuitable presentees, from fear that it might end in 'rejecting men too strict in morals and too diligent in duty to please our vitiated tastes!' Carlyle's Autobiography is one of the most instructive of books; like the similar disclosure by Benvenuto Cellini, it is the presentation of a man who is destitute of a moral sense.

Although in the pulpits of the metropolis Moderatism was but only too well represented, there were yet some striking exceptions. Sir Walter Scott, whose feelings led him strongly in the direction of the Latitudinarian party, has yet drawn in Guy Mannering an admirable sketch of Dr. John Erskine, the colleague of Principal Robertson in the Greyfriars, and for long the leader of the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland. Some of the members of that party were gladly heard by Miller, but his greatest delight he confesses to have been in hearing the discourses of the old Seceder, Dr. Thomas M'Crie. 'Be sure,' said his uncles to him on leaving Cromarty, 'and go to hear M'Crie.' The doctor was no master of rhetoric or of pulpit eloquence, but the doctrine was the theology of the true descendant of the men of Drumclog and Bothwell. Nothing is more characteristic of the university system of Scotland than that the greatest ecclesiastical scholar she could produce was to be found in a humble seceding chapel at the foot of Carrubber's Close. In Scotland, at least within the present century, no more influential book has been published than his Life of Knox, which silently made its appearance in 1811. In the revival of ecclesiastical and national feeling in the country the book will ever remain a classic and a landmark. There it occupies the place which, in the field of classical and historical scholarship, is taken by Wolf's Prolegomena to Homer. Lord Jeffrey could truly declare that to fit one's-self for the task of even a reviewer of M'Crie, the special reading of several years would be necessary. Its influence was at once felt. The 'solemn sneer' of the Humes, Gibbons, Robertsons, and Tytlers, and, be it mentioned with regret, of even Scott in that unworthy squib against the religion of his country, Old Mortality, had done much, at least among the literati and the upper classes, to obliterate and sap a belief or knowledge of the great work which had been accomplished for civil liberty by the early reformers; but now the school of flimsy devotees of Mary, Montrose and Claverhouse, with its unctuous retention of the sneer (or, historically meant, compliment) of the Merry Monarch as to Presbyterianism being no fit religion for a gentleman, the school whose expiring flicker is seen in Aytoun's Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, was for ever exploded by the research of M'Crie. It was in an unlucky hour that Scott ventured a reply to the strictures of his reviewer. Never was humiliation more deep or more bitterly felt by the novelist. The novel of Scott is about as gross a caricature as 'Carrion' Heath's Life of Oliver Cromwell, and for the historical restoration of the great Reformer, M'Crie has done in his book what Carlyle, in his Letters of Cromwell, has for ever effected for the true presentation of the Protector.

In the bookstalls of the city he would pick up some new additions to his shelf. At odd hours, too, he would hang about Castle Street in the hope of seeing Sir Walter Scott. The capital at this time, though sadly shorn of its old literary coteries in the days of Burns, still numbered such men as Jeffrey, Cockburn, Dugald Stewart, and Professor Wilson; and he did manage, one evening, to spend some hours with a cousin in Ambrose's, where the famous club used to hold their meetings in a room below. But none of these faces was he then destined to know in the flesh, and the 'pride of all Scotsmen' whom Carlyle met in the Edinburgh streets, 'worn with care, the joy all fled,' had passed away the next time when Miller visited the capital.

Work, we have seen, was plentiful in the town. The great fire had swept Parliament Close and the High Street, carrying with it the steeple of the old Tron, and many of the lofty tenements that formed such a feature of Old Edinburgh. But he was feeling the first effects of the stone-cutters' disease, and his lungs, affected by the stone dust, threatened consumption. He states that few of his class reached the age of forty through the trouble, and not more than one in fifty ever came to forty-five. But circumstances fortunately enabled him at this critical juncture to leave work for a time. The house on the Coalhill had turned out better than was expected, and, with a clear balance of fifty pounds in his pocket, he could set sail for Cromarty, where, after a weary seven days' voyage through fog and mist, he was met on landing by his uncles. Not for ten years, and then under very different circumstances, was he again to see Edinburgh.

During this period of convalescence he experienced a religious change, leading to positions from which he never saw reason to recede. 'It is,' he says, 'at once delicate and dangerous to speak of one's own spiritual condition, or of the emotional sentiments on which one's conclusions regarding it are so often doubtfully founded. Egotism in the religious form is perhaps more tolerated than any other, but it is not on that account less perilous to the egotist himself. There need be, however, less delicacy in speaking of one's beliefs than of one's feelings.' This last remark is eminently characteristic at once of the individual and of the national type of severe reticence on internal religious experience. This may serve to throw some light on the taunt flung by Dr. Johnson, in one of his most boisterous moods in Skye, at the head of Boswell. 'Can you,' he asked, 'name one book of any value on a religious subject written by the Scottish clergy?' Johnson does not seem to be dwelling on specifically theological works; he has rather in his mind the manuals of a homiletic or devotional order, in which he rather wildly asserts 'the clergy of England to have produced the most valuable works in theory and practice.' It might fairly have been retorted on Johnson that, were this so, the physicians at least had ministered but poorly to themselves, by quoting to him his own remark that he had never once met with a sincerely religious English clergyman; but Bozzy, patriotic for once, fell upon the defence of faithful discharge of pulpit ministrations and poor endowments. It might have been wiser to have fallen back on the long and militant struggle of the Church of Scotland for her existence, wiser still to have based the defence on national and psychological grounds. Nothing in the Scottish character is more remarkable than the absence of the feeling that led Luther and Wesley to a constant introspection, or at least to its frank outward expression and effusive declaration of their spiritual state. Some little knowledge of this national trait we think would have saved much windy and remote declamation about fanaticism, gloomy austerity, and enthusiasm—that mental bugbear of the eighteenth century, and well-nigh sole theological stock-in-trade of the gentlemanly and affected school of Hume and Robertson. The absence of anything like mysticism either in the nation or in its theology has been, therefore, unfavourable to the appearance of any cheap or verbal pietism. Calvinism, it may be added, is poor in comparison with Lutheranism, poorer still when contrasted in this respect with the Roman Church; for, while the former has Behmen and Swedenborg, and the latter many names such as Guyon and Rosmini among a host, Scotland has nothing of this kind, unless in the case of Erskine of Linlathen or Campbell of Row. The reason for this would seem to be that Calvinism has both a religious and a political side. As a philosophic creed, at least in details, it affords a completeness of presentation that leaves no room or indeed desire to pass behind the veil and dwell on the unknowable and the unknown.

Miller, at all events, found that hitherto his life had lacked a 'central sun,' as he expresses it, round which his feelings and intellect could anchor themselves. This he found by a curiously instructive combination of historical and geological reasoning. Professor Blackie has pointed out that the true secret of the vitality of the old Paganism and its logical internal consistency simply lay in the fact of the great humanity of the deities it created. This, also, as Miller himself no less clearly shows, is at the bottom of the enduring element in the lower reaches of Catholicism. 'There is,' says our Scottish Neander, Rabbi John Duncan, 'an old cross stone of granite by the roadside as you wind up the hill at Old Buda, in Hungary, upon which a worn and defaced image of our Saviour is cut, which I used often to pass. The thorough woebegoneness of that image used to haunt me long—that old bit of granite, the ideal of human sorrow, weakness and woebegoneness. To this day it will come back before me—always with that dumb gaze of perfect calmness—no complaining—the picture of meek and mute suffering. I am a Protestant and dislike image-worship, yet never can I get that statue out of my mind.' This, then, to Miller formed the 'central sun'—'the Word made flesh;' not merely as a received mental doctrine, but as a fact laid hold of, and round which other facts find their true position and explanation. 'There may be,' he allows, 'men who, through a peculiar idiosyncrasy of constitution, are capable of loving, after a sort, a mere abstract God, unseen and unconceivable; though, as shown by the air of sickly sentimentality borne by almost all that has been said and written on the subject, the feeling in its true form must be a very rare and exceptional one. In all my experience of men I never knew a genuine instance of it. The love of an abstract God seems to be as little natural to the ordinary human constitution as the love of an abstract sun or planet.'

No less interesting are his arguments from the geological position. It was a difficulty which had long lain heavy on the mind of Byron when, the reader may remember, in his last days in 1823 he beat over much theological and metaphysical jungle with the Scottish doctor Kennedy—the greatness of the universe and the littleness of the paragon of animals man, and the consequent difficulty of satisfactorily allowing a redemptive movement in Heaven for man in all his petty weakness. Pascal had attempted to meet this by what Hallam calls 'a magnificent lamentation' and by a metaphysical subtlety, reasoning from this very smallness to his ultimate greatness. But the geological reasoning of Miller has the undoubted merit of being scientific and inductive. In geology the dominant note is, in one word, progress. 'There was a time in our planet,' and it will be noted that the argument is perfectly independent of the appearance of man, late with himself, early with Lyell, 'when only dead matter appeared, after which plants and animals of a lower order were made manifest. After ages of vast extent the inorganic yielded to the organic, and the human period began,—man, a fellow-worker with the Creator who first produced it. And of the identity of at least his intellect with that of his Maker, and, of consequence, of the integrity of the revelation which declares that he was created in God's own image, we have direct evidence in his ability of not only conceiving of God's own contrivances, but even of reproducing them, and this not as a mere imitator, but as an original thinker.' Man thus, as Hegel says, re-thinks Creation. But higher yet the tide of empire takes its way. The geologist is not like the Neapolitan thinker, Vico, with his doctrine of recurring cycles in man. The geologist 'finds no example of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish—of the reptile—of the mammal. The long ascending line from dead matter to man has been a progress Godwards—not an asymptotical progress, but destined from the first to furnish a point of union; and occupying that point as true God and true man, as Creator and created, we recognise the adorable Monarch of all the future.' Such an argument is indeed a reach above the vaguely declamatory theory of Swinburne of man being the master of all things, and above the theory of Feuerbach that finds God merely in the enlarged shadow projected by the Ego.

His somewhat impaired strength led him to think of a livelihood through little jobs of monumental stonework in a style superior to that introduced as yet into the countryside, and to this period of observation of the Scottish character acquired through living in the vicinity of farm-houses, villages, churchyards, as the varying means of lodging were afforded him, he ascribed much of the knowledge which he turned to so good an editorial account. In the company, too, of the parish minister Stewart he was happy, for, according to his own conviction and the testimony of many others, he was a man of no ordinary acuteness and of unquestioned pulpit ability. Indeed, Miller never hesitated to declare that for the fibre of his whole thinking he was more indebted to Chalmers and to this almost unknown Cromarty minister than to any two other men. Stewart's power seems to have lain in the detection of subtle analogies and in pictorial verbal power, in which he resembled Guthrie. In an obituary notice in The Witness of Nov. 13, 1847 he dwells with affection on the man, and illustrates admirably the type of intellect and its dangers. 'Goldsmith,' he observes, 'when he first entered upon his literary career, found that all the good things on the side of truth had been already said; and that his good things, if he really desired to produce any, would require all to be said on the side of paradox and error. Poor Edward Irving formed a melancholy illustration of this species of originality. His stock of striking things on the side of truth was soon expended; notoriety had meanwhile become as essential to his comfort as ardent spirits to that of the dram-drinker; and so, to procure the supply of the unwholesome pabulum, without which he could not exist, he launched into a perilous ocean of heterodoxy and extravagance, and made shipwreck of his faith. Stewart's originality was not the originality of opening up new vistas in which all was unfamiliar, simply because the direction in which they led was one in which men's thought had no occasion to travel and no business to perform. It was the greatly higher ability of enabling men to see new and unwonted objects in old familiar directions.' For sixteen years Miller sat under his ministry, and for twelve was admitted to his closest intimacy.

But in time work of even the 'Old Mortality' order grew scarce. Accordingly, in the summer of June 1828, he visited Inverness, and inserted in the local papers an advertisement for employment. He felt that he could execute such commissions with greater care and exactness than were usual, and in a style that could be depended upon for correct spelling. He mentions himself the case of the English mason who mangled Proverbs xxxi. 10 into the bewildering abbreviation that 'A virtuous woman is 5s. to her husband,' and he might also have mentioned the case of the statue to George II. in Stephen's Green, Dublin, erected doubtless under municipal supervision, and which yet in the course of a brief Latin inscription of thirteen lines can show more than one mistake to the individual line. He had the curious, yet perhaps after all not unpractical, idea that his scheme for employment might be materially improved by his sending a copy of verses to the paper, in the belief that the public would infer that the writer of correct verse could be a reliable workman. But nothing came of this. In justice to the editor it may be allowed that the versification, if easy, was nothing remarkable, and felicity of epithets may be no guarantee for perfection of epitaphs. The reflection, however, came to him that there was no advantage to be won in thus, as he says, scheming himself into employment. It was not congenial, and walking 'half an inch taller' along the streets on the strength of this resolution, he was actually offered the Queen's shilling, or the King's to be chronologically correct, by a smart recruiting sergeant of a Highland regiment who from the powerful physique of the man had naturally inferred the possession of a choice recruit.

He determined, accordingly, to face the worst and publish. He made a hasty selection of his verses through the last six years and approached the office of the Inverness Courier. This was a highly fortunate opening, for that paper was, then and up to 1878, edited by Robert Carruthers of Dumfries, who had been appointed editor of the Courier in the very same year of Miller's visit. His Life of Pope published in 1853 is still a standard production, and altogether Carruthers was one of the ablest editors in Scotland, and his paper which was edited on Liberal lines was a very powerful organ in his day. The friendship then begun lasted till the death of Miller unbroken, and was mutually advantageous. While he was still in the Highland capital he received word of the fatal illness of his uncle James, and his first work on his return was a neat tombstone for this close friend of his father and worthy to whom he was so deeply indebted for much of his own subsequent distinction.

His volume of verse under the title of Poems Written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason issued slowly in 1829 from the press, and its appearance in the disillusionising medium of black and white convinced him that after all his true vocation was not to be found in poetry, for many lines which had appeared as tolerable, if not more, to the writer in the process of composition were now robbed of their charm by commission to print. Indeed, at no time does his versification rise beyond fluent description. It lacks body and form, and was really in his case nothing but a sort of rudimentary stratum on which he was to rear a very strong and powerful prose style. He was lacking in ear, and he confessed to an organ that recognised with difficulty the difference of the bagpipe and the big drum. The critics were not very partial to the venture. The tone of the majority was that of the Quarterly upon Keats, and the autocrats of poetical merit declared that he was safer with his chisel than on Parnassus. One little oasis, however, in the desert of depreciation did manage to reach him in a letter, through his friend Forsyth of Elgin, from Thomas Pringle of Roxburgh who had seen the book. In early days the poet had been a clerk in the Register House of Edinburgh, where his Scenes of Teviotdale had secured him an introduction to Scott, who extended to him the same ready support which he had bestowed on Leyden. By his influence he was appointed editor of Blackwood's Magazine, and later on emigrated with a party of relatives to the Cape, where his unsparing denunciations of the colonial policy in its treatment of the natives, and his advocacy of what would now be called the anti-Rhodes party brought him into complications with the officials in Downing Street and the colonial authorities. Poor Pringle!—among the one-song writers, the singers of the one lilt that rises out of a mass of now forgotten verse, his name is high, and he has won for himself an abiding niche in the hearts of his countrymen by his Emigrant's Lament, where he touches with a faultless hand the scenery of 'bonnie Teviotdale and Cheviot mountains blue.'

The volume of verses was not without its more immediate results in a local circle. It brought him under the notice of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder of Relugas, who is now remembered by his Wolf of Badenoch—a not quite unsuccessful effort at bending the bow of Ulysses, though without the dramatic force of Scott. By Carruthers he was introduced to Principal Baird, and thus a link with the past was effected through a man who had edited the poems of Michael Bruce, had befriended Alexander Murray for a short period the occupant of the Oriental chair in Edinburgh, and been a patron of Pringle and a close friend of Scott. By Baird he was strongly pressed to venture on a literary life in the capital, but the time was not propitious, and he wisely resolved to devote himself to several years of accumulation and reflection before he should embark on a vocation for which he had no great liking, and in which, even to the last, he had but little belief. For an ordinary journalist he would indeed have been as little qualified as Burns when offered a post on Perry's Morning Chronicle. The justness of his resolution was fully shown when the opportunity found him, and he was then fully prepared for the work he was to do. He was induced by the Principal to draw up for him a brief sketch of his life, and of this a draft bringing it up to 1825 was composed and sent to Edinburgh.

There existed at this time in the North the remains of a little coterie of ladies, numbering among its members Henry Mackenzie's cousin,—Mrs. Rose of Kilravock, whom Burns had visited on his Highland tour, Lady Gordon Cumming, and Mrs. Grant of Laggan, whose once well-known Letters from the Mountains have yielded in popularity to her song of Highland Laddie, which commemorates the departure in 1799 of the Marquis of Huntly with Sir Ralph Abercromby. By none of them, however, was he more noticed than by Miss Dunbar of Boath, who occupies in his early correspondence the place taken in the letters of Burns by Mrs. Dunlop. During his visits to this excellent lady he explored the curious sand-dunes of Culbin which still arrest the attention of the geologist and traveller in his rambles by the Findhorn. By Miss Dunbar he was pressed to embark on literature, while Mrs. Grant was of the opinion that he might follow the example of Allan Cunningham, who was engaged in the studio of Chantrey. But such patronage was in his case no less wisely exercised than admitted, nor was his the nature to be in any way spoiled by it; his self-reliant disposition suffered no such baneful effects as were felt by the much weaker nature of Thom of Inverurie, the one lyrical utterance of Aberdeenshire, or by Burns in the excitement of his Edinburgh season. He even became a town councillor, though he admits that his masterly inactivity was such as led him to absent himself pretty wholly from the duties, whose onerous nature may be inferred when the most important business before the council was, on one occasion, clubbing together a penny each to pay a ninepenny postage in the complete absence of town funds.

Into his life at this period a new vision was introduced through the appearance on the scene of a young lady whom he was afterwards to make his wife. Sauntering through the wood on the hill overlooking the Cromarty Firth he met Miss Lydia Fraser, who was engaged in reading 'an elaborate essay on Causation.' The reader may remember—with feelings, we hope, of contrition for Mr. Lang's railway lyric on the fin de siècle students of Miss Braddon and Gaboriau, and for the degenerate tendencies of the age,—the curiously fitting parallel in which the geologist Buckland met in a Devonshire coach, his future wife, Miss Morland, deep in a ponderous and recently issued folio of Cuvier, into which even he himself had not found time to dip! Miller was ten years the senior of his young friend, whose father had been in business in Inverness, and whose mother had retired to Cromarty to live in a retired way upon a small annuity, added to by her daughter's private pupils. As a girl Miss Fraser had been a boarder in the family of George Thomson, whose Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, enriched by the hand of Burns with about a hundred songs, forms an abiding monument of their joint taste and judgment. The acquaintance ripened into intimacy and an agreement that for three years they were to make Scotland their home, when, should nothing then turn up they were to emigrate and try their fortune in America. But fortunately an opening occurred which was to retain him at home for the work he was so naturally fitted to perform.