HUGH Mir.,LER,* Ma. BAYNE has written two bulky volumes to

tell the world what a man it lost in Hugh Miller, and he has done a difficult task we]. In his Schools and Schoolmasters, Miller himself has told the story of his early years with a minuteness of detail, a power of descrip- tion, and a glow of Scotch enthusiasm such as it would be un- reasonable to expect from any mere gleaner in the biographic field ; but the narrative ends with the day on which, as editor of the Witness, he began to do battle for the Non-Intrusion party of the Scotch Church. Hence it leaves out an important and interesting part of Miller's life. Although Mr. Bayne might profitably have given to that part three-fourths of his book, he has minutely traced the boyhood and manhood of the gifted stonemason, and has filled a big volume with facts which are known by everybody who has read My Schools and Schoolmasters. His excuse is that he reprints many of Miller's early letters. But, in truth, they do not merit the honour. They are the stilted, laboured compositions of a young man who, while aiming at a high ideal of style, was trying to master the difficult task of writing artistic prose by penning essays to his friends in the shape of epistles. Even his love-letters are like the philosophical reflections or the leading articles of a young scholar who, fired by the passion to become an Addison, feels that his hand is too stiff to rival the incomparable ease of the great .essayist, and who fancies, therefore, that he cannot afford to cast away, a chance of giving suppleness to his mental wrist. So ponderous are the love epistles, that they call to mind John Foster's Essavs, which were written as letters to the lady who after- wards became his wife. Had Miller equalled Foster in the power of reflection, literature might have been indebted to love for a new series of essays on "Decision of Char- aster" and "The Aversion of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion," written with such beauty and glow of style as were never approached in the powerful rhetoric of the great Baptist. Mr. Bayne's book, however, is marked by so much ability and, on the whole, by so much good taste, that the venial crime of dragging epistles out of congenial obscurity merits the hearty pardon of those divinities—whoever they may be—that preside over the Republic of letters, and visit with the chastisements of public neglect any defiance of its decrees.

Hugh Miller takes rank with the most notable men of this generation, and among the self-taught men of Scotland he holds the highest place after Burns. His career, indeed, reads a rebuke to those pampered darlings of scholasticism who are born to feed on the dainties of culture, and who, although begirt from boyhood with all the appliances of scholarship, extract from a life of lettered ease only a few trifles of criticism or verse. Born in poverty, he received no direct instruction save that which could be dispensed by the overworked parish schoolmaster of Cromarty. He was one of the millions who have owed the rudiments of their culture to John Knox and the other wise ecclesiastical statesmen who, when rearing the Protestantism of Scotland, acted on the principle that, to make the edifice stand for ages, they must plant it on no quicksand of tradition or of sentimental faith, but on the rock of educated reason. Miller might, it is true, have pro- fited by one or other of those Scottish Universities which owe much of their lusty life to the foresight of the same men ; but he was at first so wild, idle, and reckless, that he cast away the boon of academic culture. Although fond of reading and quick of mind, he hated the dry routine of school tasks, detested the teacher, and coveted distinction merely as the leader of his playmates in the forays which they made upon orchards, the expeditions in which they played truant, and the long rambles in which they ex- changed the dullness and monotony of the class-room for the wild freedom of the rocks that hem in the sea at Cromarty, or

* The Life and Letters of Hugh Miller. By Peter Bayne, ht.A. 2 vols. London : Straban and Co. 1871. the shell-covered beach that afterwards pictured to Miller himself the peopled expanse of geological time. Miller chose to be not a scholar, but a stonemason ; and he became one of the best in the north of Scotland. The man did well whatever he did at all. While living in highland bothies, amid circum- stances of savage wildness, and with companions who cared as little for books as if they had been so many Hottentots, Miller dreamt of a time when he should win fame as a man of letters.

Despite the smoke, the darkness, the thousand discomforts of a wind-swept hut, despite the rain that trickled through the roof, despite the laughter and the idiotic oaths that closed up the crev- ices in the talk of his fellow-workmen, the young student read Milton and Bacon, filled long epistles with rounded sentences, penned stiffly classic verses, studied mathematics, and imprinted the features of nature on a memory which could retain its hue and form as firmly as a red-sandstone slab keeps the impress of old- world leaf or fish. By the time that he had graduated as a stone- mason, and could assume the MA. of a journeyman, he had read so much of real literature, thought so vigorously, enriched his

mind with so fine a culture, and acquired such a mastery over the English language that he might have been saluted as an equal by men of regular scholastic training. He did not, indeed, know Greek or Latin, and he was ignorant of many things that form the mere common-places of the academic schools ; but much of the cul- ture that is communicated by the literature of Greece and Rome had come to him from contact with the classics of England; and for what knowledge he lacked in certain domains of book-learning he made up by the thoroughness with which he had surveyed less beaten tracts, and by the strength of' mental fibre which he had drawn from the athletics of lonely thought. Of him, as surely as of "the good Lord Clifford," might the poet have said :—

0 Love had he found in huts where poor men lie, His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

On reaching manhood Miller settled down as a stonemason in his native town of Cromarty, won local distinction by the neatness with which he cut inscriptions on gravestones, and more than local fame by the verses, the letters, the tales, and the pamphlets which he penned in his evening leisure. Gradually the townsfolk saw that he was a man of extraordinary ability. Gradually the

metropolitan critics discovered that a remote Scottish town con- tained a working stonemason who wrote English of striking purity and beauty. Gradually, as he strayed from literature to science, his name became known to savans like Murchison and Agassiz ; and afterwards, so struck was Buckland by the vividness, the accuracy, the sharpness with which the self-taught geologist pictured the fossil remains of the Cromarty coast-line, that, in a burst of a generous enthusiasm he declared that he would give his right band for such powers of description. In time Miller ceased to be a stonemason, and became a bank accountant. Then came the greatest ecclesiastical storm through which Scotland has passed since the Reformation. The patron of the parish church

of Auchterader gave the living to a minister who was unwelcome to the congregation; the worshippers resisted and appealed to the General Assembly; bat, disdaining to recognize the authority of the clergy, the patron appealed to the Civil Courts, and made good his right to do what he liked with his own church. The act was deemed an invasion of the spiritual rights of the people, and the result was a tempest which shook and shattered the Scottish Establishment. Englishmen have never passed through such an ecclesiastical tem- pest since the day when they laid Popery in the dust. Miller came to the front of the fray with a pamphlet in which, addressing Lord Brougham, he contended with great force and eloquence that the right to resist the appointment of unworthy ministers had been won by the Scotch people in their battles against prelacy, and was the inalienable privilege of the Christian Church. That appeal gave Miller a foremost place among the leaders of the Non-Intrasionists, and won for him the editorship of the news- paper which they founded to advocate their demands. For eighteen years he did the work with sturdy independence and brilliant ability. Meanwhile, he wrote volume after volume on subjects more or less connected with geology. Scotland grew justly proud of the self-taught man of letters. His name became a household word throughout his native land. It took an acknowledged place in the hierarchy of science and letters. And then, one morning fourteen years ago, the country learned that Hugh Miller was dead.

Over-work had ruined his fine brain, and he had shot himself in a

fit of insanity.

Such was the life of the great stonemason. But what has he done for his age? On what achievement of thought or writing

at all, only as a wonderful curiosity. tionalism, and stated anew the doctrine of Utilitarianism, do not Miller's fondest wish was that he should take his place among seem to have come within his ken. He knew nothing of Comte. the hierarchy of scientific investigators. And if from his youth He had read little, we suspect, of his fellow-countryman Carlyle. he had been able to apply himself steadily to the study of rock He does not seem to have studied a single chapter of John Stuart and plant, we believe that he might have taken a place by the Mill. The biblical criticism of Germany he knew only at second side of the very foremost savans. His geological works display hand, and what he did know of its results he treated as mere spurts that rare sagacity, that mysterious power of guessing rightly of exegetical impiety. Thus he lay outside the circle of all the revolu- even when the facts do not warrant a rigorous inference, and that tionary thought which did not touch the sphere of science; and,since capacity for keeping on the right scent, which are the endowments the reflections of the chief thinkers did not always harmonizewith the of the scientific " hunter of truth." The amount of sterling work philosophy of the Free Church, he dismissed them with a grandly which he did for science is seen to be wonderful when we remember peremptory vigour. When he wanted to cite a philosophical that he did not begin to study geology until the age of thirty, and authority of his own time, he quoted, not Mill or Comte, but that most of his subsequent investigation was carried on in hours Dr. Cunningham, a Free-Church theologian of whom no English and weeks snatched from the toil of editing a hi-weekly journal, student has ever heard, but who was, nevertheless, a controversialist which was the organ of a great ecclesiastical party, and in which, it of great logical power, and an ecclesiastical debater of first-rate is computed, Miller himself wrote more than a thousand elaborate vigour. Hugh Miller, in fact, lived among a set of provincial essays. But no strength of scientific genius could have so nullified thinkers, whose philosophy had been forgotten at the chief centres. those conditions as to place him in the same rank with the chief of European thought, and who spoke an obsolete dialect. Hence professional students of science ; and, in comparison with Darwin the curiously antiquated air of his writing when it becomes or Huxley, he was only an amateur. The scientific value of his speculative. It is like the utterances of a philosophical Rip Van works was lessened, moreover, by the theological atmosphere in Winkle who has been asleep for half a century.

which he lived. Orthodox Scotland had been cast into a fever of Miller has a much better title to remembrance as a writer. He alarm by the teaching of geology that the world had existed, not toiled hard for year after year to master the art that, in common merely for six thousand years, but for millenniums of millenniums ; with Rousseau, he thought the most difficult to which a man could and Hugh Miller rushed to the front of the fight to show that address himself,—the art of writing artistically. Addison, Gold- Moses had been misread, that the writings of the Hebrew legislator smith, and the other quiet classics of England he studied with such did not fix the antiquity of the globe, and that, although geology reverential care as an Oxford double-first must have lavished did cast back the age of the earth to a period beyond the flight of upon Thucydides and Cicero. He never wrote a letter that he did the imagination itself, it did not impeach the historical truth of not try to make an exercise in composition. He never wrote a the first chapter of Genesis. It is melancholy to see the tokens of paragraph for the Inverness Courier, in the days when he discharged the intellectual power which Miller wasted in the effort to sustain the humble work of local correspondent for a local newspaper, with- that untenable hypothesis. In his last work, the Testinwny out striving to give some touch of classic grace to the record of a of the Pocks, he exhausted all his ingenuity to bridge over the wreck or a great catch of herrings. And after years of such toil as. chasm between the records, Mosaic and geological. And, of other men devote to the study of the law or to the accumulation course, he exhausted that ingenuity in vain. The march of of a vast fortune, Hugh Miller won a place among the best of science has left his theories of reconciliation so far behind, that living writers. Perhaps, indeed, he merits a position among the they can now be descried only as a speck in the diatance,—a mark dozen men who, in this generation, have been able to write Bug-. to denote the point at which a few scientific men halted for a lish. But his admirers commit a signal mistake when they push moment to exchange greetings with the theologians, and beyond him into the foremost place among that band. He seldom wrote which the camp of theology itself is now pitched. The same with perfect ease and grace, and, indeed, his writing never theological atmosphere unfitted Miller for weighing calmly the lost a certain stiffness ; the easiness of its flow did not hide claims of that theory of development which has led to the the effort of the toiling hand. A glance at his Schools and Darwinian doctrines of natural and sexual selection. Had he been Schoolmasters, and then at the kindred work of a really unfettered by the Calvinism of his creed, his natural sagacity, we great writer, the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, will cannot doubt, would have enabled him at least to suspect that the show Miller to have been not less inferior to De Quincey in

theories of Lamarck,—in spite of their grotesque crudeness, and of mastery over the resources of English prose, than superior to that the distance at which they planted the foot of hypothesis beyond asthetic sensualist in manliness and vigour of aoul. Miller's full the basis of fact,—contained the germ of a principle which would powers as a prose writer were put forth only in his descriptions of ultimately bring the whole organic world within the compass of a nature, or in those of his reflections which were touched with the not less true or majestic than that by which Newton revealed glow of a poetic imagination. In vividness of tint his pictures of the ordered sequence of the planetary revolutions. Mr. Bayne sea, and rock, and forest excel those of any contemporary writer, seems to believe that Miller might have been converted to the with the exception of Ruskin ; and if they lack the brilliancy which creed of evolution, if he had lived to study the researches of lights up The Modern Painters, they also lack that extravagance Darwin. It is possible, but it is not probable ; for he allowed the which excites a feeling of repugnance to Mr. llaskin's rhetoric in threads of his theological creed to shoot through the web of his men of severity of taste. Some of the writing in which Miller is, reason, so that the shock of a conversion to Darwinism would have half meditative, half reflective, and in which he gives the rein to rent the fabric of both. Meanwhile, his career proclaims trumpet- his fancy, merits a respectable place among the best specimens of tongued to men of science the message, "Be not theological ; leave modern rhetoric. If his scientific works should continue to be read, theology alone, and truth, whether it be natural or revealed, will it will be, not for the facts which they marshal, or the inferences.

take care of itself." which they record, but for their general, and sometimes for their- As a speculative thinker, Hugh Miller has still more fragile special, excellence as pieces of English prose.

claims to remembrance. Being a Scotchman, he had, of course, a The editor of the Witness will be long remembered, however, for turn for metaphysics, and he seems to have studied Hume, Reid, a reason very different from any of those set forth by Mr. Bayne. and Brown with some attention. How acute was his general re- He was the last great literary representative of Scottish Puritanism, must his fame be based, and what is that fame worth? The reply ilective faculty we may see from his First Impressions of England, must be less flattering than that which we find in the amiable —a book which is filled with speculations that lie far beyond estimate of Mr. Bayne. Miller must, it is true, be accounted a the range of the mere man of letters, and which gives the wonderful writer, if we call to mind how hard it was for a stone- best idea of his capacity both for thought and for expression.

mason to write at all, and how depraving a school of rhetoric was But his thinking faculty was capable only of short ffights. a Highland bothy, full of smoke and ringing with oaths, or a It was like the power of wing possessed by those birds which. Highland graveyard, with its monotonous occupation of cutting dart up with great swiftness, and then fall to earth again. He tombstones. None but a man of genius could have snatched from had been denied, or at least had never developed, the faculty such toil such fruits of literature and thought. Tried by a pro- of knitting inference to inference in a long chain of logical vincial standard, therefore, Miller takes his place among the fore- sequence. And, what was still more fatal, he lay outside the circle most writers of his time. Criticism, however, can use no such test ; of the thoughts that were shaping the world. His masters had and when he is measured as a man of science, a thinker, or a man been Pope and Addison, Hume and Reid. Hence the counters of of letters by the standard which we apply to students whose names reflection with which he worked were either the trifles or the will occur to everybody, but whom it would be unfair to Miller common-places of the study. He never read a word of Kant, nor- even to name in conjunction with him, he is adjudged to be knew how vast had been the influence of that great thinker on the only a great provincial, who toiled outside the circle of the thought reflection of educated Europe. Bentham, James Mill, and the which is moving the world, and who will live, therefore, if he live other leaders of the band who revived the philosophy of Sensa- at all, only as a wonderful curiosity. tionalism, and stated anew the doctrine of Utilitarianism, do not Miller's fondest wish was that he should take his place among seem to have come within his ken. He knew nothing of Comte. the hierarchy of scientific investigators. And if from his youth He had read little, we suspect, of his fellow-countryman Carlyle. he had been able to apply himself steadily to the study of rock He does not seem to have studied a single chapter of John Stuart and plant, we believe that he might have taken a place by the Mill. The biblical criticism of Germany he knew only at second side of the very foremost savans. His geological works display hand, and what he did know of its results he treated as mere spurts that rare sagacity, that mysterious power of guessing rightly of exegetical impiety. Thus he lay outside the circle of all the revolu- even when the facts do not warrant a rigorous inference, and that tionary thought which did not touch the sphere of science; and,since capacity for keeping on the right scent, which are the endowments the reflections of the chief thinkers did not always harmonizewith the of the scientific " hunter of truth." The amount of sterling work philosophy of the Free Church, he dismissed them with a grandly which he did for science is seen to be wonderful when we remember peremptory vigour. When he wanted to cite a philosophical that he did not begin to study geology until the age of thirty, and authority of his own time, he quoted, not Mill or Comte, but that most of his subsequent investigation was carried on in hours Dr. Cunningham, a Free-Church theologian of whom no English and weeks snatched from the toil of editing a hi-weekly journal, student has ever heard, but who was, nevertheless, a controversialist which was the organ of a great ecclesiastical party, and in which, it of great logical power, and an ecclesiastical debater of first-rate is computed, Miller himself wrote more than a thousand elaborate vigour. Hugh Miller, in fact, lived among a set of provincial essays. But no strength of scientific genius could have so nullified thinkers, whose philosophy had been forgotten at the chief centres. those conditions as to place him in the same rank with the chief of European thought, and who spoke an obsolete dialect. Hence professional students of science ; and, in comparison with Darwin the curiously antiquated air of his writing when it becomes or Huxley, he was only an amateur. The scientific value of his speculative. It is like the utterances of a philosophical Rip Van works was lessened, moreover, by the theological atmosphere in Winkle who has been asleep for half a century.

which he lived. Orthodox Scotland had been cast into a fever of Miller has a much better title to remembrance as a writer. He alarm by the teaching of geology that the world had existed, not toiled hard for year after year to master the art that, in common merely for six thousand years, but for millenniums of millenniums ; with Rousseau, he thought the most difficult to which a man could and Hugh Miller rushed to the front of the fight to show that address himself,—the art of writing artistically. Addison, Gold- Moses had been misread, that the writings of the Hebrew legislator smith, and the other quiet classics of England he studied with such did not fix the antiquity of the globe, and that, although geology reverential care as an Oxford double-first must have lavished did cast back the age of the earth to a period beyond the flight of upon Thucydides and Cicero. He never wrote a letter that he did the imagination itself, it did not impeach the historical truth of not try to make an exercise in composition. He never wrote a the first chapter of Genesis. It is melancholy to see the tokens of paragraph for the Inverness Courier, in the days when he discharged the intellectual power which Miller wasted in the effort to sustain the humble work of local correspondent for a local newspaper, with- that untenable hypothesis. In his last work, the Testinwny out striving to give some touch of classic grace to the record of a of the Pocks, he exhausted all his ingenuity to bridge over the wreck or a great catch of herrings. And after years of such toil as. chasm between the records, Mosaic and geological. And, of other men devote to the study of the law or to the accumulation course, he exhausted that ingenuity in vain. The march of of a vast fortune, Hugh Miller won a place among the best of science has left his theories of reconciliation so far behind, that living writers. Perhaps, indeed, he merits a position among the they can now be descried only as a speck in the diatance,—a mark dozen men who, in this generation, have been able to write Bug-. to denote the point at which a few scientific men halted for a lish. But his admirers commit a signal mistake when they push moment to exchange greetings with the theologians, and beyond him into the foremost place among that band. He seldom wrote which the camp of theology itself is now pitched. The same with perfect ease and grace, and, indeed, his writing never theological atmosphere unfitted Miller for weighing calmly the lost a certain stiffness ; the easiness of its flow did not hide claims of that theory of development which has led to the the effort of the toiling hand. A glance at his Schools and Darwinian doctrines of natural and sexual selection. Had he been Schoolmasters, and then at the kindred work of a really unfettered by the Calvinism of his creed, his natural sagacity, we great writer, the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, will cannot doubt, would have enabled him at least to suspect that the show Miller to have been not less inferior to De Quincey in

the basis of fact,—contained the germ of a principle which would powers as a prose writer were put forth only in his descriptions of

take care of itself." which they record, but for their general, and sometimes for their- As a speculative thinker, Hugh Miller has still more fragile special, excellence as pieces of English prose.

---;the Puritanism of Knox and Melville, Rutherford and Erskine ; the Puritanism, in spirit, if not in specific creed, of the Covenanters who conquered for Scotland her ecclesiastical freedom. Scotland has produced far greater men of letters than Miller, but none of them have belonged to the ranks of her Puritanism. Hume, Adam Smith, Burns, Scott, Wilson, and Carlyle represent either the liberalism of philosophy or the chivalry of song. Far greater Puritans than Miller also stand among the worthies of Scotland, but none could write with such artistic power. He is the greatest literary Puritan ever produced by the most Puritan of peoples. All the conceptions of the sanctity which belongs to "the Sabbath," all the superstitious worship of the text of Holy Writ, all the Covenanting contempt for the institution of episcopacy, all the hatred and fear of Popery, all the old Cameroniau zeal for Presbyterianism, all the prejudices that give bone and sinew to the Puritanism of Scotland, are expressed by Miller with a classic propriety and beauty of style that recall the writing of Addison and Steele. His incarnation of those prejudices in rhetoric of academic propriety and poetic felicity of phrase will keep them alive in memory long after they shall have vanished from among inert. That is Miller's chief title to remembrance.