MILLER 319 quent letters on the herring fishery extended his reputation. Good judges in Edinburgh detected in his work the mint- mark of genius, and Miller s first prose volume, Scenes and Legends of Cromarty, was published there in 1835. In the interval he had become the accepted lover of Miss Lydia Eraser, a young lady of great personal attractions, rare in tellectual gifts, and glowing sympathy with all that was good and brave and bright. Her affection naturally steadied him in his resolution to emerge from the hand- working class ; the mallet and chisel gradually dropped from his grasp ; and when his prose venture appeared he was being initiated, in Linlithgow, into the duties of a bank clerk. On his return to Cromarty he found employ ment in the local branch of the Commercial Bank. He was a married man, and his tent seemed stably fixed at Cromarty, when the agitation that preceded the Disrup tion of 1843 made the air of Scotland vibrate. Miller loved his church, and deliberately esteemed her the most valuable institution possessed by the Scottish people. Fervently as he had sympathized with those who procured political representation for Scotland by the Reform Bill, he .still more fervently took part with those who claimed that Scottish congregations should have no pastors thrust upon them. In the summer of 1839 he wrote his famous pamphlet-letter to Lord Brougham ; Dr Candlish read it with " nothing short of rapture " ; and the first days of 1840 saw Miller installed in the editorial chair of the Witness newspaper, published twice a week in Edinburgh to advo cate the cause of non-intrusion and spiritual independence. He continued to edit the Witness till his death, which took place in the night between the 23d and 24th of December 1856. Unremitting brain work had overtaxed a system permanently injured by the hardships of his early mason life; reason at length gave way, and Miller died by a pistol shot fired by his own hand. A post-mortem examination, attested by four medical men of the highest character, evinced the presence of "diseased appearances" in the brain; and he left a few words indicating the form taken by the insane delusion which had mastered him. During the three years preceding the Disruption, cham pionship of the church by Miller did more, probably, than any other single agency to win for it the suffrage of the Scottish people. Months before the day of separation, the name " Free Church " was prospectively assigned to the party proposing to sever connexion with the state ; and, whether Hugh Miller suggested the name or did not, he was one of the chief architects of the institution. Nor has the sequel shown that his labour was vain. But long ere now an enthusiasm parallel in intensity with that which he felt for his country and his church, and to which even his old literary enthusiasm had become subservient, had taken possession of him. From infancy he had been a keenly interested observer of all natural facts and objects, and during his career as apprentice and journeyman mason he had accumulated a vast store of the particular information belonging to the geologist. But it was not until later that he expressly undertook the study of geology. We still find him, when twenty-seven, laying down charts of study and production without a word about science. When, however, he had convinced himself that his road to the stars was not by poetry, and when the limited success of his prose tales and literary essays in the volume on Cromarty suggested a profound misgiving as to the adequacy of his purely literary materials to produce an important result, he bethought him of his hoard of scientific knowledge, and addressed himself with the con centrated energy of mature manhood to geological reading and geological researches. These, in fact, were not new to him, and he was much impressed by the interest excited among scientific readers by a geological chapter in the Scenes and Legends. His chief master was Lyell, whom he reverenced henceforward as one of the greatest of living men. The principal scene of his own investigations was the Cromarty district, where he ransacked every wrinkle of the hill-side, and traced every stratum sawn through by the watercourse, and where, on the beach at ebb, in indurated clay of bluish tint and great tenacity, belonging to the Old Red Sandstone formation, he discovered and dug out nodules which, when laid open by a skilful blow of the hammer, displayed certain organisms that had never been seen by a human eye. He had entered upon correspondence with Murchison and Agassiz ; and " fellows of the Geological Society and professors of colleges" had been brought by his descriptions " to explore the rocks of Cromarty." Along with the patriotic and religious enthusiasm, therefore, that burned within him when he went to champion his church in Edinburgh, there glowed, in the depths of his heart, not indeed a stronger but a more gentle and perhaps a dearer enthusiasm for that science in which, he felt per suaded, he had something of his own to say, something to which the world of culture would be glad to listen. So early as September 1840 there began to appear in the Witness a series of articles entitled " The Old Red Sand stone." They attracted immediate and eager attention ; and the month was not at an end when, at the meeting of the British Association, Murchison brought them under the notice of the geological section, presided over by Lyell. Agassiz, already familiar from Miller s correspondence with the organisms described, contributed information respecting them, and proposed that one of the most remarkable of the fossils should be called Pterichthys Milleri. Buckland joined warmly in the encomiums of Murchison and Agassiz, vowing that " he would give his left hand to possess such powers of description as this man." The articles which met with so enthusiastic a reception from the most eminent geologists in Europe formed the nucleus of a book soon after published, and entitled The Old Red Sandstone. It established Miller s, reputation not only as an original geologist but as a practical thinker of great sagacity, and as a lucid and fascinating writer. He had at last fairly found his hand ; it is impossible to turn from the Scenes and Legends to the new volume without feeling that the spirit of the author has become more exultant, his touch at once stronger and more free. During his seventeen years of residence in Edinburgh he published a variety of books, all of them more or less geological, but claiming attention not on account of their geology alone. His First Impres sions of England and its People, the fruit of eight weeks wandering arranged in the leisure hours of a hard-worked editor, will be best appreciated when we contrast its grace and gentleness, the classic moderation of its tone, the quiet vivacity and freshness of its observation, the sense and sentiment and justice of its criticism, with the smartness of the ordinary newspaper correspondent, or the vulgarity and the impudent omniscience of the conventional book of travels. Apart from its masterly descriptions, partly geological partly scenic, and that prose poem on the ubiquity of the ocean which, though brief, will compare not unfavourably with select pages from Wilson or from Ruskin, its two passages on Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon would alone suffice to prove that the Cromarty stone-mason was a man of extraordinary genius. Of his autobiographical volume, My Schools and Schoolmasters, no opinion but one has ever been expressed. It ranks among the finest masterpieces of its kind in the English language. As a geologist his reputation is securely based upon his actual discovery of important fossil organisms, one of which bears his name, and on his contributions, thoroughly serviceable at the time they were made, to our knowledge of the formation in which those organisms occur. His eye-to-eye acquaintance with nature is attested on every page ; and, if his enthusiasm does not often rise into spray and surge of rapture, it is a deep ground-swell per ceptible in all he wrote. His powers of observation were singularly strong and accurate, and were accompanied with the most careful reflexion and a fine rich glow of imaginative vision. His discern
ment of the true position of the ventral plate of Pterichthys, when