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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

rers, 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 char

t 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

been one to do much for the social or religious advance of his people. Jupiter, or 'Old Tonans,' as he was called from sitting to Gavin Hamilton the painter for his portrait of Jupiter, had been the fanatical defender of the theatre at a time when his friend John Home, the writer of Douglas, had been compelled by public opinion to seek relief from pulpit duties, and a more fitting sphere for his rants of 'Young Norval on the Grampian Hills' in the ranks of the laity. Carlyle and his friend Dr. Hugh Blair were constant patrons of the legitimate drama in the old playhouse in the Canongate, when the burghers at night would 'dauner hame wi' lass and lantern' after the manner described with such power by Scott in the Tolbooth scene of Rob Roy. On one occasion, the doctor had, for once in his long life, to play the part of non-intrusionist, when he repelled vigorously with a bludgeon the attempt of some wild sparks to force an entry into his box! Missions he denounced in the spirit of a fanatical supporter of the repressive régime of Pitt and Dundas.

olar she could produce was to be found in a humble seceding chapel at the foot of Carrubber's Close. In Scotland, at least within the present century, no more influential book has been published than his Life of Knox, which silently made its appearance in 1811. In the revival of ecclesiastical and national feeling in the country the book will ever remain a classic and a landmark. There it occupies the place which, in the field of classical and historical scholarship, is taken by Wolf's Prolegomena to Homer. Lord Jeffrey could truly declare that to fit one's-self for the task of even a reviewer of M'Crie, the special reading of several years would be necessary. Its influence was at once felt. The 'solemn sneer' of the Humes, Gibbons, Robertsons, and Tytlers, and, be it mentioned with regret, of even Scott in that unworthy squib against the religion of his country, Old Mortality, had done much, at least among the literati and the upper clas

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

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 turn

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 s

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,

s 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 highe

almers and to this almost unknown Cromarty minister than to any two other men. Stewart's power seems to have lain in the detection of subtle analogies and in pictorial verbal power, in which he resembled Guthrie. In an obituary notice in The Witness of Nov. 13, 1847 he dwells with affection on the man, and illustrates admirably the type of intellect and its dangers. 'Goldsmith,' he observes, 'when he first entered upon his literary career, found that all the good things on the side of truth had been already said; and that his good things, if he really desired to produce any, would require all to be said on the side of paradox and error. Poor Edward Irving formed a melancholy illustration of this species of originality. His stock of striking things on the side

I. 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

of the Courier in the very same year of Miller's visit. His Life of Pope published in 1853 is still a standard production, and altogether Carruthers was one of the ablest editors in Scotland, and his paper which was edited on Liberal lines was a very powerful organ in his day. The friendship then begun lasted till the death o

n organ that recognised with difficulty the difference of the bagpipe and the big drum. The critics were not very partial to the venture. The tone of the majority was that of the Quarterly upon Keats, and the autocrats of poetical merit declared that he was safer with his chisel than on Parnassus. One little oasis, however, in the desert of depreciation did manage to reach him in a letter, through his friend Forsyth of Elgin, from Thomas Pringle of Roxburgh who had seen the book. In early days the poet had been a clerk in the Register House of Edinburgh, where his Scenes of Teviotdale had secured him an introduction to Scott, who extended to him the same ready support which he had bestowed on Leyden. By his

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

ce 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-

iously 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 o

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,

ood 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, Words of Warning to the People of Scotland, 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 Tales of the Bord

lienating 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

e 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 patrim

y as composed but of the intellectual débris 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

e 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. Re

"specs," and next he selected and read out several paragraphs, with such headings as "The schismatics in a--," "The fire-raisers in b--," and so on, winding up this part with the concluding words of one paragraph

Sneevlin' hypocrites. That's your non-intrusion meetin's.

ill 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 mi

ins, who had been liste

shaft, tae," sai

wan'erin' here an' there to raise strife amo' peaceable fowk; and syne their harangues-a clean

Somewhat later, Miller could say in The Witness 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. Mak

ict 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