IN EDINBURGH—THE CROMARTY BANK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Before leaving Cromarty he had been engaged upon his Scenes and Legends 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, 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 Borders. 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 Tales 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 Burns in Drama.

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.

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.

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 The Aberdeen Herald and The Constitutional, 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 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 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!

No apology, therefore, need here be made for the inclusion of an extract from that remarkable work by Dr. William Alexander—Johnny Gibb—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.

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 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. 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.

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 The Witness. 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 The Witness and Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk. 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.