Hugh Miller

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ar 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 The Witness 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 everyth

hat 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

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 atti

rofession 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 repo

w, alone in the records of journalism. For rough and hurrying vigour they might be matched, or more, from the columns of the Times; in lightness of wit and smart lucidity of statement they might be surpassed by the happiest performances of French journalists-a Prévost-Paradol, or a St. Marc Girardin; and for occasional brillianc

hig, 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 The Witness through the abuse and the inventions of the Tory organs. When the Edinburgh Advertiser, 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 The Witness 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,

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

s 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 t

rs of the policy of the Hopes and Muirs, when in approaching the Government with a stat

reaty 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 D

smart Parliament House 'able editor.' The Witness 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 The Times, 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

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

p 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 The Cruise of the Betsey, though in popularity it has been surpassed by his First Impressions of England, 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 Footprints of the Creator, in reply to the Vestiges by Robert Chambers, in wh

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

fer 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 History of the Rebellion of 1745 will doubtless soften their asperity after reading Chambers's account of his struggling through a whole set of the Encyclop?dia Britannica which he had in a lumber garret,-setting out at sixteen, 'as a bookseller with only my own small collectio

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 Distrib

ed on some debate in the Town Council, when Miller said it reminded him of a scene in Galt's Provost. He repeated the passage, halting at the speech of the convener of the trades, but was evidently vexed at the

turned, 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 alm

ar the horrible thought. God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me. Dearest Lydi

Mil

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

phers 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

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 no