MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS.'

THE avowed object of Hugh Miller in this volume is didactic. By the story of his own life, he wishes to impress upon the working man how much he can do to educate himself, if he will take advan- tage of every opportunity that is furnished, not by schools, which he may not be able to command, but by observation of nature and•attention to his own business. It is only on this last topic that

Mr. Miller, we think, has succeeded ; but here, undoubtedly, his example points the moral of striving honestly to do your best both morally and mechanically, and to labour. at difficulties with care- ful attention till you overcome them. Perhaps even this cannot always be done ; for some characters seem doomed to inferiority. The other causes of Mr. Miller's advancement are rather special to himself than for general imitation. He had talent, considerable ap- titude for literary cultivation, and a bent for natural history in its

• My Schools and Schoolmasters; or the Story of my Education. By Hugh Mil- ler, Author of "The Old Red Sandstone," Sze. &c. Published by Johnstone and Hunter, Edinburgh.

branches of mineralogy and geology. It is labour in vain to tell boys or men without any natural gift, to observe all the singular appearances in the quarries where they labour, the sea-beach, the mountain or the wild, where they wander, and store up the facts in memory, till some mysterious mental operation or the perusal of some treatise enable them to give system and even life to what was previously an undigested heap. Mr. Miller, too, though acting for many years as a working stone-niason, was not an average stone-mason. His family was respectable, some of its connexions with a species of standing in the district. An ancestor, suspected of making money off the Spanish main when buccaneering was the fashion, had left a house behind him ; the father of our author was a small shipowner ; and though the " oilier " he himself finally touched by inheritance was not much, and misfortune reduced members of his family, still he was removed from the category of a common workman.

But if the educational lesson Hugh Miller aimed at teaching is not thoroughly taught, My Schools and Schoolmasters is a plea-

sant and an original book. The autobiography is interesting, as the picture of a mind gradually and for a long time groping its way by natural bias along a course which was to lead upwards from obscurity. The picture of Scottish humble life and manners a generation or two back, which the more personal or family remi- niscences contain, is also attractive from its breadth and truth.

Perhaps the most really novel and striking portion of the volume is the account of the many different characters the writer fell in with among the people of Cromarty, the peasantry or his fellow- workmen. All this, indeed, is not without its alloy. Holding by profession the pen of a ready writer, Mr. Miller is rather prone to make too much of small matters by the art of elaborate delinea- tion, and some of the episodical matter might be spared altogether. He has the tale-writer's turn for wonders. Several of his super- natural stories are proper as instances of optical or imaginative

delusions, and others mark the superstitions of the time and place : but some go beyond this, and rather belong to diablerie than to a. real narrative.

From the days of the bold buccaneer the family were addicted to the sea, and several members found in it their grave. Such was the fate of Mr. Miller's father; and it gives rise to a picture of humble distress and struggle.

"There followed a dreary season, on which I still look back in memory as on a prospect which, sunshiny and sparkling for a time, has become sud- denly enveloped in cloud and storm. I remember my mother's long fits of weeping, and the general gloom of the widowed household ; and how, after she had sent my two little sisters to bed,—for such had been the increase of the family,—and her hands were set free for the evening, she used to sit up late at night, engaged as a sempstress, in making pieces of dress for such of the neigbbours as chose to employ her. My father's new house lay un- tenanted at the time ; and though his sloop had been partially insured, the

broker with whom he dealt was, it would seem, on the verge of insolvency, and having raised objections to paying the money, it was long ere any part

of it could be realized. And so, with all my mother's industry, the house- hold would have fared but ill, had it not been for the assistance lent her by her two brothers, industrious, hard-working men, who lived with their aged parents and an unmarried sister, about a bow-shot away, and now not only advanced her money as she needed it, but also took her second child, the elder of my two sisters, a docile little girl of three years, to live with them. I remember I used to go wandering disconsolately about the harbour at this season, to examine the vessels which had come in during the night ; and that I oftener than once set my mother a crying, by asking her why the ship- masters who, when my father was alive, used to stroke my head and slip

halfpence into my pockets, never now took any notice of me or gave me anything ? She well knew that the shipmasters—not an ungenerous class of

men—had simply failed to recognize their old comrade's child ; but the

question was only too suggestive, notwithstanding, of both her own loss and mine. I used, too, to climb, day after day, a grassy protuberance of the old coast-line immediately behind my mother's house, that commands a wide reach of the Moray Frith, and to look wistfully out, long after every one else had ceased to hope, for the sloop with the two stripes of white and the two square topsails. But months and years passed by, and the white stripes and the square topsails I never saw."

The progress of the autobiographer in the world is clearly told. That of his literary and scientific advance in a mental sense,

might perhaps have been presented more distinctly with advantage. His earlier lessons in natural history are exhibited fully. Here, when an apprentice and working in a quarry, is the writer's first acquaintance with fossils. " It was, however, not to the quarry itself that my first-found organisms belonged. There lies in the frith beyond an outlier of the Has, which, like

the Marcus's Cave one referred to in a preceding chapter, strews the beach

with its fragments after every storm from the sea ; and in a nodular mass of blueish-gray limestone derived from this subaqueous bed I laid open my

first-found ammonite. It was a beautiful specimen, graceful in its curves as those of the Ionic volute, and greatly more delicate in its sculpturing; and its bright cream-coloured tint, dimly burnished by the prismatic hues of the original pearl, contrasted exquisitely with the dark gray of the matrix which enclosed it. I broke open many a similar nodule during our stay at this delightful quarry, and there were few of them in which I did not detect some organism of the ancient world,—scales of fishes, groups of shells, bits of decayed wood, and fragments of fern. At the dinner-hour I used to show my new-found specimens to the workmen ; but though they always took the trouble of looking at them, and wondered at times how the shells and plants

had got into the stones,' they seemed to regard them as a sort of natural toys, which a mere lad might amuse himself in looking after, but which

were rather below the notice of grown-up people like themselves. One work-

man, however, informed me that things of a kind I had not yet found— genuine thunderbolts—which in his father's time were much sought after for the cure of bewitched cattle, were to be found in tolerable abundance on a reach of the beach about two miles further to the West ; and as, on quit- ting the quarry for the piece of work on which we were to be next engaged, Uncle David gave us all a half-holiday, I made use of it in visiting the tract of shore indicated by the wOrkman. And there, leaning against the granitic gneiss and hornblend slate of the Hill of Eathie, I found a liasic deposit, amazingly rich in its organisms, not buried under the waves, as at Manna 6 shore, or as opposite our new quarry, but at one part underlying a little grass-covered plain, and at another exposed for several hundred yards tor' ther along the shore. Never yet did embryo geologist break ground on a more promising field ; and memorable in my existence was this first of the many happy evenings that I have spent in exploring it."

Johnstone, an old soldier, serving as forester to a neighbouring gentleman, had misconceived an attempt of Hugh and some school- fellows to erect a monument to themselves when time was about to separate them, as a mischievous scheme against his master's pro- perty. The character of Johnstone is not the most marked in itself of many which the book contains, but it is interesting from its connexion with the Great Duke.

"Johnstone was an old Forty-second man, who had followed Wellington over the larger part of the Peninsula ; but, though he had witnessed the storming and sack of St. Sebastian, and a great many other bad things, no- thing had he ever seen on the Peninsula, or anywhere else, he said, half so mischievous as the cattle-trap. We, of course kept our own secret ; and as we all returned under the cloud of night, and with heavy hearts filled up our excavation level with the soil, the threatened proclamation was never issued. Johnstone, however,—who had been watching my motions for a considerable time before, and whom, as he was a formidable fellow, very un- like any of the other foresters, I had been sedulously watching in turn,— had no hesitation in declaring that I, and I only, could be the designer of the cattle-trap. I had acquainted i myself in books, he said, with the mode of entrapping by pitfalls wild beasts n the forests abroad ; and my trap for the Colonel's cattle was, he was certain, a result of my book-acquired knowledge. "I was one day lounging in front of my mother's dwelling, when up came Johnstone to address me. As the evidence regarding the excavation had totally broken down, I was aware of no special offence at the time that could have secured for me such a piece of attention' and inferred that the old soldier was labouring under sonic mistake ; but Johnstone's address soon evinced that he was not in the least mistaken. He wished to be acquainted with me, he said. It was all nonsense for us to be bothering one another, when we had no cause of quarrel.' He used occasionally to eke out his pension, and his scanty allowance as forester, by catching a basket of fish for himself from off the rocks of the Hill; and he had just discovered a projecting rock at the foot of a tall precipice, which would prove, he was sure, one of the best fishing-platforms in the Frith. But then, in the existing state, it was wholly inaccessible. He was, however, of opinion, that it was possible to lay it open by carrying a path adown the shelving face of the precipice. He had seen Wellington addre.-s himself to quite as desperate-looking matters in the Peninsula ; and were I but to assist him, he was sure, he said, we could construct between us the necessary path. The undertaking was one wholly according to my own heart ; and next morning Johnstone and I were hard at work on the giddy brow of the precipice."

Chiefly by Hugh's activity, the work was done.

"I never saw a man more delighted than Johnstone. As being lighter and more active than he,—for, though not greatly advanced in life he was considerably debilitated by severe wounds,—I had to take some of ale more perilous parts of the work on myself. I had cut the tenons for the ladder with a rope round my waist, and had recovered the trees flung into the sea by some adroit swimming; and the old soldier became thoroughly impressed with the conviction that my proper sphere was the army. I was already five feet three, he said ; in little more than a twelvemonth I would be five feet seven ; and were I then but to enlist, and to keep from the `drop drink,' —a thing which he never could do,—I would, he was certain, rise to be a sergeant. In brief, such were the terms on which Johnstone and I learned to live ever after' that, had I constructed a score of traps for the Colonel's cattle I believe he would have a inked at them all. Poor fellow ! he got into difficulties a good many years after, and on the accession of the Whigs to power, mortgaged his pension and emigrated to Canada. Deeming the terms hard, however, as he well might, he first wrote a letter to his old com- mander the Duke of Wellington, (1 holding the pen for him,) in which, in the hope that their stringency might be relaxed in his behalf, he stated both his services and his case. And promptly did the Duke reply, in an essen- tially kind holograph epistle, in which, after stating that he had no influ- ence at the time with the Ministers of the Crown, and no means of getting a relaxation of their terms in behalf of any one, he 'earnestly recommended William Johnstone, first, not to seek a provision for himself in Canada, un- less he were ablebodied and fit to provide for himself in circumstances of extreme hardship • and, second, on no account to sell or mortgage his pen- sion.' But the advice was not taken : Johnstone did emigrate to Canada, and did mortgage his pension ; and I fear, though I failed to trace his after history, that he suffered in consequence."

There is observation and sound sense in these remarks.

"Burns tells that he • often courted the acquaintance of the part of man- kind commonly known by the ordinary phrase of blackguards'' and that, though disgraced by follies, nay, sometimes stained with guilt, he had yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the noblest virtues,— magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and even modesty.' I cannot say with the poet that lever courted the acquaintance of blackguards; but though the labouring man may select his friends he cannot choose his work-fellows ; and so I have not unfrequently come in contact with black- guards, and have had opportunities of pretty thoroughly knowing them. And my experience of the class has been very much the reverse of that of Burns. I have usually found their virtues of a merely theatric cast, and their vices real ; much assumed generosity in some instances, but a callous- ness of feeling and meanness of spirit lying concealed beneath."