diff options
Diffstat (limited to '44530-h')
| -rw-r--r-- | 44530-h/44530-h.htm | 4556 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | 44530-h/images/cover.jpg | bin | 0 -> 83392 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | 44530-h/images/titlepage.jpg | bin | 0 -> 38831 bytes |
3 files changed, 4556 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/44530-h/44530-h.htm b/44530-h/44530-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..913e03a --- /dev/null +++ b/44530-h/44530-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,4556 @@ +<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" +"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> +<html> +<head> +<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> +<title>Hugh Miller, by W. Keith Leask—A Project Gutenberg +eBook</title> +<style type="text/css"> + + body {margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%;} + + p {text-indent: 0em; + text-align: justify; + margin-top: .80em; + margin-bottom: .80em; + line-height: 1.25em;} + + .hang {text-align: justify; + padding-left: 2em; + text-indent: -2em;} + + .blockquote {text-align: justify; + margin-left: 7%; + margin-right: 7%; + font-size: 98%; + margin-top: 1.5em; + margin-bottom: 1.5em;} + + .sig {margin-left: 63%; + text-align: left;} + + .smc {font-size: 85%;} + .sc {font-variant: small-caps;} + + sup, sub {font-size: 75%; + line-height: 50%;} + + .ctr {text-align: center;} + .ctrbold {text-align: center; + font-weight: bold;} + .ctrsmall {text-align: center; + font-size: 90%;} + .ctrsmaller {text-align: center; + font-size: 80%;} + .ctrsmallest {text-align: center; + font-size: 70%;} + .ctrlarge {text-align: center; + font-size: 120%;} + .ctrtoppad {text-align: center; + padding-top: 2em;} + + .small {font-size: 90%;} + .smaller {font-size: 80%;} + .smallest {font-size: 70%;} + + .fn {font-size: .7em; + text-decoration: none;} + + dl.footnotes {margin: 1em 2em;} + + dt.notelabel {text-align: right; + width: 3em; + font-size: 96%;} + + dd.notetext {text-align: justify; + margin: 0em 3em 1em 3em; + font-size: 94%;} + + #coverpage {border: .1em solid black;} + + @media print, handheld + {.figcenter {text-align: center; + margin: 2em auto auto auto;} + body {margin-left: 2%; + margin-right: 2%;} + .poetry {display: block; + margin-left: 1.5em;} + table {font-size: x-small;}} + + img {max-width: 100%; + height:auto;} + + .figcenter {clear: both; + margin: 2em auto; + text-align: center; + max-width: 100%;} + + .titlepage {font-weight: bold;} + .booktitle {font-weight: bold; + text-align: center; + font-size: 112%; + padding-top: 2em; + page-break-before: always;} + + h1 {text-align: center; + font-size: 130%; + font-weight: bold; + line-height: 2em; + padding-top: 1em; + page-break-before: always;} + + h2 {text-align: center; + font-size: 115%; + font-weight: bold; + padding-top: 4em; + padding-bottom: 1em; + page-break-before: always;} + + .poetry-container {text-align: center;} + + .poetry {display: inline-block; + text-align: left; + line-height: 1.25em;} + + .poetry .headstanza {margin: .5em 0em 1.25em 0em;} + .poetry .stanza {margin: 1em auto;} + .poetry .stanzaitalic {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em; font-style:italic;} + .poetry div {margin: 0; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} + + .poetry .i0h {margin-left: 0.5em;} + .poetry .i1 {margin-left: 1em;} + .poetry .i1h {margin-left: 1.5em;} + .poetry .i2 {margin-left: 2em;} + .poetry .i3 {margin-left: 3em;} + .poetry .i3h {margin-left: 3.5em;} + .poetry .i4 {margin-left: 4em;} + .poetry .i6 {margin-left: 6em;} + .poetry .i8 {margin-left: 8em;} + .poetry .i10 {margin-left: 10em;} + .poetry .i12 {margin-left: 12em;} + .poetry .i14 {margin-left: 14em;} + .poetry .i16 {margin-left: 16em;} + + table {margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; + margin-top: 0em; + margin-bottom: 0em;} + + td.chpt {vertical-align: top; + text-align: center; + padding-top: 1em;} + + td.txt {vertical-align: top; + text-align: left; + font-variant: small-caps;} + + td.pg {vertical-align: bottom; + text-align: right; + padding-left: .6em;} + + .tn {font-size: small; + margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + padding: .2em 1em .2em 1em; + background-color: #E6E6E6; + border-style: solid; + border-width: .1em;} + + a:link {color: #00F; + text-decoration:none;} + a:visited {color:#F00; + text-decoration:none;} + +</style> +</head> +<body> +<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44530 ***</div> + +<div class="figcenter"><img width="352" height="585" id="coverpage" src="images/cover.jpg" alt="cover"></div> + +<div class="figcenter"><img width="303" height="500" src="images/titlepage.jpg" alt="title page" border="1"></div> + +<h1> +HUGH MILLER +</h1> +<br> +<div class="titlepage"> +<p class="ctrsmall"> +BY +</p> + +<p class="ctr"> +W. KEITH LEASK +</p> + +<br> +<p class="ctrsmall"> +FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES +</p> + +<br> +<p class="ctrsmaller"> +PUBLISHED BY<br> +OLIPHANT ANDERSON & FERRIER<br> +EDINBURGH AND LONDON +</p> +<br> +<p class="ctrsmaller"> +The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and +the printing from the press of Messrs. T. and A. Constable, Edinburgh. +</p> +</div> + + + +<h2> +PREFACE +</h2> + + +<p> +In the absence of material dealing especially with his last years in +Edinburgh a complete <i>Life</i> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p class="sig"> +W. K. L. +</p> + +<p> +<span class="sc">Aberdeen</span>, <i>April</i> 1896. +</p> + + + + +<h2> +CONTENTS +</h2> + +<table summary="Contents"> +<tr> +<td class="txt"> </td> +<td class="pg"><small>PAGE</small></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER I</td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td class="txt">Early Days—In Cromarty</td> +<td class="pg"><a href="#I">9</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER II</td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td class="txt">In Edinburgh—The Cromarty Bank</td> +<td class="pg"><a href="#II">37</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER III</td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td class="txt">The Scottish Church, 1560-1843—'The Witness'</td> +<td class="pg"><a href="#III">68</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER IV</td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td class="txt">In Edinburgh—Last Years</td> +<td class="pg"><a href="#IV">96</a></td> +</tr> + + +<tr> +<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER V</td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td class="txt">In Science</td> +<td class="pg"><a href="#V">119</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td class="txt" colspan="2"> </td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td class="txt">Appendix: Bibliography</td> +<td class="pg"><a href="#appendix">154</a></td> +</tr> +</table> + + +<br> + +<p class="booktitle"> +HUGH MILLER +</p> + + + + +<h2> +<a name="I"> </a> +CHAPTER I +</h2> + +<p class="ctr"> +EARLY DAYS—IN CROMARTY +</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> +<div class="stanza"> +<div>'A wet sheet and a flowing sea,</div> +<div>A wind that follows fast.'</div> +<div class="i8"><span class="sc">Allan Cunningham</span></div></div></div></div> + +<p> +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 +<cite>Ecclesiastical History</cite>, '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 <span class="smc">II.</span> +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 <cite>Ecclesiastical History</cite> 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 <cite>The Antiquary</cite>. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<cite>Tales and Sketches</cite> 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 <i>mains</i> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <i>cass-chron</i>, 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, +</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> +<div class="stanza"> +<div>'When Norse and Danish galleys plied</div> +<div>Their oars within the Firth of Clyde,</div> +<div>And floated Haco's banner trim</div> +<div>Above Norweyan warriors grim.'</div></div> + +<div class="stanza"> +<div class="i12"><i>Marmion</i>, iii. xx.</div></div></div></div> + +<p> +Such, too, had been the traditional custom for centuries after of the +boatbuilders in the Western Highlands. +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>Book of Sports</cite>, 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 <cite>Douglas</cite>, seconded by Robertson of +Gladsmuir, the subsequent historian of <cite>Charles +<span class="smc">V.</span></cite>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Of these two uncles, the James and Sandy of his <cite>Schools and +Schoolmasters</cite>, 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 <cite>Reliques</cite>, 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 +<cite>Reminiscences</cite>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>Scenes and Legends</cite>. +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>Letters</cite> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. <cite>The +Pilgrim's Progress</cite>, 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 <cite>Robinson Crusoe</cite>, <cite>Gulliver's +Travels</cite>—both never so familiar in Scotland to boys as they are +in England—Cook's <cite>Voyages</cite>, John Howie of Lochgoin's +<cite>Worthies</cite>, the <cite>Voyages</cite> 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 +<cite>Wallace</cite>, 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 <cite>Iliad</cite> and the +<cite>Odyssey</cite> 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 <cite>Bruce</cite> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>Johnny +Gibb</cite>, 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 +<cite>Rudiments</cite> 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 +<cite>Roderick Random</cite> 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 +<cite>Rudiments</cite> 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 +<cite>Rudiments</cite>.' +</p> + +<p> +More congenial amusement he found in the exercise of his story-telling +faculty. When the master's back was turned, the <cite>Sennachie</cite>, +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 <cite>Citizen of the World</cite>, 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 <cite>Letters of a Village Governess</cite>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +His reading at this time received a curious extension through there +falling into his hands a copy of <cite>Military Medley</cite> 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 <cite>Marmion</cite>, 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':— +</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> +<div class="stanza"> +<div>'Again I fought each combat o'er,</div> +<div>Pebbles and shells in order laid</div> +<div>The mimic ranks of war displayed.'</div></div></div></div> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <i>uncalled</i> 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 <cite>Sartor</cite> has drawn certainly no +flattering picture of the Edinburgh of his days, and his friend +Professor Masson in the early volumes of <cite>Macmillan's +Magazine</cite> 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 <cite>The Man of Feeling</cite>, +we have said enough to show that Miller certainly lost nothing by +non-attendance at the classes in Aberdeen. +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>Old Red Sandstone</cite> 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: +</p> + +<div class="blockquote"> +<p> +'I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time, fond of the +pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad +awake; and, woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has +instanced in his <cite>Twa Dogs</cite> as one of the most +disagreeable of all employments. Bating the passing uneasiness +occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life +which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I +had been a wanderer among rocks and woods—a reader of curious +books when I could get them—a gleaner of old traditional stories; +and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams and all my +amusements for the kind of life in which men toil every day that +they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be +enabled to toil. The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern +shore of a noble inland bay, or firth rather (the Bay of Cromarty), +with a little clear stream on the one side and a thick fir wood on +the other. It had been opened in the Old Red Sandstone of the +district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, and +which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty +feet.' +</p> +</div> + +<p> +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 <cite>The +Witness</cite>—'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 <cite>Highland Tour</cite> 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.' +</p> + +<p> +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 +<i>brochan</i>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <span class="smc">II.</span>—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, <cite>Humphrey Clinker</cite>, had been no less familiar than +from the pages of <cite>David Copperfield</cite> 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 <cite>Chronicles of +the Canongate</cite>. 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. +</p> + + + +<h2> +<a name="II"> </a> +CHAPTER II +</h2> + +<p class="ctr"> +IN EDINBURGH—THE CROMARTY BANK +</p> +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> +<div class="stanza"> +<div>'I view yon Empress of the North</div> +<div class="i1">Sit on her hilly throne.'</div> +<div class="i8"><span class="sc">Scott.</span></div></div></div></div> + + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>Guy +Mannering</cite>, and by Lockhart in his <cite>Life of Burns</cite>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>Institutes</cite>; 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 +<i>and prejudice of their masters</i>,' they should work every day in +the week except at Christmas! Clearly there was no Eight Hours Bill in +Old Scotland. +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>Douglas</cite>, 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 +<cite>Rob Roy</cite>. 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 +<cite>Autobiography</cite> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>Guy Mannering</cite> 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 <cite>Life of +Knox</cite>, 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 <cite>Prolegomena to Homer</cite>. 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, +<cite>Old Mortality</cite>, had done much, at least among the +<i>literati</i> 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 <cite>Lays of the Scottish +Cavaliers</cite>, 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 <i>Life</i> of Oliver Cromwell, and for the +historical restoration of the great Reformer, M'Crie has done in his +book what Carlyle, in his <cite>Letters of Cromwell</cite>, has for +ever effected for the true presentation of the Protector. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.' +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>The +Witness</cite> 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 <i>his</i> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <span class="smc">II.</span> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>Inverness Courier</cite>. 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 +<cite>Courier</cite> in the very same year of Miller's visit. His +<cite>Life of Pope</cite> 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. +</p> + +<p> +His volume of verse under the title of <cite>Poems Written in the +Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason</cite> 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 <cite>Quarterly</cite> 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 <cite>Scenes +of Teviotdale</cite> 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 <cite>Blackwood's +Magazine</cite>, 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 <cite>Emigrant's Lament</cite>, where he touches with a faultless +hand the scenery of 'bonnie Teviotdale and Cheviot mountains blue.' +</p> + +<p> +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 <cite>Wolf of +Badenoch</cite>—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 <cite>Morning +Chronicle</cite>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<cite>Letters from the Mountains</cite> have yielded in popularity to +her song of <cite>Highland Laddie</cite>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <i lang="fr">fin de +siècle</i> 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 <cite>Select Collection of Original Scottish +Airs</cite>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +Cromarty had hitherto been without a bank. Now, through the +representation of local landowners and traders, the Commercial Bank of +Scotland was induced to extend one of its branches to the town. The +services of a local shipowner were secured for the post of agent, and +Miller was offered the place of accountant. It was necessary, of +course, that he should qualify himself for his new duties, and so he +sailed to Leith to acquire his initiation at Linlithgow. He was now in +his thirty-second year. +</p> + +<p> +Before leaving Cromarty he had been engaged upon his <cite>Scenes and +Legends</cite> of the traditional history of the country, and on his +forwarding his manuscript to Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, to whom it is +dedicated, he was invited by the hospitable baronet to meet Mr. Adam +Black the publisher, whose long retention of the copyright of the +Waverley Novels has shed distinction on the firm of which he was the +head. By him very generous terms were offered, and Miller by his +venture realised £60 over his second book, which still seems to enjoy +in its thirteenth edition no slight share of popularity. He was even +pressed by Sir Thomas to make his own house at Grange his residence +while in the south, but, Linlithgow having been already fixed upon he +took his passage in the fly-boat running on the canal between Edinburgh +and Glasgow and soon 'reached the fine old burgh as the brief winter +day was coming to a close, and was seated next morning at my desk, not +a hundred yards from the spot on which Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh had +taken his stand when he shot the Good Regent.' At first he was rather +diffident of his ability for the work, the swiftness of mechanical +summation never to the end coming to him perfectly natural; though, in +the course of a brief two months' absence from Cromarty, he was able to +join the bank with such a working acquaintance with the details of the +business that, when the policy of Sir Robert Peel threatened an attack +upon the circulation of the one-pound note, he was competent to publish +a series of articles, <cite>Words of Warning to the People of +Scotland</cite>, in which he defended the cash credit system of +Scottish banking. This had before been fully expounded by Hume and +Scott, and Miller could show its peculiar ability for enabling men to +'coin their characters should they be good ones, even should houses, +ships, and furniture be wanting.' In the years to come his experience +enabled him to write his own business and commercial leaders in his +paper, but as yet his income did not exceed one hundred pounds, and he +willingly joined in the continuation of Wilson's <cite>Tales of the +Borders</cite>. This work has retained its popularity, though probably +few are aware of the complexity of the authorship. As edited by +Leighton, it preserves the names of several writers who occupy a more +or less humble niche among the minor singers of Scotland, and in the +list of contributors, along with Miller, to the work are found the two +Bethunes, Alexander and John. He wrote for the <cite>Tales</cite> a +good deal of rather poorly remunerated work, and his papers on Burns +and Fergusson afford a not unpleasing attempt to weave the lives of the +two poets into an imaginative narrative. On their appearance, the +papers were quoted as original reminiscences, though a more +discriminating criticism could not have failed to detect their real +nature. Miller possessed the logical and personal element too strong to +merge his own individuality successfully in the characters of others. +The dramatic faculty was deficient. Yet it was not quite an unfortunate +attempt to thus anticipate such a sketch as Dr. Hutchison Stirling has +so admirably worked out in his <cite>Burns in Drama</cite>. +</p> + +<p> +Into a very different arena he was now to be drawn. Politically and +ecclesiastically, it was a period of excitement. In 1829 Catholic +Emancipation had no sooner been passed than O'Connell brought in his +motions for the Repeal and the Tithe War. The latter was a protest by +the Romanists against paying tithes for the maintenance of the Irish +Church, whose incumbents were a mere outpost of the Tory and +Episcopalian party, converting, as Lord Rosebery has said, nobody, and +alienating everybody. On the withdrawal of Grey, and the fall of Peel, +Lord Melbourne had carried on for years a sort of guerilla warfare with +a varying majority, too dependent on the Irish vote to give general +satisfaction. The Tithe Act, however, was passed, and this made the +support of the English clergy in Ireland a charge upon rent. The +position in which matters then stood with the Government will be +clearly seen by a reference to the admirable speech of Macaulay, in May +1839, to the electors of Edinburgh. In Ross-shire, the tension of +affairs had been rendered more acute by a wave of Tory reaction which +induced the Church of Scotland to cast the weight of her influence +against the Whigs; but the people, as has ever been the case upon such +aberrations from the national policy, had steadily declined to follow +this lead, although the endowment scheme for new chapels had been dealt +with by the Whigs in a niggard and unsatisfactory way. +</p> + +<p> +In Cromarty the cause of the Church was strong. Since the Revolution, +the succession in the parish had been at once popular and able. The +position taken up hitherto by Miller and his uncles had been a middle +one. With strong hereditary attachment to the national establishment +they united personal leanings which led them to a sympathy with the +standpoint and the theology of the Seceders. But as yet Miller was, he +says, 'thoroughly an Established man.' The revenues of the Church he +regarded as the patrimony of the people; and he looked not unnaturally +to a time 'when that unwarrantable appropriation of them, through which +the aristocracy had sought to extend its influence, but which had +served only greatly to reduce its power in the country, would come to +an end.' Still he confesses that as yet there were no signs of what he +would himself have desired to see—a general and popular agitation +against patronage—though he noted with approval the 'revival of the +old spirit in the Church.' The time had, however, come when he could +hesitate no longer. He saw with anxiety the decisions go against the +Church in March 1838, and of the Lords in May 1839, the victory of his +case by the presentee to Auchterarder, and the declaration of the +illegality of the Veto Act of 1834. 'Now,' he says, 'I felt more +deeply; and for at least one night—after reading the speech of Lord +Brougham and the decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterarder +case—I slept none.' Could he not, he reasoned with himself, do +something in the hour of danger to rescue the patrimony of his country +out of the hands of an alien aristocracy, which since 1712 had +obstinately set itself in hereditary opposition to the people? In the +morning he wrote a letter addressed to Lord Brougham, the grandson of +the historian Robertson, to which we shall have occasion later on to +refer in detail. This admirable piece of reasoning and clever +statement—the result of a week's work—was sent to Robert Paul, the +manager of the Commercial Bank in Edinburgh. By him its value was +quickly seen, and by the strenuous advice of Dr. Candlish it was at +once put in print. Four editions in the course of well-nigh as many +weeks proved its excellence; and it was fortunate enough to secure +encomiums from two men so different in their leanings as Daniel +O'Connell and Mr. Gladstone. +</p> + +<p> +The writer who could at such a critical position produce a pamphlet of +this nature was, of course, a marked man. The leaders of the +Evangelical party of the Church in Edinburgh had been engaged in a +scheme for the starting of a paper. From the press of the capital, and +from such provincial organs as <cite>The Aberdeen Herald</cite> and +<cite>The Constitutional</cite>, as edited by Mr. Adam and Mr. Joseph +Robertson, the 'travelled thane Athenian Aberdeen' who drifted into the +Crimean War later on, and who drifted with the Parliament House party +in a reactionary ecclesiastical policy at this time, had been content +to draw such scanty information as he ever possessed on the real issues +at stake in the Church of Scotland. Indeed, his lordship had gone so +far as to taunt the Evangelical Party as composed but of the +intellectual <i lang="fr">débris</i> of the country, and of the 'wild men' in the +Church. Sir Robert Peel, who really knew nothing of the intricacies of +the question, was content to believe that there was a conspiracy to +defeat the law and to rend the constitution. But the ignorance of the +Premier and the taunt of Lord Aberdeen came but with an ill grace from +them when flung against such men as Sir David Brewster, Chalmers, +Welsh, Guthrie, Bonar, Duff, and Miller, and the whole intellectual +force of the country at large. Indeed, to the very last, the indecision +and the ignorance as to the state of the country shown by Lord Aberdeen +were but the natural results of his holding his ecclesiastical +conscience in fee from such men as Robertson of Ellon, Paull of +Tullynessle, and Pirie of Dyce—these bucolic personages, 'like +full-blown peony-roses glistening after a shower,' whose triple and +conjunct capacity, joined to that of their master, might have been cut, +to borrow the eulogy of Sir James Mackintosh upon Burke, out of the +humblest of their rivals and never have been missed. It was really high +time that something should be done, when Lord Medwyn could pose as an +ecclesiastical scholar by a few garbled quotations from Beza, +professing to set in their true light the views held by the Reformers +upon patronage; and when these very extracts, together with the copious +errors of the press, had been worked up by Robertson of Ellon to be +quoted by Lord Aberdeen third-hand as an embodiment of oracular +learning and wisdom! +</p> + +<p> +No apology, therefore, need here be made for the inclusion of an +extract from that remarkable work by Dr. William +Alexander—<cite>Johnny Gibb</cite>—to which we have before had +occasion to refer, and which must ever rank as the classic of the +movement with which Miller's own name is associated. It deals with the +sort of windy pabulum then served up by the Aberdeen papers to obscure +the real issues, and it describes in the raciest and most mellow style +of the lamented writer the meeting in the schoolhouse of Jonathan +Tawse, at whose hospitable board are assembled the three farmers and +the local doctor. Readers in the North of Scotland can from their own +knowledge read much between the lines; and they will not forget that +Mr. Adam and Mr. Joseph Robertson were the only two men who could be +found with effrontery sufficient to shake hands with Mr. Edwards in the +all-too notorious induction at Marnoch. +</p> + +<div class="blockquote"> +<p> +'Jonathan took up an Aberdeen newspaper, wherein were recorded +certain of the proceedings of the Evangelical ministers, who were +visiting different parishes for the purpose of holding meetings. +First he put on his "specs," and next he selected and read out +several paragraphs, with such headings as "<span class="sc">The schismatics in +a——</span>," "<span class="sc">The fire-raisers in b——</span>," and so on, +winding up this part with the concluding words of one paragraph, +which were these:—"So ended this compound of vain, false, and +seditious statements on the position of the Church, and which must +have been most offensive to every friend of truth, peace, or +loyalty who heard it." +</p> + +<p> +"I say Amen to ilka word o' that," said Dr. Drogemweal. "Sneevlin' +hypocrites. That's your non-intrusion meetin's. It concerns every +loyal subject to see them pitten doon." +</p> + +<p> +'"Here's fat the editor says, in a weel-reason't, and vera calm an' +temperate article," continued Jonathan—"he's speakin' o' the +fire-raisers": "How much reliance could be placed on the kind of +information communicated by these reverend gentlemen will be +readily imagined by such of our readers as have read or listened to +any of the harangues which the schismatics are so liberally dealing +forth. If simple laymen, in pursuing objects of interest or of +ambition, were to be guilty of half the misrepresentations of facts +and concealment of the truth which are now, it would seem, thought +not unbecoming on the part of <i>Evangelical</i> ministers, they +would be justly scouted from society." "That's fat I ca' sen'in the +airrow straucht to the mark."' +</p> + +<p> +"Seerly," interposed Mains, who had been listening with much +gravity. +</p> + +<p> +"A weel-feather't shaft, tae," said Dr. Drogemweal. +</p> + +<p> +'"An' it's perfectly true, ilka word o't. They're nae better o' the +ae han' nor incendiaries, wan'erin' here an' there to raise strife +amo' peaceable fowk; and syne their harangues—a clean perversion +o' the constitutional law, an' veelint abuse o' the institutions o' +the countra."' +</p> +</div> + +<p> +How many specimens of that style of 'calm and temperate article' were +produced in the North, no one with a recollection for either history or +for humour need recall at this hour. Somewhat later, Miller could say +in <cite>The Witness</cite> that in a few days he had clipped out of +the papers what he had seen written against such a man of position and +courtesy as Mr. Makgill Crichton of Rankeilour in the course of a +fortnight. It amounted to eleven feet six inches when pieced together, +and was for the most part gross abuse and vulgar personalities. +</p> + +<p> +The hour, then, had come and the man. Miller was invited to Edinburgh +to meet the leaders of the Evangelical party, and he was offered the +position of editor of the newspaper, which started its first issue on +January 15, 1840, appearing bi-weekly upon Wednesdays and Saturdays. At +the end of the bank's financial year, he was presented by his +fellow-townsmen with a breakfast service of plate, and the presence of +his uncle Alexander was to Miller a circumstance of peculiar +satisfaction. In a few days later he was seated at the editorial desk. +For sixteen years he was with undiminished success to edit <cite>The +Witness</cite>. But here we pause. The conflict in which he was to +engage calls for a special chapter. The question has been approached +from all sides, civil as well as ecclesiastical. But it is fitting that +here, at least, an attempt be made to connect the struggle with the +history and the peculiar mental and moral characteristics of the +Scottish people. It will be seen that the question involves +far-reaching, deep-rooted, and closely connected points of issue. It +will therefore be the attempt of the next chapter to show the really +national and democratic features of the conflict, and to briefly +indicate how the civil and religious rights of the people, long before +staked and won by the early Reformers, were again, when surrendered by +an alien nobility, saved for them—from the point, at least, of abiding +literature—by two men; who, sprung themselves from the people, the one +the son of a Cromarty sailor and the other of an Aberdeenshire crofter, +wrote the leaders in <cite>The Witness</cite> and <cite>Johnny Gibb of +Gushetneuk</cite>. The best years of Miller's own life, sixteen years +of unceasing turmoil and overwork, were spent in making these issues +abundantly clear to the people. No apology need then be made for an +effort to reset these positions in their historical connection, and to +exhibit the logical nexus of affairs from 1560 to 1843. +</p> + + + + +<h2> +<a name="III"> </a> +CHAPTER III +</h2> + +<p class="ctr"> +THE SCOTTISH CHURCH, 1560-1843—'THE WITNESS' +</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> +<div class="stanza"> +<div>'The fate of a nation was riding that night.'</div> +<div class="i8"><cite>Paul Revere's Ride</cite>, <span class="sc">Longfellow</span>.</div></div></div></div> + + +<p> +When Andrew Melville said to King James <span class="smc">VI.</span>, 'Sir, as divers +times before have I told you, so now again must I tell you, there are +two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland; there is King James, the head +of the Commonwealth, and there is Christ Jesus, the King of the Church, +whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom he is not a +king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member,' he expressed what, from +its foundation as an Establishment in 1560 till now, has been in every +one of its constituent parts the belief and practice of the indomitable +Kirk of Scotland. +</p> + +<p> +These were words which the British Solomon was to remember. Over the +border, where the obedient English clergy, who looked from the humblest +curate to the highest dignitary to the throne alone for their support, +professed to find in the pedantic pupil of the great Buchanan the +wisdom of a present deity and regarded his slobbering utterances as +'the counsels of a god,' James found himself in more congenial society +for the promulgation of his views on kingcraft which were to embroil +the nation and drive his descendants from the throne. The preface to +the Authorised Version of the Bible by the translators of 1611 shews +the depth to which the Anglican clergy could sink. No wonder that James +found such men ready tools to his hand. In their company he could +complacently vapour about 'No bishop, no king,' or express his joy in +finding himself for the first time in the company of 'holy and learned +men.' When Melville, as professor of divinity at Sedan, was dying an +exile in 1622 James was dismissing the two English houses of Parliament +for what he was pleased to call an invasion of his prerogative; the +rumours of the Spanish marriage were in the air, the first instalment +of the royal legacy of kingcraft. 'No bishop, no king': The nation was +to take him at his word, and to demonstrate pretty effectively that +kingdoms can do without either—and both. +</p> + +<p> +'Not a king—but a member;' 'in all matters ecclesiastical as well as +civil head supreme'—the whole history of Scotland was to run for three +hundred years in these grooves. This is the doctrine which, from 1560 +till now, has in Scotland been known as the Headship of Christ. Without +a correct understanding of this question, not as a mere metaphysical or +theological figment, but as a reality most vitally 'within practical +politics' carrying effects direct and visible into every corner of the +national life, the history of Scotland must of necessity be a sealed +book—the play of <cite>Hamlet</cite> without the royal Dane. To the +English reader this has been largely obscured, from the fact that the +chief sources of information open to him are not such as present a +rational or connected story. George Borrow found that Scott's +caricature of <cite>Old Mortality</cite> was what Englishmen had in +their minds, and that some thin romanticism about Prince Charles Edward +was the end and substance of their knowledge. Yet such a presentation +would be no less absurd than <cite>Hudibras</cite> would be for the men +of the Long Parliament. Scott was too much occupied with the external +and material conditions of the country, too much engrossed by obvious +necessity of materials in the romantic element of Scottish history, and +too little in sympathy with the spiritual and moral forces at work to +present anything like a complete narrative, while his feudal sentiments +were nourished by the almost entire lack of the political instinct. The +ecclesiastical chapters in John Hill Burton's <cite>History</cite> are +not equal to the main body of his work; and, if the +<cite>Lectures</cite> of Dean Stanley are the characteristically thin +production of one confessing to but a superficial knowledge of the vast +literature of the field,' the <cite>Ecclesiastical History</cite> of +Grub is only the work of a mere Episcopalian antiquary, and the lack of +judgment and political insight appears on every page. 'It seems to me,' +says Carlyle, 'hard measure that this Scottish man Knox, now after +three hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the +world, intrinsically for having been, in such way as was then possible +to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen'—harder still, say we, that the +subject of Milton's great eulogy should be judged by minds of the +notes-and-queries order, or by those of the class of Hume and +Robertson, who have such a gentlemanly horror at everything that +savours of enthusiasm as to miss the central point, the +<i>coincidence</i> of civil and religious liberty. +</p> + +<p> +'In every sense a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him. +A man's, or a nation of men's.' Yet we find Hume writing to Robertson +that if the divine were willing to give up his Mary, the philosopher +was willing to give up his Charles, and there would at least be the +joint pleasure of seeing John Knox made completely ridiculous. 'Who,' +writes Robertson to Gibbon, 'is Mr. Hayley? His Whiggism is so bigoted, +and his Christianity so fierce, that he almost disgusts one with <i>two +very good things</i>!' Christianity was then only a good thing when it +had good things to offer to pluralists of the Warburtonian order. Yet +these two garbled and distorted narratives are still the most widely +known versions in England. Little wonder, therefore, is it that Carlyle +should ask, 'I would fain know the history of Scotland; who can tell it +me? Robertson, say innumerable voices; Robertson, against the world. I +open Robertson; and find there, through long ages too confused for +narrative, a cunning answer and hypothesis—a scandalous chronicle (as +for some Journal of Fashion) of two persons: Mary Stuart, a Beauty, but +over light-headed; and Henry Darnley, a Booby who had fine legs. Thus +is History written.' +</p> + +<p> +In England, the Reformation took place in a way quite different from +that in which it was effected in Scotland. The strong hand of Henry +<span class="smc">VIII.</span> piloted the nation for a time through a crisis, and for +a space at least it would appear that the nation was content to +surrender its religious conscience into the hands of the king. He +attempted, says Macaulay with perfect truth, to constitute an Anglican +church differing from the Roman Catholic on the point of the Supremacy, +and on that alone. There can be little doubt that to the court of Henry +the king was the head of both church and state, and that the power of +the keys temporal as well as ecclesiastical resided in the Crown. So +far did Cranmer carry out this idea that, regarding his own spiritual +functions as having ceased with the death of Henry, he renewed his +commission under Edward <span class="smc">VI.</span>, and for mere denial of the Act of +Supremacy More and Fisher were sent to the block. It is true that +Elizabeth was induced to part with a good deal of this exaggerated +prerogative, yet she still exercised such a domineering and +inquisitorial power as threatened to unfrock any refractory creature of +her creation. It was natural, therefore, that the church created almost +exclusively by the will of the Crown should for her rights and +privileges rest entirely upon the Crown. The people had never been +consulted in her creation, and it was to the Crown alone that the +clergy could look. Her constitution, her traditions, and her government +were all monarchical; and if, at first, she was moderate in her tone of +adulation, it was easy to see that, led largely by interest, she would +begin to assert the divine origin of the powers of the king, with the +deduction of 'no bishop, no king' and of passive obedience, which made +itself heard from the pulpits of Laud, Montagu, and Mainwaring, and in +the treatise of Filmer. +</p> + +<p> +Passing from the more servile ranks of the clergy to those of the laity +it appeared as the party cry of a class. To many it has often appeared +strange how such an absurd and illogical doctrine could become even the +shibboleth of a political party. Yet at bottom the doctrine of the +divine right of the king was not very unfavourable to the divine right +of squires, and king and cavaliers were bound together by obvious ties +of interest in the maintenance of the royal prerogative against the +rising tide of political opposition. Holy Alliances in recent times +have not found this doctrine strange to them, and a high elevation of +the prerogative and the mitre was the very breath of existence to a +church whose being depended on the stability of the throne. Passive +obedience was a convenient cry for those who never dreamed that the +breath of the king could unmake them as a breath had made. Never till +James <span class="smc">VII.</span> began to oppress the clergy did they begin to see +what was logically involved in their abject protestations of loyalty, +and in their professions of turning the right cheek to the royal +smiter. Only when the seven bishops were sent to the Tower, not for any +loyalty to the country or to the constitution, but through a selfish +maintenance of their own interests as a class, did the Anglican body +bethink themselves of resistance, and of texts that reminded them of +the hammer of Jael and the dagger of Ehud no less than of the balm of +the anointed of the Lord. History has repeated itself. The landed and +clerical classes associated their triumph with the triumph of +Episcopacy, and their humiliation with the triumph of the Independents. +The exaltation of the prerogative, therefore, again made its appearance +at the Restoration, to be shaken by the high-handed measures of James, +and pass to extinction at the Revolution. The same thing has +practically been seen in Spain. Spain, remarks Borrow, is not naturally +a fanatical country. It was by humouring her pride only that she was +induced to launch the Armada and waste her treasures in the wars of the +Low Countries. But to the Spaniard, Catholicism was the mark of his own +ascendency; it was the typification of his elevation over the Moor. The +Most Catholic King was therefore flattered to exalt the claims of the +Holy See no less than the English clergy had exalted the prerogative of +the king. Far different the condition of affairs in Scotland. When Knox +landed at Leith, in May 1559, he found the whole people ripe for a +change, so that by August of next year the Scottish Parliament could +pass a resolution to abolish the Papacy with the entire consent of the +nation, and in December 1560 the First General Assembly met. Its laic +element was strong and was emphasised from the beginning. To six +ministers there were thirty-four elders, and it met by no sanction of +the Crown, but by its own authority. At its second meeting, Maitland of +Lethington could craftily raise the question as to the legality of such +conventions without the consent of the Queen. It was retorted that, if +they were dependent merely upon the Queen for their liberty of meeting, +they would be deprived of the public preaching of the gospel. 'Take +from us,' said Knox, 'the freedom of assemblies, and take from us the +Gospel'; but it was left to her to send a commissioner. So early was +the doctrine of the Headship maintained by the Church of Scotland. In +1560, no less than 1843, the question was clear. In 1557 they had +resolved that the election of ministers, according to the custom of the +primitive church, should be made by the people; and in the First Book +of Discipline of 1560, re-enacted in 1578, it was laid down that 'it +appertaineth to the people and to every several congregation to elect +their minister, and it is altogether to be avoided that any man be +violently intruded or thrust in upon any congregation.' The fabric was +laid: three hundred years have not started a plank. +</p> + +<p> +The difference of the Reformation in England and in Scotland at once +emerges. Knox had the nation at his back; and, besides being, as Milton +said, 'the Reformer of a nation,' he had found the people by mental +temperament, or by concurrent historical reasons, anchored to a +doctrinal system with a political side which has coloured ever since +the stream of its existence. Calvinism, in every one of its forms, +exaggerated or diluted, has this double side. It is felt in this way. +To a nation believing that the divine decree of election has singled +out the individual, the claims of a church with the greatest of +histories and the most unbroken of descents are of slight value. To the +individual believing it is God's own immutable decree that has made his +calling and election sure, the whole retinue of priests and priestly +paraphernalia appears but an idle pageant. To the nation, and to the +individual alike, regarding itself or himself as fellow-workers with +God in the furtherance of His immutable decrees, thrones, dominions, +principalities and powers have for ever lost their awe or a power to +coerce. Wherever the belief has been carried these results have been +seen. There has been, what Buckle failed completely to see, a rooted +aversion to ecclesiasticism, and a no less rooted aversion to tyranny. +And in no better words could the doctrinal and political principles be +laid down than in the famous words of Andrew Melville which we have set +at the head of this chapter. +</p> + +<p> +Again, when Knox laid hold of the nation his schemes in their very +first draft embraced the people as a whole. It was not a merely +piecemeal or monarchical business as in England. The Reformers were not +content with merely formulating an Act like Henry; they proceeded to +carry out in detail their plans for a national system of education. +They had no idea of setting up a church of their own invention. There +is something in the Scottish intellect, in this resembling the French, +that seeks for the completest realisation in detail of its ideas. As +Professor Masson has said, its dominant note is really not caution, +with which it is so frequently credited, but <i>emphasis</i>. While the +English Independents during the later years of the Civil War appear as +either sectaries or as individualists, the contention of the Scots was +ever for a national system. This feature in the character of the nation +is really at the root of what Hallam calls the 'Presbyterian +Hildebrandism' of the elder M'Crie. Johnson, too, could with some +considerable truth say to Boswell, 'You are the only instance of a +Scotchman that I have known who did not at every other sentence bring +in some other Scotchman.' But this is the very feature that Buckle has +overlooked, and it is this that explains how the new church spoke in +the authoritative tones of the old; this, too, which explains how, +outside of the waning Episcopalian sect, there are no dissenters in +Scotland in the true sense. We have parties, not sects. While the +Secession, the Relief, the Cameronians, the Burghers were all mere +branches of the parent stock, retaining in detail its fundamental +nature in discipline and worship, the established church in England +finds itself face to face with organised and hostile dissent. So +entirely has the national unity been preserved in Scotland that +Professor Blackie has said, with no less truth than pith, that while +Presbyterianism is the national and the rational dress of the land, +Episcopacy is but the dress coat by which the nakedness is hid of the +renegade from the nation, and the apostate from its church. Dean +Stanley found that 'the questionable idols' of the Episcopalian sect +were Mary Queen of Scots, Montrose, and Dundee. These have never been +the idols of the Scottish people: the last, indeed, occupies in its +memory the peculiar niche of infamy. +</p> + +<p> +The political side of the national religion is expressed no less +clearly in facts. The Scottish Crown is held by a contract,<a href="#note1" name="noteref1"><small>[1]</small></a> and the +coronation oath is the deliberate expression of it. In his <cite>De +Jure Regni</cite> in 1579, dedicated to the king, Buchanan had made +this apparent to Europe, and in his <cite>Lex Rex</cite>, in 1644, +Buchanan was reinforced by Rutherfurd in the doctrine that the people +is the source of power, and his officers are merely <i>ministri regni +non regis</i>, 'servants of the kingdom, not of the king.' Startling +doctrine this to the slobbering vicegerent of God, conceding to the +people acts to be revoked at his pleasure. In the light of ordinary +facts, therefore, what are the national covenants of 1580 and 1638, but +very simple Magna Chartas or Reform Bills with a religious colouring? +One half of the statements of Hume and Robertson about fanaticism, +austerity, gloom, enthusiasm, democracy, and popular ferocity, and all +the bugbears of the writers so terribly 'at ease in Zion,' would be +discounted by a simple regard for facts. When Leighton and Burnet went +into the west in 1670 to try and induce the people to recognise the +establishment of Charles, what did they find? Wranglings or harangues +after the manner of Scott's Habbakuk Mucklewrath? 'The poor of the +country,' says Burnet, 'came generally to hear us. We were amazed to +see a poor commonalty so capable to argue upon points of government, +and on <i>the bounds to be set to the power of the civil magistrate</i> +and princes in matters of religion: upon all these topics they had +texts of Scripture at hand, and were ready with their answers to +everything that was said to them. This measure of knowledge was spread +even among the meanest of them, their cottagers and servants.' Leighton +might well have remembered the case of his own father. History loves +not the Coriolani, says Mommsen, and Miller has well seized this +incident to bring out the popular side of the national religion. To the +question, in an inn at Newcastle, what the Scottish religion had done +for the people, he could reply, 'Independently altogether of religious +considerations, it has done for our people what your Societies for the +Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and all your Penny and Saturday Magazines +will never do for yours; it has awakened their intellects and taught +them to think.' +</p> + +<p> +But the exigencies of the romance-writer are often the means of +corrupting history, and the largest class of readers will ever prefer +to read it, in the phrase of Macaulay, with their feet on the fender. +To that class, therefore, the political crisis of 1638, one of no less +magnitude than the French Revolution, will ever be obscured by airy +talk about religious intolerance and popular fanaticism. The history of +Scotland in consequence becomes either, as Carlyle said, a mere +hunting-ground for intriguing Guises or else is left to the novelist +with the Mucklewraths, wild men, and caricatures. Even yet the mere +English reader of Hume and Robertson has not got beyond the phrases of +'iron reformers' and 'beautiful queens.' The intrepidity of Knox, like +the conduct of Luther at the Diet, becomes material for the +sentimentalist to decry or the latitudinarian to bewail. The courtly +Dean Stanley approaches the maudlin in his remarks at this stage, and +he thinks of Scott as he 'murmured the lay of Prince Charlie on the +hills of Pausilippo, and stood rapt in silent devotion before the tomb +of the Stuarts in St. Peter.' But the admirers of the greatest of all +novelists will remember also no less his statement that he gave the +heart without giving the head, and will even regard it as a merely +temporary aberration, like his presence at Carlton House with the +Prince Regent, where, says Lockhart with curious lack of humour, 'that +nothing might be wanting, the Prince sang several capital songs!' The +spell of Sir Walter should not blind us to the real and the false in +the national story. Eminently clear-headed and politically sound were +the men of 1638, worthy compeers of the great men that sat in England's +Long Parliament. The Jacobite Rebellions are a mere extraneous incident +in the history of Scotland, and the events of 1638, 1698, and 1843 will +show the peculiar spirit of the people in a fairer flowering. How +curiously illusory are the generalisations of philosophers! +Calculation, shrewdness, pawkiness—these are the traditional marks of +the stage-Scotchman from the days of Smollett. But Buchanan's +<i>perfervidum ingenium</i> is surely much truer, and mere calculation +is just what is <i>not</i> the national mark. If her poverty and pride +were seen in Darien, no less truly was her religious and political side +seen in these other events. But the question of the Headship still +awaits us. On the accession of William, the shattered remnants of the +kirk were gathered together by Carstares after twenty-eight years of +persecution: <i>nec tamen consumebatur</i>. Perhaps, in the +circumstances under which both king and country found themselves, no +other compromise could so well have been come to as that of 1690. The +election was left in the hands of elders and the heritors, to be +approved of by the people, leaving an appeal to the Presbytery. At the +Union, Scotland seeing the danger to which she was exposed by her +scanty band of forty-five members being swamped in the English or Tory +phalanx—a danger to which every year subsequent has added but too +evident a commentary—had exacted the most strenuous obligations for +the unalterable preservation of her ecclesiastical system. But five +years witnessed the most shameless breach of public faith, by an Act +which had the most ruinous effects, political and religious, upon the +people. The Tories had come into power on the crest of the Sacheverel +wave, and in 1712 Bolingbroke proceeded to carry out his scheme of +altering the succession and securing the return of the Pretender. An +Act of Toleration was passed for the Episcopalian dissenting sect in +Scotland, and an oath of abjuration sought to be imposed upon the +Scottish Church for the sake of exciting confusion. An Act restoring +patronage was rushed through the House by the Tory squires, who +composed five-sixths of the House of Commons. Against this the Whigs +and Carstares protested vigorously, and appealed to the Treaty of +Union, but appeal was lost upon the ignorant class, who were not +overdrawn in the Squire Western of Fielding's novel. For a hundred +years this Act bore evil fruits. The nobility of the land were only too +ready to seize upon the poor spoils of the national endowment in order +to renew their waning power in the country, and in so doing they +managed to set themselves and their descendants in hereditary +opposition to the great mass of the people. The English peerage has +done much for the English people. In Scotland, it may be asked, which +of the four Scottish Universities has had a farthing of the money of +the nobility, and what have they done for the Church in any one of her +branches? +</p> + +<p> +In Miller's <cite>Letter to Brougham</cite> this cardinal point of 1712 +is made clear:— +</p> + +<div class="blockquote"> +<p> +'Bolingbroke engaged in his deep-laid conspiracy against the +Protestant succession and our popular liberties; and again the law +of patronage was established. But why established? Smollett would +have told your Lordship of the peculiarly sinister spirit which +animated the last Parliament of Anne; of feelings adverse to the +cause of freedom which prevailed among the people when it was +chosen; and that the Act which re-established patronage was but one +of a series, all bearing on an object which the honest Scotch +member who signified his willingness to acquiesce in one of those, +on condition that it should be described by its right name—an +Act for the Encouragement of Immorality and Jacobitism in +Scotland—seems to have discovered. Burnet is more decided. Instead +of triumphing on the occasion, he solemnly assures us that the +thing was done merely "to spite the Presbyterians, who, from the +beginning, had set it up as a principle that parishes had, from +warrants in Scripture, a right to choose their ministers," and "who +saw, with great alarm, the success of a motion <i>made on +design</i> to weaken and undermine their establishment"; and the +good Sir Walter, notwithstanding all his Tory prejudices, is quite +as candid. The law which re-established patronage in +Scotland—which has rendered Christianity inefficient in well-nigh +half her parishes, which has separated some of her better clergymen +from her Church, and many of her better people from her clergymen, +the law through which Robertson ruled in the General Assembly, and +which Brougham has eulogised in the House of Lords, that identical +law formed, in its first enactment, no unessential portion of a +deep and dangerous conspiracy against the liberties of our country.' +</p> +</div> + +<p> +The immediate result was seen in the conduct of the patrons. As the +Regent Morton had established tulchan bishops and secured the revenues +of the sees, the patrons now named such presentees as they deliberately +saw would be unacceptable to the people, protected as they were by the +appeal to the Presbytery, so that during the protracted vacancy they +drew the stipend. No actual case of intrusion, however, seems to have +occurred until 1725, but the rise of moderatism<a href="#note2" name="noteref2"><small>[2]</small></a> within the Church +gave too frequent occasion for such forced presentations as, we have +seen, took place at Nigg, in 1756, in the days of Donald Roy, Miller's +relative. The secessions of the Erskines in 1733 and of the Relief +under Gillespie in 1752 were the results of intolerant Moderatism, and +its long reign under Robertson the historian, lasted for well-nigh +thirty years in the Assembly, till his withdrawal in 1780. +</p> + +<p> +Were we to credit the eulogies of Dean Stanley and others upon Home, +Blair, and Robertson, we should regard this as the golden age of the +Church of Scotland. Robertson he describes as 'the true Archbishop of +Scotland.' But there are men who seem fated, in the pregnant phrase of +Tacitus, to make a solitude and call it peace. The reign of Robertson +was simply coincident with the very lowest spiritual ebb in the +country, to which his own long régime had in no slight degree +contributed. The Spaniard dates the decline and fall of his own country +from the days of Philip <span class="smc">II.</span>, <i>segundo sin segundo</i>, as +Cervantes bitterly calls him, 'the second with (it was to be hoped) no +successor.' Even in 1765, such had been the spread of religion outside +the national establishment that the Assembly was forced to reckon with +it. They found 'a hundred and twenty meetinghouses, to which more than +a hundred thousand persons resorted.' Patronage was found, after +debate, to be the cause. It is no tribute to Alva that he found the Low +Countries a peaceful dependency of Spain and left them a free nation; +none to the policy of 'thorough' that it sent Laud and Strafford to the +block. An impartial verdict will be that Robertson undermined for ever +the edifice which Carstares had reared. +</p> + +<p> +An attempt has been recently made again to cast a glamour over the old +Scottish moderates of the eighteenth century. Their admirers point to +Watson the historian of Philip <span class="smc">II.</span>, to Henry the historian of +Britain, to Robertson, to Thomas Reid the philosopher, Home the +dramatist, Blair the sermon-writer, Adam Ferguson, Hill of St. Andrews, +and George Campbell of Aberdeen. Not even the Paraphrases have escaped +being pressed into the field to witness to the literary and other gifts +of Oglivie, Cameron, Morrison, and Logan. But the merits of a class are +not best seen by the obtrusion of its more eminent members, but by the +average. We do not judge the provincial governors of Rome by such men +as the occasional Cicero and Rutilius, but by the too frequent +repetition of men like Verres and Piso. Nor even in these very upper +reaches will the Moderates bear a close inspection. No one now reads +Home's <cite>Douglas</cite>. Young Norval has gone the way, as the +critic says, of all waxworks, and curious is the fate of the great +Blair: he lives not for the works upon which immortality was fondly +staked, but for having given breakfasts to Burns in his Edinburgh days. +'I have read them,' says Johnson of these sermons; 'they are +<i>sermones aurei ac auro magis aurei</i>. I had the honour of first +finding and first praising his excellencies. I did not stay to add my +voice to that of the public. I love Blair's sermons, though the dog is +a Scotchman and a Presbyterian, and everything he should not be.' This +avalanche of laudation seems strange to the modern reader, who will +find in them the rhetoric of Hervey's <cite>Meditations on the +Tombs</cite>, united to a theology that could pass muster in a +deistical writer. Burns, though he lent himself to be the squib-writer +of the Ayrshire Moderates, was fully aware of the merely negative +tenets of the school, and in his <cite>Holy Fair</cite> he asks +</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> +<div class="stanza"> +<div>'What signifies his barren shine</div> +<div class="i1">Of moral powers and reason?</div> +<div>His English style, and gestures fine</div> +<div class="i1">Are a' clean out o' season.</div></div> + +<div class="stanza"> +<div>Like Socrates or Antonine,</div> +<div class="i1">Or some old pagan heathen,</div> +<div>The moral man he does define,</div> +<div class="i1">But ne'er a word of faith in,</div> +<div class="i3">That's right this day.'</div></div></div></div> + +<p> +But the spirit of Moderatism was to be fully seen in the debate upon +Missions in 1796. It was moved in the General Assembly by Robert Heron, +the unfortunate friend of Burns, and deeply shocked was old Jupiter +Carlyle. It wounded the feelings for the proprieties of the old man. +For half a century, said he, had he sat as a member, and he was happy +to think that never till now had he heard such revolutionary principles +avowed on the floor of the house! Clergymen of lax life, and whose +neglect of parochial duties was notorious, were unanimous in declaring +that charity should begin at home. The spectre of Tom Paine rose before +them. Never, they maintained, while still there remained at home one +man under the influence of attack from the <cite>Age of Reason</cite>, +should such a visionary overture be entertained. But there was worse +behind this. The missionary societies were united with various +corresponding centres; accordingly, in the days of the Dundas dynasty, +when Burns during this very year was reminded that it was his place to +act and not to think, when the Alien and Traitorous Correspondence Act +of 1793 and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1794 had revived +the worst of obsolete and feudal enactments, a wily use of this reign +of terror was made to defeat missions by an attack on their supposed +insidious and political designs. The lawyer who was afterwards to sit +on the bench as Lord President Boyle, rose and said: 'The people meet +under the pretext of spreading Christianity among the heathen. Observe, +sir, they are affiliated, they have a common object, they correspond +with each other, they look for assistance from foreign countries, in +the very language of many of the seditious societies. Already, it is to +be marked, they have a common fund. Where is the security that the +money of this fund will not, as the reverend Principal [Hill of St. +Andrews] said, be used for very different purposes? And as for those +Missionary Societies, I do aver that, since it is to be apprehended +that their funds may be in time, nay, certainly will be, turned against +the Constitution, so it is the bounden duty of this House to give the +overtures recommending them our most serious disapprobation, and our +immediate, most decisive opposition.' The legal mind is not often +remarkable for profundity, but the fine violation of reasoning in the +'nay, certainly will be,' is just on a par with Jonathan Tawse's 'clean +perversion of the constitutional law,' which we have seen before. The +detection of treason, too, lurking in the apparently harmless missions +fairly rivals Serjeant Buzfuz in <cite>Pickwick</cite>, with his +exposure of the danger underlying the 'chops and tomato sauce' of the +defendant. Such had been the unhappy legacy of Robertson. Such was the +legal spirit infused from the bar to the bench that was to act in +decisions against the true interests of the Church during the Ten +Years' Conflict. +</p> + +<p> +But the tide was to turn. Years of dissatisfaction had at last produced +the inevitable reaction, and in 1834 the General Assembly had bowed to +the storm and passed the Veto Act. Then were discovered the evils of +co-ordinate jurisdictions, the mistake committed in 1690 and 1707 by +which no provision had been made for a line of clear demarcation +between the ecclesiastical and civil courts, and the blunder committed +in intrusting great questions affecting Scotland to the judgments of +aliens in political sympathies. The tone of many a decision of the +House of Lords was to make people think upon Seafield's brutal jest +about 'the end of an auld sang,' and Belhaven's trumpet-warning about +the risks to the 'National Church founded on a rock, secured by a claim +of right, descending into a plain upon a level with Jews and Papists.' +There were limits even to the loyalty of the most faithful, and for ten +weary years the conflict between the courts was to run its course. In +1842 the Church had instructed its Lord High Commissioner to lay before +Her Majesty a series of resolutions by which it was hoped that a +rupture could be averted. On the 18th of May 1843 the Commissioner for +the Crown was the Marquis of Bute, and after the levée in Holyrood +Palace, the retiring Moderator, Dr. Welsh, preached in St. Giles, and +in St. Andrew's Church the Assembly—the last Assembly of the real +Church of Scotland—met. The scene so often described had best be given +in Miller's own words, as at once affording a capital specimen of his +editorial style and as the work of an eye-witness. We abridge from his +leader of May 20:— +</p> + +<div class="blockquote"> +<p> +'The morning levée had been marked by an incident of a somewhat +extraordinary nature, and which history, though in these days +little disposed to mark prodigies and omens, will scarce fail to +record. The crowd in the Chamber of Presence was very great, and +there was, we believe, a considerable degree of confusion and +pressure in consequence. Suddenly,—whether brushed by some passer +by, jostled rudely aside, or merely affected by the tremor of the +floor communicated to the partitioning, a large portrait of William +the Third, that had held its place in Holyrood for nearly a century +and a half, dropped heavily from the walls. "There," exclaimed a +voice<a href="#note3" name="noteref3"><small>[3]</small></a> from the crowd,—"there goes the Revolution Settlement." +For hours before the meeting of Assembly, the galleries of St. +Andrew's Church, with the space behind, railed off for the +accommodation of office-bearers, not members, were crowded to +suffocation, and a vast assemblage still continued to besiege the +doors…. The Moderator rose and addressed the House in a few +impressive sentences. There had been infringement, he said, of the +constitution of the Church,—an infringement so great, that they +could not constitute the Assembly without a violation of the Union +between Church and State, as now authoritatively defined and +declared. He was, therefore, compelled, he added, to protest +against proceeding further, and, unfolding a document which he held +in his hand, he read, in a slow and emphatic manner, the protest of +the Church. For the first few seconds, the extreme anxiety to hear +defeated its object,—the universal "hush, hush," occasioned +considerably more noise than it allayed; but the momentary +confusion was succeeded by the most unbroken silence; and the +reader went on till the impressive close of the document, when he +flung it down on the table of the House and solemnly departed. He +was followed at a pace's distance by Dr. Chalmers; Dr. Gordon and +Dr. Patrick M'Farlan immediately succeeded, and then the numerous +sitters on the thickly occupied benches behind filed after them, in +a long unbroken line, which for several minutes together continued +to thread the passage to the eastern door, till at length only a +blank space remained. As the well-known faces and forms of some of +the ablest and most eminent men that ever adorned the Church of +Scotland glided along in the current, to disappear from the courts +of the State institution for ever, there rose a cheer from the +galleries. At length, when the last of the withdrawing party had +disappeared, there ran from bench to bench a hurried, broken +whispering,—"How many? how many?"—"<i>four hundred</i>": The +scene that followed we deemed one of the most striking of the day. +The empty vacated benches stretched away from the Moderator's seat +in the centre of the building, to the distant wall. There suddenly +glided into the front rows a small party of men whom no one +knew,—obscure, mediocre, blighted-looking men, that, contrasted +with the well-known forms of our Chalmers and Gordons, Candlishes +and Cunninghams, M'Farlans, Brewsters, and Dunlops, reminded one of +the thin and blasted corn ears of Pharaoh's vision, and like them, +too, seemed typical of a time of famine and destitution.' +</p> +</div> + +<p> +'I am proud of my country, no other country in Europe could have done +it,' said Lord Jeffrey. The Church had simply, in 1843, reverted to the +precedents of 1560 and 1578, and had, in the simile of Goldsmith +happily used by Miller on the occasion, returned like the hare to the +spot from which it flew. Edinburgh, he maintained, had not seen such a +day since the unrolling by Johnston of Warriston of the parchment in +the Greyfriars'. There was a secession, not from the Church, but from +the law courts, and temporary majorities of the Assembly. But the evil +men do lives in brass after them, and the Act of 1712 had rent the +Church of Scotland. No other country had been so fortunately situated +for the exemplification of an unbroken and a National Church. It was +left to two Tory Governments to ruin it, but opportunities once lost +may not thereafter be recovered. Under the long reign of Moderatism it +looked as if the <i>Nec tamen consumebatur</i> were indeed to be a +mockery. But the revival of national feeling at the beginning of the +century, and the expression of popular rights in the Reform Bill of +1832, were waves that were destined to extend from the nation to the +Church. The great book of M'Crie in 1811 had truly been fruitful of +results. For a century Moderatism had reigned on a lost sense of +nationality. But, as for long the history of Rome had been written with +a patrician bias and an uneasy remembrance of that figure of Tiberius +Gracchus, so through the influence of M'Crie the figure of John Knox +had again risen to popular consciousness in Scotland. There they could +see a greater than the Boyles, the Hopes, the Kinnoulls, the Broughams, +and the Aberdeens. Yet, till its publication, the face of M'Crie had +been almost unknown upon the streets of Edinburgh. +</p> + +<p> +And the Succession? Did it abide with the Free Church or the residuary +Establishment? Lord Macaulay will show, in his speech in the House of +Commons on July 9, 1845, what the violation of the Treaty of Union had +effected in 1712, and that 'the church of Boston and Carstares was not +the church of Bryce and Muir, but the church of Chalmers and Brewster.' +No one knew that better than Hugh Miller, and no one had done more to +make the issues plain to the people of Scotland. To him it was 'the +good cause,' as Macaulay in his address to the Edinburgh electors had +styled his own. While a plank remained, or a flag flew, by that it was +his wish to be found. It was the cry which M'Crie had said, 'has not +ceased to be heard in Scotland for nearly three hundred years.' From +his first leader in <cite>The Witness</cite>, of January 15, 1840, to +the close of his life in 1856, he was to send forth no other sound. +'Your handwriting did my heart good,' he writes in a letter before us, +of 9th October 1840, to his friend Patrick Duff in Elgin, 'and reminded +me of old times long before I became ill-natured or dreamed of hurting +any one. I am now "fighting in the throng"—giving and taking many a +blow. But I am taking all the care I can to strike only big wicked +fellows, who lift hands against the Kirk, or oppress the poor man.' +</p> + +<p> +Napoleon feared three papers more than ten thousand bayonets, and +certainly Miller was a tower of strength not to be found in the adverse +battalions. None of the merely 'able editors' of the Establishment +party, much less the pamphleteers of the quality of Dean of Faculty +Hope, could touch him or find a link in his armour. This was a tribute +to character. The men of the opposition had 'nothing to draw with, and +the well was deep'; and many names then blown far and wide by windy +rumour, such as Dr. Cook, Robertson of Ellon, Dr. Bryce, and Principal +Pirie of Aberdeen, survive like flies in amber only because it was +their misfortune to be associated with great men. He might have said +with Landor that he did not strive with these men, for certainly of +them all 'none was worth his strife'; yet, though individually +contemptible, they formed a solid phalanx of Moderatism and of dead +resistance to argument and conviction. It was a time of great men. If +Chalmers was the incarnation of the country and the movement, Murray +Dunlop its jurist, Cunningham and Candlish its debaters, it was yet to +the leaders in <cite>The Witness</cite> that the great mass of his +countrymen looked for the opinions of Hugh Miller. His relative, Dr. +Gustavus Aird of Creich, the late Moderator of the Free Church, has +informed us that in his own parish he learned the paper was read out in +the mill, and that in many places the same thing took place. It is well +to have the ear of the country, and it was well at the critical hour +that there was a man found who was heard gladly of the common people. +</p> + + +<dl> +<dt class="notelabel"><a name="note1"> </a><a +href="#noteref1"><small>[1] +</small></a></dt> +<dd class="notetext"> For this important point in its bearing upon the position +of the Cameronians, and the 'Testimony' of Richard Cameron at +the market-place of Sanquhar, June 22, 1680, see Buchanan's +<cite>History</cite>, <span class="smc">XX.</span> 36-47, and Milton's +<cite>Tenure of Kings and Magistrates</cite>, with the coins +of James <span class="smc">VI.</span> stamped in 1570. Thus, while James +<span class="smc">VII.</span>'s creatures, the Bishops, maintained the +'divine right' of their creator, led by Paterson, the +Archbishop of Glasgow, Dalrymple could carry the resolution +on the constitutional question of tenure that the king had +'forfaulted the throne.' +</dd></dl> + +<dl> +<dt class="notelabel"><a name="note2"> </a><a +href="#noteref2"><small>[2] +</small></a></dt> +<dd class="notetext"> For the similar rise of the spirit in England see Mark +Pattison's excellent paper in <cite>Essays and +Reviews</cite>, 'Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, +1688-1750. +</dd></dl> + +<dl> +<dt class="notelabel"><a name="note3"> </a><a +href="#noteref3"><small>[3] +</small></a></dt> +<dd class="notetext"> The 'voice' of this now famous utterance was William +Howieson Crauford, Esq. of Craufurdland. +</dd></dl> + + + +<h2> +<a name="IV"> </a> +CHAPTER IV +</h2> + +<p class="ctr"> +IN EDINBURGH—LAST YEARS +</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> +<div class="stanza"> +<div>'In close fights a champion grim,</div> +<div>In camps a leader sage.'</div> +<div class="i8"><span class="sc">Scott.</span></div></div></div></div> + + +<p> +'We have had,' says Dr. Guthrie in a letter dated 6th September 1839, +'a meeting about our newspaper. Miller, I may say, is engaged, and will +be here, I expect, in the course of two or three weeks. His salary is +to begin with £200, and mount with the profits of the paper. I think +this too little, but I have no doubt to see it double that sum in a +year or two—Johnstone to be the publisher, we advancing £1000, and he +will need other two. I am down with Brown, Candlish, and Cunningham for +£25 each. A few individuals only have as yet been applied to, and +already £600 of the £1000 has been subscribed.' His household he left +behind him in Cromarty for the time, and he lodged in St. Patrick +Square. Fortunate was it for the people that at the right time its ear +should have been caught by such a writer, one whose voice in the arena +was at once recognised by the individuality of its tone. The Edinburgh +press had long been held by the Moderate party, and the belief had been +that the conflict was a mere clerical striving for power. It remained +for Miller to educate the party, and to such effect was this done that, +while the non-intrusion petition to Parliament in 1839 from Edinburgh +had borne but five thousand signatures, the number, says Robert +Chambers, mounted in the first year of <cite>The Witness</cite> to +thirteen thousand. It was clear to all Scotland that there was a new +Richmond in the field. It is the more necessary to insist on this, +because the clerical mind, which after Malebranche is too prone to see +everything in itself and its own surroundings, has never fully +confessed the services to the country of the layman. As Guthrie points +out, a silence is maintained all through Buchanan's <cite>Ten Years' +Conflict</cite> on Miller. This he regrets, not only on the ground that +it would be Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, but also for its +missing the cardinal principle that at such a time the press and public +meetings form the most influential of factors. This such a kindred +spirit and public orator as Guthrie is quick to see, nor does he go +beyond the facts of the case, or the judgment now of the country, in +maintaining that 'Miller did more than any dozen ecclesiastical +leaders, and that, Chalmers excepted, he was the greatest of all the +men of the Ten Years' Conflict.' +</p> + +<p> +He certainly was no half advocate or mere 'able editor' in the +Carlylean phrase. If Chalmers, Candlish, and Cunningham were the +leaders in the ecclesiastical courts, Murray Dunlop the jurist, Miller +was the pen-man of the party. 'His business,' says Guthrie, the orator +of the movement, 'was to fight. Fighting was Miller's delight. On the +eve of what was to prove a desperate conflict, I have seen him in a +high and happy state of eagerness and excitement. He was a scientific +as well as an ardent controversialist; not bringing forward, far less +throwing away, his whole force on the first assault, but keeping up the +interest of the controversy, and continuing to pound and crush his +opponents by fresh matter in every succeeding paper. When I used to +discuss questions with him, under the impression, perhaps, that he had +said all he had got to say very powerful and very pertinent to the +question, nothing was more common than his remarking, in nautical +phrase, "Oh, I have got some shot in the locker yet—ready for use, if +it is needed"!' +</p> + +<p> +And that it was needed, in his own and the Church's interest, the +pamphlets of abuse by which he was attacked, and which would form a +small library, would remain to show. Thus he was really, all the more +from his isolated position, as we shall see, indebted to what Professor +Masson, in an appreciation of him in <cite>Macmillan's Magazine</cite> +for 1865, describes as the Goethean 'demonic element.' He had a better +knowledge, he shows, of the country and its ecclesiastical history than +was possessed by his clerical colleagues, and along with this went what +he calls 'a tremendous element of ferocity, more of the Scandinavian +than the Celt, leaving his enemy not only slain but battered, bruised +and beaten out of shape.' This, though in a sense exaggerated, is true +to the extent that he entered the lists not as a mere servant, but as a +convinced defender of the liberties of the people. To touch on anything +that infringed upon the Presbyterian history of the country—be it by +the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Sutherland, or other site-refusing +landlords of the day, or by some flippant alien and Episcopalian +pamphleteer among the briefless of the Parliament House, was certainly +to court a bout from which the unwary disputant emerged in a highly +battered condition. Yet his pugnacity was really foreign to the nature +of the man. His surviving daughter informs the writer he was 'a very +mild and gentle father, and his whole attitude was one depressed with +humility.' It was, however, well for site-refusers and factors riding +on the top of their commission from absentee landlords to feel that +attacks upon their policy in <cite>The Witness</cite> were not to be +lightened by any hopes of an apology or by appeals to fear. 'The +watchman,' he writes in a letter before us, dated 9th October 1840, 'is +crying half-past twelve o'clock, and I have more than half a mile to +walk out of town between two rows of trees on a solitary road. Fine +opportunity for cudgel-beating factors I carry, however, with me a +five-shilling stick, strong enough to break heads of the ordinary +thickness, and like quite as well to appeal to an antagonist's fears as +to his mercy.' +</p> + +<p> +<cite>The Witness</cite> started with a circulation of six hundred. Its +position among the Scottish papers was at once assured, and no greater +proof of the personality of the editor and the quality of 'the leaders' +remains than in the curious fact that, now after half a century, to the +great mass of the people his name has been not Miller, nor Mr. Miller, +but Hugh Miller. As in the similar case of John Bright the people +seized on the fact that here was a writer and speaker sprung from +themselves, and his christian name was as familiar as his surname. Yet, +curiously enough, from first to last he never believed in the +profession of an editor, and from the 'new-journalism' of the paragraph +and the leaderette he would have turned in disdain. Nothing but the +fact that he felt convinced of his mission would have induced him to +leave Cromarty for the post. 'I have been,' he could truly say, 'an +honest journalist. I have never once given expression to an opinion +which I did not conscientiously regard as sound, nor stated a fact +which, at the time at least, I did not believe to be true.' He never +mastered, or felt it necessary to master, the routine details of the +business, for the paper was read not for its Parliamentary reports, or +the exposition of party politics, but for the essays, sketches, or +leaders which were known to be by him. Accordingly the mere fluent +production of 'copy,' and the diurnal serving up of the editorial +thunder by which the members of the fourth estate fondly delude +themselves that they lead public opinion, never really came naturally +to him. He prepared himself carefully for his work; and perhaps the +bi-weekly issue of the paper and its peculiar nature lessened the +strain upon the editor. His successor in the editorial chair of the +paper, Dr. Peter Bayne, in the preface to Miller's <cite>Essays</cite> +(1862) says: +</p> + +<div class="blockquote"> +<p> +'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 <i>completeness</i> 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 +<cite>Times</cite>; in lightness of wit and smart lucidity of +statement they might be surpassed by the happiest performances of +French journalists—a Prévost-Paradol, or a St. Marc Girardin; and +for occasional brilliancies 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. Coleridge. But +as complete journalistic essays, symmetrical in plan, finished in +execution, and of sustained and splendid ability, the articles of +Hugh Miller are unrivalled.' +</p> +</div> + +<p> +Certainly few modern editors could produce such a leader as he did on +Dugald Stewart (Aug. 26, 1854), or upon the <cite>Encyclopœdia +Britannica</cite> (April 30, 1842), or could, finding themselves for a +day in London, 'when time hung heavy on my hands,' buy a cheap reprint +of Eugene Sue's <cite>Wandering Jew</cite> and convert its hurried +perusal into a capital paper on the conflict between Continental +Ultramontanism and Liberalism. The individuality of the writer and the +tenacity with which he held to his opinions gave the journal a tone +naturally impossible to an ordinary party paper. The great mass of the +readers of <cite>The Witness</cite> were of course Liberals, yet he +strenuously contended against making it an organ of any political +party. Part of the prospectus ran—'<cite>The Witness</cite> will not +espouse the cause of any of the political parties which now agitate and +divide the country. Public measures, however, will be weighed as they +present themselves, in an impartial spirit, and with care proportioned +to their importance.' He had noticed, he said, the Church of Scotland +for a time converted by Conservatism into a mine against the Whigs, and +he was determined that no 'tool-making politician' should again convert +it to a party weapon. It was to remain the organ of 'the Free Church +people against Whig, Tory, Radical, and Chartist.' So careful was he of +the good name of the paper that he 'often retained communications +beside him for weeks and months, until some circumstance occurred that +enabled him to determine regarding their real value.' Chalmers read the +paper to the last with approval, and this was a source of joy and +support to Miller. Nothing but such a wise supervision could have +piloted <cite>The Witness</cite> through the abuse and the inventions +of the Tory organs. When the <cite>Edinburgh Advertiser</cite>, of June +13, 1848, could try to improve on that rhetorical flight of Barrère, +characteristically fathered by its author on 'an ancient author,' about +the tree of liberty being watered by the blood of tyrants, by an +assertion that <cite>The Witness</cite> had 'menaced our nobles with +the horrors of the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its +nightly task, and the bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled in +buttonholes on the streets of Paris!'—proof was naturally wanting. A +phantom of a 'grey discrowned head sounding hollow on the scaffold at +Whitehall' was also served up by that paper, in its devotion to the +house of Buccleuch, as a threat in which the irate scribe professed to +detect a subtle attack on the House of Hanover in the interests of the +Free Church. 'I am a Whig, in politics,' he said, 'never a Radical or +Conservative.' He had no cheap sympathy with the working men, for them +he had seen on their worst side. 'Three-fourths of the distress of the +country's mechanics (of course not reckoning that of the unhappy class +who have to compete with machinery) and nine-tenths of their +vagabondism will be found restricted to inferior workmen, who like +Hogarth's "Careless Apprentice," neglected the opportunity of their +second term of education. The sagacious painter had a truer insight +into this matter than most of our modern educationists.' He was no +believer in household, much less in universal, suffrage, and as an +admirer of Delolme's views on our constitution, the radical he regarded +as a 'political quack,' convinced as he was that 'those who think must +govern those that toil.' But he advocated, along with Guthrie, a system +of undenominational education of a kind pretty much what is now +established, a moderate extension of the franchise, abolition of +entail, and the game laws. The Maynooth grant and Macaulay he opposed. +He was an Oliverian for Ireland, and the cause of much trouble in the +most distressful country he viewed as associated with that subsidy, +which he would have preferred to see converted into a grant for +science. +</p> + +<p> +Indeed, like most of his countrymen he had a strong view of historical, +as distinguished from mere party, conservatism. The last has of course +been rendered simply impossible in Scotland by the history and the +ecclesiastical tenets of the country, but he ever carried about him +something like the conviction of Dr. Livingstone, that the common +people of Scotland had read history and were no levellers. Thus he +held, like Burke, to what Mr. Morley calls 'the same energetic feeling +about moral laws, the same frame of counsel and prudence, the same love +for the slowness of time, the same slight account held of mere +intellectual knowledge.' This historic conservatism of Burke would be +taken by most Scotchmen as a pretty good basis for reasoned Liberalism, +and the fixity of Miller's main positions only exposed him the more to +the wearisome Tory vocabulary of 'high-flyer, fire-raiser, fanatic,' +etc. Admirably in the <cite>Letter to Brougham</cite> does he seize on +the ground of the political Liberalism of Scotland:— +</p> + +<div class="blockquote"> +<p> +'I, my Lord, am an integral part of the Church of Scotland, and of +such integral parts, and of nothing else, is the body of this +Church composed; nor do we look to the high places of the earth +when we address ourselves to its adorable Head. The Earl of Kinnoul +is not the Church, nor any of the other patrons in Scotland. Why, +then, are these men suffered to exercise, and that so exclusively, +one of the Church's most sacred privileges? You tell us of +"existing institutions, vested rights, positive interests." Do we +not know that the slave-holders, who have so long and so stubbornly +withstood your Lordship's truly noble appeals in behalf of the +African bondsman, have been employing an exactly similar language +for the last fifty years; and that the onward progress of man to +the high place which God has willed him to occupy has been impeded +at every step by existing institutions, vested rights, positive +interests?' +</p> +</div> + +<p> +Bitter words, surely, all this for the ecclesiastical wirepullers of +1874, and inheritors of the policy of the Hopes and Muirs, when in +approaching the Government with a statement of the intolerable strain +of patronage, they tabled that same <cite>Letter to Brougham</cite>! +</p> + +<p> +To the last, Miller clung to 'the Established principle.' This need not +seem wonderful. The Free Church he regarded as the Church of Scotland +in all but the state tie, the more so that the coercion by the civil +courts had not failed to impress him with the conviction that the +Headship, as stipulated for the Scottish Establishment by the Treaty of +Union, though defeated by Bolingbroke and lost in the stagnation of the +eighteenth century, had passed as an integral part of her constitution +to the Free Church. The difficulty attaching to his position proved an +unfortunate source of tension between him and some of the leaders, and +to this was due that lamentable quarrel with Dr. Candlish which he +carried to his grave, and which perhaps broke his heart, for he was +what Lord Cockburn had called their mutual friend Murray Dunlop, 'the +purest of all enthusiasts' and though Miller triumphed absolutely, yet +it was not in human nature to forget that the attack was, however +sincere, an attack upon cherished convictions. +</p> + +<p> +There can be, therefore, no good now in minimising the fact that Dr. +Candlish, in his zeal to secure a political and tempting opportunity +against the Tory party, was led to enter on a quarrel with Miller. The +action really amounted to a motion of no confidence in his editorial +management. He proposed to centralise the Church press, and to secure +the intrusion of a sub-editor on the existing staff, and the conversion +of the paper into an explicit and active party organ. But by this time +Miller had become one of the proprietors, by undertaking to pay back by +instalments the thousand pounds advanced by Johnstone to the +subscribers, with the interest, year by year, of the unpaid portion +till the whole debt should be extinguished. The most objectionable +feature was the proposal to secure the services of some smart +Parliament House 'able editor.' <cite>The Witness</cite> had been +accused of 'preferring Protestantism to Macaulay, and damaging the +elections.' In this was shown the cloven foot, for it was an attempt to +run the paper for the Whigs, and to render it the organ of the legal +lights of the Parliament House in pursuit of official posts and spoil, +of which Miller justly thought they had enough. Besides, the fall of a +Government would mean the fall of that Government paper, and thus its +influence as the organ of Free Churchmen would be damaged. Already the +paper had parted with one of its best men who had been attracted to +<cite>The Times</cite>, and in the whole scheme Miller saw 'a +censorship; and the censor, assisted by the nice taste and tact of the +Parliament House editor, is to be Dr. Candlish.' But, he asks, 'who was +to control Dr. Candlish?' He could not see the paper jockeyed for a +Government, and he stood aloof from 'Exhalations blown aslant, over the +faces of even the Evangelical Churches, from the bogs and fens of a +hollow Liberalism that professes to respect all religions, and believes +none.' He felt that he had the people behind him, and 'possessing their +confidence, I do not now feel justified in retiring from my post: Dr. +Candlish and his Parliament House friends are not the ministers and +people of the Free Church of Scotland—"of wiles, more inexpert, I +boast not,"—the difference must either close entirely, or the people +of Scotland must be made fully acquainted with the grounds on which it +rests.' The unfortunate rupture closed by the very pointed question by +Chalmers, 'Which of you could direct Hugh Miller?' +</p> + +<p> +Meanwhile, in the Highlands and Islands, things were for a time going +hard with the now disestablished Church. In some cases they had to +preach 'where the snow was falling so heavily upon the people, that +when it was over they could scarcely distinguish the congregation from +the ground, except by their faces.' Baird of Cockburnspath had passed +away in a room, 'a few inches above which were the slates of the roof, +without any covering, and as white with hoar frost within as they were +white with snow without. His very breath on the blankets was frozen as +hard as the ice outside.' At Canonbie, Guthrie had passed Johnny +Armstrong's Tower, and preached in wind and rain to a large +congregation, 'old men, apparently near the grave, all wet and benumbed +with the keen wind and cold rain.' In Cromarty, Miller's old friend +Stewart was now preaching in the factory close, and there, in the +summer of 1843, after a night of rain had swept the streets, his mind +reverts to the congregations over Scotland in the open air—'I do +begrudge the Moderates our snug, comfortable churches. I begrudge them +my father's pew. It bears date 1741, and has been 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.' The subtle mark of +Scottish <i>gentility</i> in the allusion to the pew will not fail to +strike the reader. Let it not be said that it savours of +'gigmanity'—in that standing bugbear of Carlyle! +</p> + +<p> +In 1844 he set out on a geological ramble round the Hebrides in the +floating manse, '<cite>The Betsey</cite>,' by which the Church served +the islands in the west, owing to the refusal of sites by Lord +Macdonald and others. The yacht was but thirty feet by eleven, and +there with his old Cromarty friend Swanson, the 'outed' minister of the +Small Isles, he learned the hardships to which the miserable policy of +the landlords had exposed the poor Highlanders. But if 'the earth was +the <i>lairds'</i> and the fulness thereof,' the water was not! The +building in which the congregation met was of turf—'the minister +encased in his ample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and +protected atop by a genuine sou'wester, of which the broad posterior +rim sloped half a yard down his back; and I, closely wrapped up in my +grey maud, which proved, however, a rather indifferent protection, +against the penetrating powers of a Hebridean drizzle.' In none of his +works does he exhibit a happier descriptive view than in <cite>The +Cruise of the Betsey</cite>, though in popularity it has been surpassed +by his <cite>First Impressions of England</cite>, where he records the +results of an eight weeks' tour, in 1845, from Newcastle to London, +passing York, Birmingham, and Stratford on the way. In 1847 he +published his <cite>Footprints of the Creator</cite>, in reply to the +<cite>Vestiges</cite> by Robert Chambers, in which he seeks to +controvert the theory of development, at least in the form in which it +was then presented, by attempting to prove the fishes and the fossils +of the Old Red to be as advanced in character as those now existing. A +racy sketch on <cite>The Geology of the Bass</cite> formed part of a +contribution to a work then issued, dealing with the history, botany, +and zoology of the Bass Rock. The copyright of this he reserved with a +view to its subsequent incorporation into a long-projected geological +survey of Scotland. But this cherished idea he never lived to +accomplish, though such a work from his hand would have been well-nigh +final and perfect in its descriptive graces. +</p> + +<p> +He was still in the enjoyment of his great physical power in spite of +the severe strain to which his editorial and literary labours exposed +him, added to as these were by his appearances in London and elsewhere +as a public lecturer. As an exponent of science he could attract an +audience in Exeter Hall of five thousand persons, whose attention he +held to the close in spite of his northern accent; though perhaps this, +like the Fifeshire speech of Chalmers and the Annandale tongue of +Carlyle, may have given an extra charm to the individuality of the +lecturer. The quarrel with Candlish had thinned the ranks of some of +his friends, nor did he ever draw to the circle of Edinburgh as he had +done to those in Cromarty. He was not to be easily got at by the +eminent men who sought his acquaintance, yet it is with pleasure we +catch occasional glimpses of him in the society of the best that either +Edinburgh or London could produce. Stewart in Cromarty had passed away, +in 1847, during the prosecution to him of a call to St. George's to +succeed Candlish, who had been translated to the college chair left +vacant by Chalmers. None of his friends were nearer to him than +Mackgill-Crichton of Rankeillour in Fife, and there we find him one +Christmas along with Sir David Brewster and Guthrie. Both Miller and +his host were men of great physical powers, and—as Professor Masson +notes—the geologist had a habit of estimating men by their physique. +Crichton had narrated how he had started by the side of the mail coach +as it passed his gates, and after a run of twenty miles he had been the +first at the ferry. 'A horse could do more than either of you,' was the +amused rejoinder of Brewster. +</p> + +<p> +The issue of his <cite>Schools and Schoolmasters</cite> (1854), +republished from the columns of his paper, brought him warm encomiums +from Carlyle, Robert Chambers, and others. Miller in politics and other +points differed strongly from Chambers, and of course at this time the +secret of the authorship of the <cite>Vestiges</cite> had not been +divulged. Yet beautifully does Chambers, to whom Scottish publishing +and periodical literature owes so much, refer to the early days in +Cromarty in comparison with his own struggles in Peebles. Readers who +may have not quite forgiven some passages in Chambers's <cite>History +of the Rebellion of 1745</cite> will doubtless soften their asperity +after reading Chambers's account of his struggling through a whole set +of the <cite>Encyclopædia Britannica</cite> which he had in a lumber +garret,—setting out at sixteen, 'as a bookseller with only my own +small collection of books as a stock—not worth more than two pounds, I +believe, quickly independent of all aid—not all a gain, for I am now +sensible that my spirit of self-reliance too often manifested itself in +an unsocial, unamiable 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.' +</p> + +<p> +The close was cheered by the thought that he had fairly earned the +admiration and confidence of his country. Yet nothing that could in any +way fetter his editorial independence or freedom of action could he +permit. When the money invested in <cite>The Witness</cite> was offered +to him by Chalmers it was firmly declined, and the proposal to requite +his services to the country by providing him with a residence he would +not allow. 'I know,' he said, 'that as the defender of Free Church +principles my intentions have been pure and loyal, but I am not quite +sure I have been successful in doing the right thing, nor have I done +anything that is worthy of such consideration from my friends. I +believe my way is to make yet.' The same was his answer to a proposal +to allow his name to stand for election as Lord Rector of Marischal +College in Aberdeen; he met it pretty much in the vein of Carlyle at +Edinburgh, when he felt that here was a generation in young Scotland +rising up who seemed to say that he had not altogether, after a +hard-spent day, been an unprofitable servant. Time had softened the +ecclesiastical asperities of other years, and in 1853 Lord Dalhousie +wrote to Lord Aberdeen to secure his election for the vacant Chair of +Natural History in Edinburgh. But it fell to Edward Forbes. Again he +was singled out by Lord Breadalbane, in 1855, and he was offered the +post of Distributor of Stamps for Perthshire, an office which would to +him have been a comfortable sinecure, securing alike competence and +much leisure. For twenty-eight years Wordsworth in Westmoreland filled +such a post, and Miller's banking experiences would have fitted him +perfectly for it. But he felt that a man turned fifty could not take up +a new vocation with success. That in this he was too modest there can +be no doubt; but after a brief consideration he made up his mind to +decline. 'I find,' he said, 'my memory not now so good as it was +formerly. I forget things which I was wont to remember with ease. I am +not clear, in such circumstances, about taking upon me any money +responsibility.' +</p> + +<p> +In fact, the long and severe strain of sixteen years had told. Of the +extraordinary memory whose failure he regrets, Guthrie supplies a +forcible example. In the shop of Johnstone the publisher a discussion +turned on some debate in the Town Council, when Miller said it reminded +him of a scene in Galt's <cite>Provost</cite>. He repeated the passage, +halting at the speech of the convener of the trades, but was evidently +vexed at the temporary breakdown. He got a copy from the front shop, +and turned up the passage. Then they learned that, though it was +fifteen years since last he had seen the book, he had repeated page +after page <i>verbatim</i>. +</p> + +<p> +The year 1856 was one remarkable for garotte robberies. This awakened +in the overtaxed brain of Miller a fear for his museum of geological +specimens which he had housed for himself at Shrub Mount, Portobello. +The last four years of his life he had spent there, and often he would +leave the house and return late in the evening after hours of +investigation of the coast line and geological features of Leith and +the surrounding country. He knew his Edinburgh thoroughly; some of his +happiest papers are to be read in his <cite>Edinburgh and its +Neighbourhood</cite>; and it was after one of these excursions that Sir +Archibald Geikie had seen him, as he describes in the reminiscence to +be found in the last pages of this work. The fear of burglars had taken +hold firmly of his imagination, and he resumed the habit of bearing +fire-arms which he had begun at Cromarty when carrying the money of the +bank between that town and Tain. The inflammation of the lungs in his +early days as a mason had again at intervals returned, and his sleep +was broken by dreams of such a harassing nature that he would wake in +the morning to examine his clothes, in the belief that he was now the +victim of evil spirits. In such a condition it was not unnatural that +his mind should take a colour from other days, where the reader may +remember his own account of seeing the figure at the door after his +father's death. Professor Masson, we see, notes this point, and he +believes that Miller felt a strange fascination for all stories of +second-sight. Though he never wrote or spoke of such, except in the +sober tone of science, yet 'my impression,' he says, 'is that Hugh +Miller did all his life carry about him, as Scott did, but to a greater +extent, a belief in ghostly agencies of the air, earth, and water, +always operating, and sometimes revealing themselves. One sees his +imagination clinging to what his reason would fain reject.' The only +hope lay in a total cessation from all work, but this was found +impossible through the almost second nature which over-exertion had +become to him. He had also a rooted dislike for all medicines, and it +was with difficulty that he was induced to put himself under the +management of Dr. Balfour and Professor Miller. The last day of his +life was given to the revision of the proof-sheets of his +<cite>Testimony of the Rocks</cite>, and in the evening he turned over +the pages of Cowper, whose works had ever been among his standard +favourites. By a curious fatality his eye rested on <cite>The +Castaway</cite>, written by the poet in a similar mental condition, and +which for sustained force and limpid expression is unrivalled as a +religious lyric. He retired to rest on the night of the 24th December +1856. Next morning, his body, half-dressed, was found with a bullet +from a revolver through his left lung. He had lifted a heavy woven +jersey over his chest before he fired, which showed that death had not +been accidental. On a table a loose sheet of paper was found on which +had been written these lines to his wife:— +</p> + +<div class="blockquote"> +<p> +'<span class="sc">Dearest Lydia</span>,—My brain burns, I <i>must</i> have +<i>walked</i>; 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. +</p> + +<p class="sig"> +<span class="sc">Hugh Miller.</span>' +</p> +</div> + +<p> +It fell to Dr. Guthrie, in whose church of Free St. John's the deceased +had been an office member, to apprise the widow of the real nature of +the case; and in order to secure her sanction for a <i>post-mortem</i> +examination the above letter had to be produced, showing that his +purpose had been executed almost before the ink was dry. On the 26th +the verdict was issued:—'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.' His +funeral was the largest Edinburgh had seen since that of Chalmers, and +by his side in the Grange Cemetery he was laid. To the mass of his +countrymen abroad he was the greatest of living Scotchmen. His works +had given him a European reputation in science, while to those at home +the work he had accomplished as a tribune of the people had given him a +position second only to that of Guthrie. +</p> + +<p> +A generation has arisen since which hears but by vague report the +principles for which the men of 1843 contended. It takes many a man to +fall in the ditch before glorious revolutions can successfully march +over in their pumps and silk stockings, giving their victorious +three-times-three. It has been sought to minimise these issues, to +explain them away after the manner of 'able editors' and complacent +philosophers cheerfully 'at ease in Zion,' and to maintain, with the +hardy gravity of ignorance, that the combatants really knew not what +they fought for—the Headship of Christ, Anti-Patronage, or resistance +to the civil courts. Similar futilities we have seen ventilated over +the American Civil War. The North, say the philosophic thinkers, or +tinkers, did not know whether it fought for the preservation of the +Union or against slavery. Such speculations are too thin to carry much +weight. In both cases many went to their grave for what they believed +to be principle, and all such men may be safely trusted to have reached +some conclusions and clear issues. These issues obviously all met; +after Auchterarder on the one hand, and South Carolina on the other, +had led the way, no such easy subterfuge was possible for either party. +</p> + +<p> +The lesson then learned at such a cost might never have been necessary, +with a better adjustment of the political balance, which has been again +found wanting and craves a final and a rational settlement. What +Fairfoul in 1662 told Middleton had been simply again repeated in 1843 +by Muir and Hope, who held the ear of Sir James Graham, to whom Peel +had resigned the whole management of Scottish affairs. For all that +Graham knew of them, Peel might as well have left them to a foreigner. +It took the death of thousands of Irishmen in the potato famine of 1847 +to convince the overfed John Bull of even the barest existence of an +Irish Question, and many a man went to his grave before Lord Aberdeen, +Peel, Graham, and other official people could learn for themselves the +true condition of Scotland. Then it was too late, and their regrets +were vain. The bill of Bolingbroke brought in, as Burnet said, to +weaken the Scottish Church, had produced its logical effects in +widening the gulf between the people and the nobility of Scotland; +education at Eton, Harrow, and the English Universities had done the +rest. Carlyle is known to have regarded the action of the Church in +1843 as the greatest thing in his time; the sole survivor of the Peel +ministry, Mr. Gladstone, has expressed the same opinion; while the +critical, wiry, and alert little Jeffrey was 'proud of his country.' It +bears to-day the mark very strongly of Hugh Miller. Nor need the +workman be ashamed of his work—from which, therefore, let him not be +separated. +</p> + + + + +<h2> +<a name="V"> </a> +CHAPTER V +</h2> + +<p class="ctr"> +IN SCIENCE</p> + +<p class="ctr">'In league with the stones of the field.'—<span class="sc">Job</span> v. 23. +</p> +<br> + +<p> +The geologist writes in sand literally and historically, and in the +science of the Testimony of the Rocks super-session is the law. 'Such,' +says Miller himself in the preface to the first edition of the +<cite>Old Red Sandstone</cite>, '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 advancing tide +of knowledge leaves the names of the early pioneers little more than a +list of extinct volcanoes. Hooke and Burnet, Ray and Woodward, Moro and +Michel, are to the ordinary mass of readers about as obsolete as the +saurian and the mastodon. Only the very few can live in a tide so +strong, which bears away not only the older landmarks but even such +names as Werner and Hutton, Hall and Fleming. +</p> + +<p> +From about 1830 to 1850 the old metaphysical reign seems to have +ceased; and Jeffrey, in the palmy days of the <cite>Edinburgh +Review</cite>, could declare that the interest in psychology had +well-nigh passed away with Dugald Stewart. Natural Science seemed to be +taking its place, and the British Association movement lent impetus to +the new <i lang="fr">régime</i>. Sedgwick, Buckland, Murchison, Owen, and others, +followed by Huxley and Tyndall, appeared to herald the advent of an age +when the most difficult problems could be read off the book of Nature, +and the public turned eagerly from the Babel of the philosophers to the +men of the new school in a sort of expectation of a royal road to +learning, without missing their way in theological jungle or 'skirting +the howling wastes' of metaphysics. Needless to say, the hopes were no +more realised than were the expectations of a golden age of material +prosperity in the wake of the Reform Bill. The problem of man and his +destiny remains as rooted as ever, and the metaphysician has not been +dislodged. The old battle of the evidences had been fought in the +domain of mental science, and when transferred to the natural sciences +the fight was not productive of the expected results. The times, as +Richter said, were indeed 'a criticising critical time, hovering +between the wish and the ability to believe, a chaos of conflicting +times: but even a chaotic world must have its centre, and revolve round +that centre: there <i>is</i> no pure entire confusion, but all such +presupposes its opposite, before it can begin.' In Scotland and in +England the great ecclesiastical currents of the Disruption and the +Oxford Movement had left the nation for a time weary of theology, and +the school of natural science was in possession of the field. Now the +tide has turned, and the geologist is threatened with eclipse. Of the +<i>doyen</i> of the new school, Richard Owen, Professor Huxley +says:—'Hardly any of those speculations and determinations have stood +the test of investigation. I am not sure that any one but the historian +of anatomical science is ever likely to recur to them. Obvious as are +the merits of Owen's anatomical and palæontological work to every +expert, it is necessary to be an expert to discuss them; and countless +pages of analysis of his memoirs would not have made the general reader +any wiser than he was at first.' Even Buckland is regarded by Boyd +Dawkins as belonging to a type of extinct men. Thus is the deposition +effected of the scientific Pope of the day. If such rapid supersession +be the law, who can expect in departing to leave footprints in the +annals of so shifting a science? Who can be a fixed star? +</p> + +<p> +There is some comfort in the reflection that, as in Political Economy, +so in Geology, it is the inspiration that lives and not the mere amount +of positive contribution to knowledge. Bacon has effected nothing for +science; in everything that he attempted it may be shown that he was +wrong and that his methods have led to nothing. His name is associated +with no new discovery, no new law, not even with a new or inductive +method. But his niche is secure through the spirit in which he +approached the question; if he did not see the Promised Land, at least +he was a firm believer in its existence, and that spirit has outlived +his unhappy detraction of greater men than himself in mental +philosophy. His mind was swift to perceive analogies, and such a type +of mind, if it adds little to actual knowledge, is at least valuable as +a stimulus. Carlyle in his political pamphlets has certainly not +advanced the lines of the 'dismal science'; he even contemptuously +doubted its existence, and he has done harm to it through the +ready-reckoner school of <i lang="fr">à priori</i> economists who refer +everything with confidence to their own internal consciousness. Yet +Carlyle at his worst has his value. He has the merit of showing that +the problem is in its very nature an everlasting one, and that the +plummet line of the mere profit-and-loss moralist will never sound the +depths of man and his destiny. Such thinkers are, however, rare; but in +natural science they are the salt. Such are Oken, Cuvier, Darwin; their +position is independent of the truth of their theories, and they have +the gift of a fused and informing imagination, by which their theories +are landmarks. Much of their work has already been recast, and some of +their once supposed safest generalisations have been abandoned. But the +progress of science revolves round them as central suns. Hardly one of +Niebuhr's interpretations of Roman history has stood the test of +subsequent investigations, any more than those of Ewald in the field of +Biblical criticism. Yet in historical science no two men have a more +assured rank. +</p> + +<p> +It is this informing power that keeps alive the geologist. Hume owes +his position in metaphysics to this power, and to his great gifts as a +stylist. Few men of science have had graces of style. In Darwin it is +lacking, and he has himself set on record that literature and art had +ceased for him to exert any influence, and that a mere novel had become +the highest form of intellectual amusement. Hutton needed a Playfair to +make him intelligible, as Dugald Stewart was needed for the exposition +of Reid. But it is this power that will keep Miller alive. His views +upon the Old Red Sandstone, on the Noachian Deluge, on the Mosaic +Cosmogony, may be right or wrong. But they have the sure merit of +abiding literature, and men highly endowed with this gift have a +lasting and assured fame. Mr. Lowell has declared Clough to be the true +poet of the restlessness of the later half of the century, and Tennyson +to be but its pale reflex. But the answer is ready and invincible: +Tennyson is read, and Clough is already on the shelf. As a piece of +imaginative writing, <cite>The Old Red Sandstone</cite> is not likely +to be soon surpassed in its own line. 'I would give,' we find Buckland +declaring, 'my left hand to possess such powers of description as this +man has.' 'There is,' says Carlyle, 'right genial fire, everywhere +nobly tempered down with 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.' We doubt +if a single page of Sedgwick, or of Buckland even in his +<cite>Bridgewater Treatise</cite>, be read—at least as literature. But +a man, whose book upon the 'Old Red' has seen its twentieth edition, +whose <cite>Testimony of the Rocks</cite> is in its forty-second +thousand, and whose <i>Footprints</i> has seen a seventeenth edition, +has only attained this popularity by his solid merits as a writer and +thinker. Mere popularisation cannot explain it. When a man has fully +mastered his subject, and his subject has mastered him, there is sure +to emerge a certain demonic force in literature or in science, all the +more if the writer be a man with a style. +</p> + +<p> +It need hardly be said that geology, from its very first appearance, +had been associated with distinct views in Biblical criticism. The old +chronology of Archbishop Ussher in the margin of the Authorised +Version, by which <span class="smc">B.C.</span> 4004 was gravely assigned as the date +of the Creation of the world, and <span class="smc">B.C.</span> 2348 for the Deluge, +was in conflict with a science which required ages for its operations +and not the limited confines of six thousand years, which form but a +mere geological yesterday to the scientist like Lyell, who postulates +some eighty millions of years for the formation of the coal-beds of +Nova Scotia. The six 'days' of the Biblical Creation were thought +unworthy, as a mere huddling of events into a point of time, of the +Divine Wisdom, and impossible in conception. Mistakes in positive +statement, no less than of implication, were also alleged against the +Mosaic record, which was said to be admirable as literature if not +immaculate in science. For long geology was regarded as a hostile +intruder, and it required much time to assuage the fears on the one +hand and lessen the rather vague pretensions on the other, before the +lines of demarcation could be firmly drawn, if indeed, in a certain +class of both theological and scientific minds, they can be said to be +even yet settled. There is still the Voltairian type of thinker which +is not yet exploded; and which, even in the case of Professor Huxley, +has imagined that a mere shaking of the letter of a text or two is +tantamount to an annihilation of the Christian faith. 'That the sacred +books,' as Carlyle says, 'could be all else than a Bank of Faith Bill, +for such and such quantities of enjoyment, payable at sight in the +other world, value received; which Bill becomes a waste paper, the +stamp being questioned; that the Christian Religion could have any +deeper foundations than books, nothing of this seems to have even in +the faintest matter occurred to Voltaire. Yet herein, as we believe the +whole world has now begun to discover, lies the real essence of the +question.' Science, in fact, after a long <i lang="fr">régime</i> of even more +than Macaulayesque cocksureness, is now abating its tone. It now no +longer threatens like a second flood to cover the earth, and it is +possible for mental and historical science to reappear like the earth +out of the waters, and a clear line to be drawn between the limits of +mind and matter. Happily, accordingly, it is no longer possible for a +Voltaire to meet the theologian with a belief that the shells found on +high hills were dropped by pilgrims and palmers from the Holy Land, any +more than it would be possible to assert, with Dugald Stewart, that the +words in Sanskrit akin to Greek were dropped by the troops of Alexander +the Great. It is now as impossible to maintain, with the mythologists +of legend, that the Ross-shire hills were formed by the +<i>Cailliach-more</i>, or great woman, who dropped stones through the +bottom of the panniers on her back, as it would be for any reactionary +Chauteaubriand to assert that God made the world, at the beginning, +precisely as we see it with all its completeness and antiquity, since +he believed an infancy of the world would be a world without +romance!—denying creation in periods, and asserting it in +instantaneous processes, by which the fossils were even created just as +we see them. Such a conception is not to exalt the Divine Power; or, if +it appears to do so, it yet effectively annihilates a belief in the +Divine Wisdom that could create pretty toys and useless fossils—a +creation of mummies and skeletons that were never from the very +beginning intended to be anything but skeletons, without any relation +to living beings. +</p> + +<p> +Miller accordingly makes it perfectly plain in what spirit he +approaches the sacred record. The Bible, he says repeatedly, is neither +a scientific text-book nor even a primer. Why, he asks, should it be +regarded as necessary to promulgate the truths of geology when those of +astronomy have been withheld? 'Man has everywhere believed in a book +which should be inspired and should teach him what God is and what God +demands of him, and this expectation is fully met in the Bible. But +nowhere has man looked for the divine revelation of scientific truth, +for it is in accordance with the economy of Providence, that Providence +which is exhibited in gradual developments, that no such expectation +has been or need be realised, the <cite>Principia</cite> of Newton and +the discoveries of James Watt being both the result of the natural and +unaided faculties of man.' Nay, more; there never could have been such +a revelation given, for never yet has a single scientific truth been +revealed. But, on the other hand, when he contrasts this clear +perception of the demarcation of religion and science in the Bible, and +the all too copious neglect of it in the other sacred books of the +world, he is constrained to regard this very ability of distinction +between two classes of truth as a strong argument for its inspiration. +</p> + +<p> +On Man and his destiny he is no less clear, and he has many fertile +suggestions to offer. His main thesis in this connection we have +already seen as determining in his own life its central point. Man he +regards as literally the fellow-worker with God. Up till his appearance +upon the earth, nature had been remarkable only for what it was, but +not for what it became. The advent of man marks the improver of +creation—God made manifest in the flesh. Between his intellect and +that of his Creator there is a relation, since we find creature and +Creator working by the same methods. Precisely as we see China arriving +at the invention of printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass +without any connection with the West, so we see the works of the +Creator in the palæozoic period repeated by the tiny creature-worker, +without any idea that he had been anticipated. Thus Creation is not +merely a scheme adapted to the nature of man, but one specially adapted +to the pattern nature of God. Man made in the image of God is a real +and fitting preparation for God's subsequent assumption of the form of +man. 'Stock and graft had the necessary affinity,' and were finally +united in the one person. History is, therefore, no mere finite record +dating from a human act in Eden, but is the real result of a decree, +'in which that act was written as a portion of the general programme.' +</p> + +<p> +The problem of the origin of evil is of course a difficulty viewed in +relation to the decrees of God, in whom no evil can exist. In the +present state of things he regards evil as due to man himself. The +deputed head of creation has voluntarily and of his own free will +<i>not</i> chosen to be a fellow-worker with God, who, while binding +him fast in the chain of events, has yet left his will free. To ordain +sin would be a self-contradiction of the idea of God; He but creates +the being that in turn creates sin. 'Fore-knowledge,' as Milton says, +'had no influence on their fault, which had no less proved certain +unforeseen.' Perhaps this is as near as we are ever likely to get. But +the Fall in its theological aspect, while it must be fully apprehended +by faith, has nothing to fear from science, which teaches, if it can be +said emphatically to teach one thing, that the sins of the fathers are +visited upon the children. With Coleridge, therefore, he regards the +Fall as a necessary stage in the history of thought and of man. The +creation of the non-absolute gives a pivot without which all subsequent +events would be inexplicable. It gives the true means of colligating +the phenomena: Man, if at the Fall he lost Eden, gained a conscience +and a moral sense. +</p> + +<p> +More remarkable is his attempted reconciliation of science and the +Mosaic cosmogony. Chalmers had regarded the Biblical account as +relating only to existing creations, and believed in the existence of a +chaotic period of death and darkness between this present world and the +prior geological ages. Pye Smith, on the other hand, had regarded chaos +as both temporary and limited in extent, and believed that outside this +area there had existed lands and seas basking in light and occupied by +animals. But subsequent geological knowledge had shown that this theory +of cataclysms and breaks was without evidence—many of the present +plants and animals co-existing with those of the former periods; nor +could Smith's theory of light existing round the coasts of the earth be +brought to square with the distinct statement of the primal creation of +light in Genesis. On the other hand, Miller notices that geology, as +dealing not with the nature of things, but only with their actual +manifestations, has to do with but three of the six days or periods. +The scale of all geologists is divided into three great classes. Lesser +divisions of systems, deposits, beds, and strata may exist; but the +master divisions, as he calls them, are simply those three which even +the unpractised eye can detect—the Palæozoic, the Secondary, and the +Tertiary. The first is the period of extraordinary fauna and flora—the +period emphatically of forests and huge pines, 'the herb yielding seed +after its kind, and tree bearing fruit.' The second is the age of +monsters, reptiles, pterodactyls and ichthyosaurs, 'the fowl that +flieth above the earth, the great sea-monsters and winged fowl after +its kind.' The Tertiary period is that of 'the beasts of the earth and +the cattle after their kind.' In each age, it is true, there is a +twilight period, a period of morning-dawn and evening-decline; but in +the middle of each period it is that we find the great outstanding +features above. Thus there would be no contradictions in the record. +This, it must be allowed, summarises truly enough the process of +creation; but it leaves out of sight the invertebrata and early fishes +of the first period, and regards the succeeding carboniferous era as +the leading features, while perhaps in some subordinate details it +inverts the order of other appearances. +</p> + +<p> +To the wider objection to the Biblical record, with its light before +the creation of the sun upon the fourth day, the vegetation on the +third independent of the sun's warming rays, and to other real or +supposed contradictions, Miller has a highly ingenious reply. We do not +think it fully meets the necessities of the case, but it has +unquestionably the merit of imaginative power, and is in full harmony +with the nature of man's mind, and is therefore preferable to any +theory which would assert the exact science of the Mosaic record by its +anticipation of the theory of Laplace and Herschel, by which the earth +existed before the sun was given as a luminary, and was independent of +the sun for light. Perhaps the theory of progressive revelation will +commend itself to most as the truest and the simplest explanation, +though it should be noted that the extraordinary approximation of the +Biblical version to the latest science does really set it far above the +merely human speculation of some old Hebrew Newton or Descartes. +</p> + +<p> +While regarding the 'days' as ages, Miller views the record as the +result of an <i>optical vision</i> presented to the writer. He truly +enough remarks that any exact revelation would have defeated its own +object through an elaborate statement to man at an early stage. Man +would not have believed it, as it would have contradicted his own +experience. He would no more have believed that the earth revolved on +its own axis than that molluscs had preceded him on the earth. The +record, therefore, he regards as according to appearance rather than to +physical realities: 'The sun, moon, and stars may have been created +long before, though it was not until the fourth day of creation that +they became visible from the earth's surface.' The six days or periods +he takes to correspond with the six divisions in a successive series of +the Azoic, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Oolitic, and Tertiary +ages. To the human eye of the seer, the second day would afford nothing +to divert it from the atmospheric phenomena; on the fourth the +celestial phenomena would alone be so prominent as to call for specific +mention. But, familiar to most readers as the famous passage is, we +here present it as the best example of his descriptive and imaginative +powers. If there are to be reconciliations at all, as either necessary +or desirable, it would be hard to beat this fine piece of fused +strength and imagination.<a href="#note4" name="noteref4"><small>[4]</small></a> +</p> + +<div class="blockquote"> +<p> +'Such a description of the creative vision of Moses as the one +given by Milton of that vision of the future which he represents as +conjured up before Adam by the archangel, would be a task rather +for the scientific poet than for the mere practical geologist or +sober theologian. Let us suppose that it took place far from man, +in an untrodden recess of the Midian desert, ere yet the vision of +the burning bush had been vouchsafed; and that, as in the vision of +St. John in Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as +certainly addressed as the eye. A "great darkness" first falls upon +the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham, +but without the "horror"; and as the Divine Spirit moves on the +face of the wildly troubled waters, as a visible aurora enveloped +by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that +"in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." +Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision to a few brief moments, +pass away; the creative word is again heard, "Let there be light," +and straightway a grey diffused light springs up in the east, and, +casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming, +vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the west. One +heavy sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint +light waxes fainter—it sinks beneath the dim undefined horizon; +the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits a +while on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what +seems to be a calm and starless night. +</p> + +<p> +'The light again brightens—it is day; and over an expanse of +ocean, without visible bound, the horizon has become wider and +sharper of outline than before. There is life in that great +sea—invertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic, life; but, from the +comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet, +only the slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and +fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what most +strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in +the atmospheric scenery. That lower stratum of the heavens occupied +in the previous vision by seething steam, or grey, smoke-like fog, +is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the +previously invisible vapour of the tepid sea has thickened in the +cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the +atmosphere they lie, thick and manifold—an upper sea of great +waves, separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament, +and, like them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A +mighty advance has taken place in creation; but its most +conspicuous optical sign is the existence of a transparent +atmosphere—of a firmament stretched out over the earth, that +separates the water above from the waters below. But darkness +descends for the third time upon the seer, for the evening and the +morning have completed the second day. +</p> + +<p> +'Yet again the light rises under a canopy of cloud, but the scene +has changed, and there is no longer an unbroken expanse of sea. The +white surf breaks, at the distant horizon, on an insulated reef, +formed mayhap by the Silurian or Old Red coral zoophytes ages +before, during the bygone yesterday; and beats in long lines of +foam, nearer at hand, against the low, winding shore, the seaward +barrier of a widely-spread country. For at the Divine command the +land has arisen from the deep—not inconspicuously and in scattered +islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive though flat and +marshy continents, little raised over the sea-level; and a yet +further fiat has covered them with the great carboniferous flora. +The scene is one of mighty forests of cone-bearing trees—of palms +and tree-ferns, and gigantic club-mosses, on the opener slopes, and +of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark +rolling rivers. There is a deep gloom in the recesses of the +thicker woods, and low, thick mists creep along the dank marsh or +sluggish streams. But there is a general lightening of the sky +overhead; as the day declines, a redder flash than had hitherto +lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern-covered bank and long +withdrawing glade. And while the fourth evening has fallen on the +prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears on, and the fourth day +approaches, that yet another change has taken place. +</p> + +<p> +'The Creator has spoken, and the stars look out from openings of +deep unclouded blue; and as day rises, and the planet of morning +pales in the east, the broken cloudlets are transmuted from bronze +into gold, and anon the gold becomes fire, and at length the +glorious sun arises out of the sea, and enters on his course +rejoicing. It is a brilliant day; the waves, of a deeper and softer +blue than before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with +little else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of richer +green; and as the sun declines amid ever richer glories than those +which had encircled his rising, the moon appears full-orbed in the +east,—to the human eye the second great luminary of the +heavens,—and climbs slowly to the zenith as night advances, +shedding its mild radiance on land and sea. +</p> + +<p> +'Again the day breaks; the prospect consists, as before, of land +and ocean. There are great pine woods, reed-covered swamps, wide +plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines +over all. But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a +feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or +wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while +birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in +hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening, +over the narrower seas, or brighten with the sunlit gleam of their +wings the thick woods. +</p> + +<p> +'And ocean has its monsters: great <i>tanninim</i> tempest the +deep, as they heave their huge bulk over the surface to inhale the +life-sustaining air; and out of their nostrils goeth smoke, as out +of "a seething pot or caldron." Monstrous creatures, armed in +massive scales, haunt the rivers, or scour the flat rank meadows; +earth, air, and water are charged with animal life; and the sun +sets on a busy scene, in which unerring instinct pursues +unremittingly its few simple ends—the support and preservation of +the individual, the propagation of the species, and the protection +and maintenance of the young. +</p> + +<p> +'Again the night descends, for the fifth day has closed; and +morning breaks on the sixth and last day of creation. Cattle and +beasts of the field graze on the plains; the thick-skinned +rhinoceros wallows in the marshes; the squat hippopotamus rustles +among the reeds, or plunges sullenly into the river; great herds of +elephants seek their food amid the young herbage of the woods; +while animals of fiercer nature—the lion, the leopard, and the +bear—harbour in deep caves till the evening, or lie in wait for +their prey amid tangled thickets, or beneath some broken bank. At +length, as the day wanes and the shadows lengthen, man, the +responsible lord of creation, formed in God's own image, is +introduced upon the scene, and the work of creation ceases for ever +upon the earth. +</p> + +<p> +'The night falls once more upon the prospect, and there dawns yet +another morrow—the morrow of God's rest—that divine Sabbath in +which there is no more creative labour, and which, "blessed and +sanctified" beyond all the days that had gone before, has as its +special object the moral elevation and final redemption of man. And +over <i>it</i> no evening is represented in the record as falling, +for its special work is not yet complete. Such seems to have been +the sublime panorama of creation exhibited in vision of old to +</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> +<div class="stanza"> +<div>"The Shepherd who first taught the chosen seed,</div> +<div>In the beginning how the heavens and earth</div> +<div>Rose out of chaos";</div></div></div></div> + +<p> +and, rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth that +militates against even the minutest or least prominent of its +details.' +</p> +</div> + +<p> +The <cite>Origin of Species</cite> in 1859 was issued after Miller's +death, but the leading doctrines of Darwin were not unknown before that +time to the public through the appearance of Robert Chambers's +<cite>Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation</cite> in 1844, and a +subsequent volume of 'Explanations' in 1846. This book caused almost as +considerable a stir as that of Darwin himself, and the greatest care +was taken by Chambers to conceal the authorship. The proof-sheets sent +to Mr. Ireland in Manchester, were returned to the writer, who +reforwarded them to Ireland, who in his turn despatched them to London. +The guesses at the author ranged from Sir Charles Lyell up to the +Prince Consort; and so strong were the feelings aroused that they +defeated a proposal to bring in Chambers as Lord Provost of Edinburgh +in 1848, and the secret was not formally divulged till the issue by +Ireland in 1884 of a twelfth edition. The book is written in a +'powerful and brilliant style,' as Darwin says; and, though long out of +print, its re-issue by Routledge and Son in their Universal Library has +again drawn attention to its views, which in Scotland caused something +of the stir produced by the appearance in England of <cite>Essays and +Reviews</cite>. Chambers, indeed, regarded his book as 'the first +attempt to connect the natural sciences into a history of creation. As +such, it must necessarily be crude and unsatisfactory, yet I have +thought the time was come for attempting to weave a great +generalisation out of established natural truths.' Much of the popular +ideas or misconceptions about the geological record is due to the +<cite>Vestiges</cite>. It is not very strong in logic nor exact in +individual branches of science, yet its influence fully merited the +detailed reply by Miller, in 1847, in the <cite>Footprints of the +Creator</cite>, which he appropriately dedicated to Sir Philip Egerton, +the highest authority on fossil fishes. +</p> + +<p> +Chambers and his school had largely subscribed to the doctrines of +Oken, by which no organism had been created of larger size than an +infusorial point, and no organism created which was not microscopic; +whatever exists larger, man himself included, having been developed and +not created. To this Miller replies that this at least is not the +testimony of the rocks. If it were true, it would follow that the +oldest fossils would be small, and low in organisation. But, so far is +this from being the case that the oldest organisms, whether that be the +<i>asterolepis</i> or the <i>cephalaspidæ</i> or the <i>acanthidæ</i>, +are large and high. One asterolepis found at Thurso measures over +twelve feet, and a Russian specimen described by Professor Asmus of +Dorpat seems to have reached the astonishing length of twenty-three +feet. Thus, the earliest organisms 'instead of taking their place, +agreeably to the demands of the development hypothesis, among the +sprats, sticklebacks, and minnows of their class, took their place +among its huge and basking sharks, gigantic sturgeons, and bulky +sword-fishes. They were giants, not dwarfs.' +</p> + +<p> +The prevalence of the brachiopods in the Silurian period over the +<i>cephalaspidæ</i> proves little. What the naturalist has to deal with +is not quantity but quality, 'not the number of the low, but the +standing of the high. A country may be distinctly a country of flocks +and herds, or a country of carnivorous mammalia, or like New South +Wales or the Galapagos, a country of marsupial animals or of reptiles. +Its human inhabitants may be merely a few hunters or shepherds, too +inconsiderable in numbers to give it any peculiar standing as a home of +men. But in estimating the highest point in the scale to which the +animal kingdom has attained, it is of the few men, not of its many +beasts, that we must take note.' Thus he maintains that the existence +of a single cephalopod or one cuttlefish among a wilderness of +brachiopods is sufficient to indicate the mark already attained in the +scale of being, just as the existence of the human family, when +restricted to a pair, indicated as clearly the scale as when its +existence can be counted by millions. Under the clearing-system in the +Western Highlands, Miller had, during 'the cruise of the Betsey,' +noticed in the island of Rum a single shepherd and eight thousand +sheep. Yet the human unit, to the naturalist, would outweigh all the +lower organisms. Moreover, the brachiopods of the palæozoic age he +would regard as larger than those existing now which have sunk by +'degradation' into inferior importance. +</p> + +<p> +The proof of the development theory in the realm of fossil flora he +would regard as still more questionable. It had been asserted that in +the carboniferous age no exogenous plant had appeared; that before the +Lias nature had not succeeded in producing a tree, and that the +vegetation of the coal-measures had been 'magnificent immaturities' of +the vegetable kingdom. But the quarry of Craigleith, near Edinburgh, +alone would refute it, not to speak of the coal-fields of Dalkeith and +Falkirk with their araucarians and pines. While Brongniart had denied +to the Lower 'Old Red' anything higher than a lichen or a moss, 'the +ship carpenter might have hopefully taken axe in hand, to explore the +woods for some such stately pine as the one described by Milton: +</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> +<div class="stanza"> +<div>"Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast</div> +<div>Of some great ammiral."'</div></div></div></div> + +<p> +It might be thought, however, that to the geological argument from +development some consolation might be left from the general fact of the +lower producing the higher. Yet even here the Lamarckian theory fails. +Fishes were earlier than the beasts of the field and man. But we are +still a long way from any proof that 'the peopling of the earth was one +of a natural kind, requiring time'; or that the predecessors of man +were his progenitors. So far as geology is concerned, superposition is +not parental relation, so that there is no necessity for the lower +producing the higher. Nor has transmutation of marine into terrestrial +vegetation been proved. This had been the mainstay of the Lamarckian +hypothesis, and had been adopted from the brilliant but fancifully +written <cite>Telliamed</cite> (an anagram, by the way, of the author's +name) of De Maillet by both Oken and Chambers, who had found in the +<cite>Delphinidæ</cite> the marine progenitors of the +<cite>Simiadæ</cite>, and through them of man—a curious approximation +to some recent crude ideas of Professor Drummond in his <cite>Ascent of +Man</cite>. They had pointed to the general or supposed agreement in +fauna and flora between the Galapagos and South America, between the +Cape de Verde Islands and Africa; yet in such a period of conversion +plants of an intermediate character would be found, and thousands of +years have failed to produce such a specimen. Thus geology, botany, and +zoology would seem to afford slight support to the Darwinian theory, at +least in the state of the argument as presented in the +<cite>Vestiges</cite>, unless a very large draft upon the mere +imagination is made. +</p> + +<p> +And such a demand is made by Darwin. 'If,' says he, 'my theory be true, +it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was +deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer +than, the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and +that, during these vast, yet quite unknown periods of time, the world +teemed with living creatures.' This, however, we may say with the +Regent Morton, is only 'a devout imagination'; and it might be more +scientific to take the geological record as we find it, for, says +Miller, 'it is difficult to imagine that that uniform cessation of +organised life at one point, which seems to have conducted Sir Roderick +Murchison and Professor Sedgwick to their conclusion, should thus have +been a mere effect of accident. Accident has its laws, but uniformity +is not one of them; and should the experience be invariable, as it +already seems extensive, that immediately beneath the fucoidal beds +organic remains cease, I do not see how the conclusion is to be +avoided, that they represent the period in which, at least, +<i>existences capable of preservation</i> were first introduced.' +Indeed the hypothesis of Darwin would fall under the remark of +Herodotus, that the old theorisers and speculators at the last resort +betook themselves to a belief in an imaginary ocean-river or to +something in the interior of the earth where observation was of +necessity excluded. For, as Professor Bain says, the assertion of a +fact wholly beyond the reach of evidence for or against, is to be held +as untrue: we are not obliged to show that a thing is not,—the burden +lies on them who maintain that the thing is. +</p> + +<p> +We have said that those who ultimately live in each branch of science +are few. It is only by the combination in perfection of imagination and +observation that success is ensured. Miller had noticed in the writer +of the <cite>Vestiges</cite> the absence of original observation and +abstract thinking, or the power of seeing and reasoning for himself. In +truth, there is something in geological speculation akin to what +Professor Jebb has noticed in the field of classical emendation and of +textual criticism, especially in Germany, where scholarship is a +crowded profession, and eminence is often temporarily won by boldness +of handling the texts. But even Ritschl, with all his heavy apparatus +of learning, singularly fails in comparison with the sagacity of +Bentley or the instinct of Porson. What habits of classical +verse-composition had done for these scholars is brought to the +geologist by observation. This, in unison with creative mental power, +will alone preserve the name of the natural scientist. The first has +kept White of Selborne a literary evergreen: the second has maintained +his place for Cuvier. Miller's own friend, Dr. Longmuir, rightly +singles out this Champollion-like trait of <i>sagacity</i> as his most +characteristic feature, by which 'he seemed by intuition to perceive +what cost other minds no small amount of careful investigation.' He was +very cautious in statement, and laborious in the acquisition of his +data. In his works the reader will find no second-hand statements, no +airy generalisation; even in fields where special research in minute +departments had been by circumstances denied to him, his gift of +constructive imagination often enables him to supply such defects as +later investigators may have detected and added. 'The more,' says +Professor Huxley, I study the fishes of the Old Red, the more I am +struck by the patience and sagacity manifested in his researches, and +by the natural insight which, in his case, seems to have supplied the +want of special anatomical knowledge.' +</p> + +<p> +And what is true in science is also no less true in his purely literary +performances. The reader of his articles, political or social, cannot +fail to be struck with the pertinence of his quotations and +illustrations. What he knew was instantly at the call of a powerful +memory and a vigorous imagination. As an editor, he had not to go to +memory for his metaphors, and to his imagination for his facts. Both +came easily and naturally; and his writing, even in its most sustained +flights, shows no signs of effort. Some critics have detected in his +style an element of exuberance; and this may be allowed in his +narrative and descriptive passages. There would appear to have been, as +it were, a Celtic lobe of imagination in his mind for the feeling of +discursive description and external nature. Thus, in his slightest +landscapes his imagination or eye is not satisfied with the few bold +touches such as Carlyle would, after his manner, throw upon the canvas. +It expands, like the method of Ruskin, over the surface. But in each +case the defect is the result of original endowment. The eye, he says, +had been in his case exclusively trained as a mason, and this habit of +seeing the projected line complete from the beginning was at the bottom +of his often spoiling the effect of his narrative with flamboyant +additions, through his possession of the geological eye for its +conformation in detail. Johnson said of Thomson that he had a true +poetical genius—the power of seeing even a pair of candles in a +poetical light. The landscape became to Miller at once anatomised into +its geological aspects. +</p> + +<p> +But in his strictly scientific passages this is not so. There the style +is simple in expression and close in reasoning. When we consider the +great amount of solid literary performance, and of minute observation, +recorded in his <cite>Cruise of the Betsey</cite> and his <cite>Rambles +of a Geologist</cite>, extending over the West Coast and the +Orkneys—when we know that much of his work consisted of papers in +<cite>The Witness</cite>, republished, like <cite>The Old Red +Sandstone</cite>, in book form with the necessary additions, we shall +wonder at the fertility and the quickness of the mind that could, in +the midst of distracting journalistic demands on his time and +attention, produce such a mass of varied and finished work in science +and literature. And of the work in <cite>The Witness</cite> as a +political writer, we need only say that the present ecclesiastical +condition of Scotland bears largely his impress. Till he came and gave +expression to the feeling of the country in the columns of his paper, +the people had to a considerable extent believed the question at issue +to be one that concerned mainly the clergy. This had been the +standpoint of the Moderate organs, in a wary attempt to win over the +laity. But by the <cite>Letter to Brougham</cite> he won the ear of the +people, and to the end he never lost it. By 1841 the political +candidates in Scotland at the general election had proclaimed +themselves, with a single exception, in favour of some distinct +alteration of the law of patronage. Whether Church papers are or are +not a blessing—in England they have become a menace to political +action and a medium for the most offensive clericalism and reactionary +measures—may safely be left out of account in settling the question in +his own case, for, as we have seen, he had never consented to make his +paper a merely ecclesiastical organ. But of the work which he +accomplished as a leader-writer and as an exponent of popular rights we +have the unhesitating estimate of Guthrie: 'The battle of Christ's +rights as Head of the Church, and of the people's rights as members of +the body of which He is the Head, was fought and won in every town and +a large number of the parishes of Scotland, mainly by Hugh Miller, +through the columns of <cite>The Witness</cite> newspaper.' Of it he +himself, in the closing sentences of the <cite>Schools and +Schoolmasters</cite>, could say with modesty that it took its place +among our first-class Scottish newspapers, and that it numbered among +its subscribers a larger percentage of readers with a university +education than any other. Nor would he, perhaps, have considered it as +among the least of his journalistic successes that his name and +connection could win for the elder Bethune, at the close of his wintry +day, the proposed editorship of the <cite>Dumfries Standard</cite>, +which would have done much to have brightened the life of his old +fellow-contributor to Wilson's <cite>Border Tales</cite> had not the +poet been removed before him by death. +</p> + +<p> +In science there are stars and stars, to borrow the adage of Thackeray +upon men. There are stars that are fixed. In his own line of geology, +as an inspirationist, we think his name will not soon pass away. There +may be defects of knowledge, but there is no defect of spirit; and here +we cannot do better than set down the opinion of his friend, Sir +Archibald Geikie, who has a connection both with Miller and with +Murchison through his occupancy of the Murchisonian Chair of Geology in +the University of Edinburgh. Both Miller and Murchison came out of the +Black Isle. In a communication to us of the date 22nd December 1895, he +thus writes:— +</p> + +<div class="blockquote"> +<p> +'Hugh Miller will always occupy a peculiar place in the history of +geology, and in the ranks of geological literature. He was not in +any sense a trained geologist. He lacked the habit of patient and +detailed investigation in departments of the science that did not +specially interest him, but which were essential as a basis of +accurate induction and successful speculation. In all that relates +to the stratigraphical sequence of the formations, for example, he +accepted what had been done by others without any critical +examination of it. Thus, in his own region—the north of +Scotland—he believed that a girdle of Old Red Sandstone nearly +encircles the older crystalline rocks of Ross and Sutherland—a +view then generally adopted. Yet he had actually walked over ground +where, with even an elementary knowledge of structural geology, he +could have corrected the prevalent error. It is, of course, no +reproach to him that he left matters as he found them in that +respect; his genius did not find in such questions the appropriate +field of its exertion. +</p> + +<p> +'Nor though he occupied himself all through his life with fossils, +can he be called a palæontologist. He had no education in +comparative anatomy, and was thus incompetent to deal adequately as +a naturalist with the organisms which he discovered. He was himself +perfectly conscious of the limitations of his powers in this +department, and thus wisely refrained from burdening the literature +of science with descriptions and names which would have been +revised, and perhaps entirely recast, by some subsequent more +competent biologist. +</p> + +<p> +'Hugh Miller's unique position is that of a poetic student of the +geological side of Nature, who possessed an unrivalled gift of +vividly communicating to others the impressions made on his own +mind by the observation of geological fact and by the inferences +which such observation seemed to warrant. His lively imagination +led him to seize more especially on those aspects of the past +history of the earth which could be most vividly realised. He loved +to collect the plants and animals of which the remains have been +entombed among the rocks, and to re-people with them the scenes in +which they lived long ages ago. Each scattered fact was marshalled +by his eager fancy into its due place in the mental picture which +he drew of such long-vanished lands, lakes, rivers, and seas. His +enthusiasm supplied details where facts were wanting, and enabled +him to kindle in his readers not a little of the burning interest +which he felt himself. +</p> + +<p> +'Long study of the best English literature had given Miller a rare +mastery of his mother tongue. For elegance of narrative combined +with clearness and vividness of description, I know no writing in +the whole of scientific literature superior, or, indeed, perhaps +equal to his. There can be no doubt that this literary gift, +appealing as it did to so wide a circle of readers, formed a chief +source of the influence which he exerted among his contemporaries. +It was this that enabled him to spread so widely a curiosity to +know something of geological science, and an interest in the +progress of geological discovery. I do not think that the debt +which geology owes to him for these services, in deepening the +popular estimation of the science, and in increasing the number of +its devotees, has ever been sufficiently acknowledged. During his +lifetime, and for some years afterwards, Hugh Miller was looked +upon by the general body of his countrymen as the leading geologist +of his day. And this exaggerated but very natural estimate spread +perhaps even more extensively in the United States. His books were +to be found in the remotest log-hut of the Far West, and on both +sides of the Atlantic ideas of the nature and scope of geology were +largely drawn from them. +</p> + +<p> +'Of the extent and value of Miller's original contributions to +geology I am, perhaps, hardly fitted to speak. He was one of my +earliest and kindest scientific friends. He used to relate to me +the results of his summer rambles before he had time to set them +down in writing. He admitted me into the intimacy of his inner +thoughts on geological questions and controversies. He brought me +completely under the spell of his personal charm, and filled me +with an enthusiastic love for the man as well as a passionate +admiration for the geologist. Nor has the glamour of that early +friendship passed away. I would rather leave to others the +invidious task of coldly dissecting Hugh Miller's work and seeing +how much of it has been a permanent addition to science, and how +much has passed away with the crudities of advancing knowledge. I +will only say that there cannot be any doubt that his contributions +to the stock of geological fact were much less important than the +influence which his writings ever had in furthering the spread of +an appreciation of geological science throughout the +English-speaking world. +</p> + +<p> +'There were two departments in which his best original work was +done. One of these was the Old Red Sandstone, where he laid the +foundations of his fame as an observer and describer of Nature. His +unwearied devotion to the task of collecting the fishes of the Old +Red Sandstone, and his patient industry in piecing their broken +fragments together, opened up a new chapter in the history of Life +on our globe. The other department was that which embraces the +story of the Ice Age. Miller was one of the pioneers in the study +of the Boulder-Clay. The last years of his life were more +especially devoted to that interesting formation in which he found +fossil shells in many parts of Scotland where they had never been +found before. I well remember my last interview with him, only a +few evenings before his death. He had spent a short holiday in the +low ground about Bucklyvie between the Forth and Clyde, and had +collected a number of marine shells, which led him to draw a +graphic picture of what must have been the condition of central +Scotland during a part of the glacial period. On the same occasion +he questioned me as usual about my own geological doings. I had +been surveying in detail the geological structure of Arthur's Seat +at Edinburgh, and showed him my maps. He went over them with lively +comments, and, when he had done, turned round to his eldest +daughter, then a girl at school, and gave her in his own pictorial +way a sketch of the history of the volcano that had piled up the +picturesque hill on the eastern outskirts of the city. +</p> + +<p> +'I count it as one of the privileges of my life to have known Hugh +Miller, and as one of its chief losses that he was so suddenly +removed when I had hardly realised the full value of his friendship +and of his genial enthusiasm. His writings formed my earliest +geological text-books, and I shall never cease to look back upon +their influence with gratitude. They ought to be far more widely +read than they seem now to be. Assuredly no young geologist will +find more stimulating chapters than those penned by the author of +the <cite>Old Red Sandstone</cite>.' +</p> +</div> + +<p> +The statue erected to him by his countrymen presents to the eye of the +traveller one of the most striking features of the landscape as he +approaches the little town of Cromarty. No more fitting scene could be +found than that which commands the magnificent sweep of water over +which Miller's eye had ranged when a boy. Of the Scott Monument in +Edinburgh he had said that no monument could be in keeping and in +character that was not Gothic; and no one to himself could be true that +forgot the interpreter of the Old Red Sandstone. As late as 1836, +Buckland in his <cite>Bridgewater Treatise</cite> had briefly dismissed +it, and it was a new revelation in geology to make known its scientific +importance. In dedicating the book to Sir Roderick Murchison, who had +been born at Taradale on the Beauly Firth in 1792, he could say that +Smith, the father of English geology, had been born upon the Oolite: +they, he added, had been born upon the Old Red. Rarely could nature +afford a more striking example of the true and the picturesque, than in +these two widely differing memorials, the one in the Princes Street of +his 'own romantic town,' the other looking over the expanse of the +Cromarty Firth. In life these men had never met, and in type they were +totally distinct. Yet in the great features of integrity and force of +character no two men could more strikingly agree. Both wrote with their +eyes on the object, and both were loyal to fact. Of Miller we may say +what Carlyle had said of Sir Walter, that no sounder piece of British +manhood had been put together in this century of time, and that, when +he departed, he took a man's life along with him. +</p> + +<p> +A man of the people, he was understood by the people; and he wished it +to be so. When we passed through the Sutors of Cromarty some years ago, +about six in the morning of a fine summer day, there was a sailor at +the wheel on the bridge. Under the belief that we were strangers to the +locality, he pointed out the statue in the distance and gave an +account, correct in the main, of what Miller had been and what he had +done. In dwelling upon the life the narrator seemed to borrow respect +for the dignity of all labour and of his own calling. Goldsmith thought +of Burke that in giving up to party what was meant for mankind he had +narrowed his mental powers and lessened his influence and force. It may +be that there are some who think that, in doing the ecclesiastical work +which he accomplished, he had given up to the Church of Scotland in all +her branches what was meant for science. Such a judgment would be +incorrect; it would certainly be one which would but feebly reflect the +convictions of all Scotchmen. It is a true remark of the elder Disraeli +that few men of science have either by their work or in their life +influenced the staple of the thinking of humanity. To influence a whole +people is certainly given but rarely to any one man. But to mould the +opinions of his countrymen in a lasting sense,—and no higher object +would he have desired—was no less certainly given to Hugh Miller. +</p> + +<dl> +<dt class="notelabel"><a name="note4"> </a><a +href="#noteref4"><small>[4] +</small></a></dt> +<dd class="notetext"> <cite>Testimony of the Rocks</cite>, pp. 186-191, ed. +1857. +</dd></dl> + + + + +<h2> +<a name="appendix"> </a> +BIBLIOGRAPHY +</h2> + + +<p class="hang"> +1829. Poems written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason. +<i>Inverness.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1829. Letters on the Herring Fishery. <i>Inverness</i> (reprint from +<cite>Inverness Courier</cite>). +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1835. Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland; or, The Traditional +History of Cromarty. <i>Edinburgh.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1839. Letter from one of the Scottish People to the Right Hon. Lord +Brougham and Vaux, on the opinions expressed by his lordship on the +Auchterarder case. <i>Edinburgh.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1839. The Whiggism of the Old School as exemplified by the Past History +and Present Position of the Church of Scotland. <i>Edinburgh.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1841. The Old Red Sandstone; or, New Walks in an Old Field. +<i>Edinburgh</i> (republished from <cite>Witness</cite>). +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1847. First Impressions of England and its People. <i>Edinburgh.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1847. Footprints of the Creator; or, the Asterolepis of Stromness. +<i>London</i>, 1849. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1848. The Sites Bill and the Toleration Laws; being an Examination of +the Resolutions of the Rev. Dr. Alexander of Argyle Square Chapel +Congregation. <i>Edinburgh.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1848. Geology of the Bass Rock (section contributed to M'Crie's +<cite>History of the Bass Rock</cite>). <i>Edinburgh.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1850. Thoughts on Education. <i>Edinburgh</i> (republished from +<cite>Witness</cite>.) +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1852. My Schools and Schoolmasters; or, the Story of My Education +(<i>Edinburgh</i>, 1854). <cite>Popular</cite> edition by W. P. Nimmo, +Hay & Mitchell, <i>Edinburgh</i>, 1893. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1854. The Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland. <i>Edinburgh</i> (address +to Royal Physical Society, 22 Nov. 1854). +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1855. Geology versus Astronomy; or, the Conditions and the Periods; +being a view of the Modifying Effects of Geological Discovery on the +Old Astronomic Inferences respecting the Plurality of Inhabited Worlds. +<i>Glasgow.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1857. The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its bearing on the Two +Theologies, Natural and Revealed. <i>Edinburgh</i> (Twelve lectures +before the Edinburgh Philosophical Society, British Association, 1855, +etc.). +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1858. The Cruise of the Betsey; or, A Summer Ramble among the +Fossiliferous Deposits of the Highlands; with Rambles of a Geologist, +or Ten Thousand Miles over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland. +Edited by W. S. Symonds. <i>Edinburgh.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1859. Sketch Book of Popular Geology. Edited by Mrs. Miller. (Lectures +delivered before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh.) +<i>Edinburgh.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1862. Essays. Edited by Dr. P. Bayne (republished from +<cite>Witness</cite>). +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1863. Tales and Sketches. Edited by Mrs. Miller (contributions to +Wilson's <cite>Border Tales</cite>, etc.). +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1864. Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood. Edited by Mrs. Miller. +<i>Edinburgh</i>, 1891. W. P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1889. The Headship of Christ and the Rights of the Christian People. +With preface by Dr. P. Bayne. <i>Edinburgh</i>, new edition, Nimmo, Hay +& Mitchell. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +1890. Leading Articles. Edited by his Son-in-law, the Rev. John +Davidson. New edition, <i>Edinburgh</i>, W. P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell. +</p> +<br> + +<p> +The following list of a uniform edition of Hugh Miller's Works is taken +from Messrs. W. P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell's 1896 Catalogue:— +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +My Schools and Schoolmasters; or, The Story of my Education. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its Bearings on the Two +Theologies, Natural and Revealed. <i>Profusely Illustrated.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +First Impressions of England and its People. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +Sketch-Book of Popular Geology. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland; or, The Traditional +History of Cromarty. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +The Old Red Sandstone; or, New Walks in an Old Field. <i>Profusely +Illustrated.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +The Cruise of the Betsey; or, A Summer Ramble among the Fossiliferous +Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist; or, Ten Thousand +Miles over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +Footprints of the Creator; or, The Asterolepis of Stromness. With +Preface and Notes by Mrs. Miller, and a Biographical Sketch by +Professor Agassiz. <i>Profusely Illustrated.</i> +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +Tales and Sketches. Edited, with a Preface, by Mrs. Miller. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood, Geological and Historical. With the +Geology of the Bass Rock. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +Essays: Historical and Biographical, Political and Social, Literary and +Scientific. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +Leading Articles on Various Subjects. Edited by his Son-in-law, the +Rev. John Davidson. With a Characteristic Portrait of the Author, +facsimile from a Photograph, by D. O. Hill, R.S.A. +</p> + +<p class="hang"> +The Headship of Christ and the Rights of the Christian People. With +Preface by Peter Bayne, A.M. +</p> + + + +<br><br> +<p class="ctrtoppad"> +<i>FAMOUS SCOTS</i> +</p> + + +<p class="ctrtoppad"> +<big>THOMAS CARLYLE</big> +</p> + +<p class="ctrtoppad"> +<span class="sc">By</span> HECTOR C. MACPHERSON +</p> + + +<p> +'One of the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far +outweighing in value some more pretentious works with which we are +familiar.'—<cite>Literary World.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'We heartily congratulate author and publishers on the happy +commencement of this admirable enterprise.'—<cite>British +Weekly.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'As an estimate of the Carlylean philosophy and of Carlyle's place in +literature and his influence in the domains of morals, politics, and +social ethics, the volume reveals not only care and fairness, but +insight and a large capacity for original thought and +judgment.'—<cite>Scotsman.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'Lets us get a correct glimpse into the complex workings of a +master-mind, and is lighted up by many airy touches of fact and +fancy.'—<cite>Weekly Free Press.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'A fascinating story of a wonderful writer.'—<cite>Leeds +Mercury.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'An eminently readable book.'—<cite>Evening Dispatch.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'Is distinctly creditable to the publishers, and worthy of a national +series such as they have projected.'—<cite>Glasgow Daily +Record.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'The book is written in an able, masterly, and painstaking +manner.'—<cite>Educational News.</cite> +</p> + + +<br> +<p class="ctrtoppad"> +<big>ALLAN RAMSAY</big> +</p> + +<p class="ctr"> +<span class="sc">By</span> OLIPHANT SMEATON +</p> + + +<p> +'Graphic and winning.'—<cite>Dundee Advertiser.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'Gives many quaint and pleasant glimpses of Scottish life in the last +century.'—<cite>Newcastle Chronicle.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'A most interesting monograph.'—<cite>Arbroath Herald.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'Discussing Ramsay as a pastoral poet and elegist, the biographer gives +an able analysis of his chief writings. The whole book is, indeed, +marked by authority and ability.'—<cite>Banffshire Journal.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'A new and most important addition to our national +biography.'—<cite>Scottish Notes and Queries.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'Eminently readable.'—<cite>Border Advertiser.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'The story throughout is told with vigour.'—<cite>Glasgow +Citizen.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'Presents a very interesting sketch of the life of the poet, as well as +a well-balanced estimate and review of his works.'—<cite>Peoples +Friend.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'The author has shown scholarship and much enthusiasm in his +task.'—<cite>Edinburgh Dispatch.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'The kindly, vain, and pompous little wig-maker lives for us in Mr. +Smeaton's pages.'—<cite>Daily Record.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'A careful and intelligent study.'—<cite>Glasgow Herald.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'A very capable piece of literary craftsmanship by a competent +hand.'—<cite>Edinburgh Evening News.</cite> +</p> + +<p> +'It is not a patchwork picture, but one in which the worker, taking +genuine interest in his subject and bestowing conscientious pains on +his task, has his materials well in hand, and has used them to produce +a portrait that is both lifelike and +well-balanced.'—<cite>Scotsman.</cite> +</p> +<br> +<div class="tn"> +<p> +Transcriber's Note: +</p> + +<p> +Minor typographical errors have been corrected +without note. +</p> + +<p> +Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have +been retained as printed. +</p> +</div> + +<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44530 ***</div> +</body> +</html> + diff --git a/44530-h/images/cover.jpg b/44530-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..e0a2d4d --- /dev/null +++ b/44530-h/images/cover.jpg diff --git a/44530-h/images/titlepage.jpg b/44530-h/images/titlepage.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..1a42c8c --- /dev/null +++ b/44530-h/images/titlepage.jpg |
