Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected
without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have
been retained as printed. Words printed in italics are noted with
underscores: _italics_.
HUGH MILLER
BY
W. KEITH LEASK
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
PUBLISHED BY
OLIPHANT ANDERSON & FERRIER
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and
the printing from the press of Messrs. T. and A. Constable, Edinburgh.
PREFACE
In the absence of material dealing especially with his last years in
Edinburgh a complete _Life_ of Hugh Miller will probably never be
attempted. I am informed by his daughter, Mrs. Miller Mackay, F. C.
Manse, Lochinver, that the letters and materials sent out to Australia
to form the basis of a projected biography by his son-in-law and
daughter disappeared, and have never been recovered. The recent deaths
of his son and of others who knew Hugh Miller in Cromarty and in
Edinburgh still more preclude the appearance of a full and authentic
presentation. To the scientist the works of Miller will ever form the
best biography; to the general reader and to those who, from various
causes, regard biography as made for man and not man for biography some
such sketch as the following may, it is believed, not be unacceptable.
To treat Hugh Miller apart from his surroundings of Church and State
would be as impossible as it would be unjust. Accordingly the
presentation deliberately adopted has been from his own standpoint--the
unhesitating and undeviating traditions of Scotland.
Geology has moved since his day. In the last chapter I have accordingly
followed largely in the steps of Agassiz in the selection of material
for a succinct account of Miller's main scientific and theological
standpoints or contributions. My best thanks are due to Principal
Donaldson of the University of St. Andrews for looking over the
proof-sheets; to Sir Archibald Geikie, Director-General of the
Geological Survey, London, for his admirable reminiscence of his early
friend contained in the last pages of this work; and to my friend J. D.
Symon, M.A., for the bibliography of Miller in the closing appendix.
W. K. L.
ABERDEEN, _April_ 1896.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
EARLY DAYS--IN CROMARTY 9
CHAPTER II
IN EDINBURGH--THE CROMARTY BANK 37
CHAPTER III
THE SCOTTISH CHURCH, 1560-1843--'THE WITNESS' 68
CHAPTER IV
IN EDINBURGH--LAST YEARS 96
CHAPTER V
IN SCIENCE 119
APPENDIX: BIBLIOGRAPHY 154
HUGH MILLER
CHAPTER I
EARLY DAYS--IN CROMARTY
'A wet sheet and a flowing sea,
A wind that follows fast.'
ALLAN CUNNINGHAM
The little town of Cromarty lies perched on the southern shore of the
entrance to the Firth of that name, and derives its name from the
Cromachty, the crook or winding of the magnificent stretch of water
known to Buchanan and the ancient geographers as the _Ecclesiastical
History_, 'in which the very greatest navies may rest secure from
storms.' In the history of Scotland the place is scarcely mentioned;
and, indeed, in literary matters is known only from its association
with the names of Hugh Miller and the rare figure of Sir Thomas
Urquhart of Cromarty, who had followed Charles II. to the 'crowning
mercy' of Worcester fight, to land at last in the Tower. But for the
silence of history the imagination or the credulity of the knight has
atoned, by the production of a chronicle which rivals fairly the
_Ecclesiastical History_ of the old wandering Scottish scholar
Dempster, who had in Italy patriotically found the Maccabees to be but
an ancient Highland family. According to Urquhart, whose translation of
Rabelais has survived his eccentric disquisitions in genealogy and
history, Alypos, the forty-third lineal descendant of Japhet, was the
first to discover Cromarty, and, when the Scythians under Ethus pitched
on the moor bounding the parish on the north, they had been opposed by
the grandson of Alcibiades; in proof of which Sir Thomas could
triumphantly point to remaining signs of 'trenches and castrametation'
with a confidence which would have won the heart of Jonathan Monkbarns
in _The Antiquary_.
The population of the district is essentially a mixed one, and strongly
retains the distinctive features of the Scandinavian and the Gael. From
Shetland to the Ord of Caithness, the population of the coast is
generally, if not wholly, of the former type. Beyond the Ord to the
north of the Firth of Cromarty, we find a wedge of Celtic origin, while
from the southern shore to the Bay of Munlochy the Scandinavian element
again asserts itself. Thus, as Carlyle escaped being born an Englishman
by but a few miles, the separation from the Celtic stratum was, in
Miller's case, effected by the narrow single line of the one-mile
ferry. In later years, at all events, he would refer with evident
satisfaction to his Teutonic origin. There was, as we shall have
occasion to notice, a certain Celtic lobe of imagination on the
mother's side, but in his mental and political character the great
leading features of the other race were undoubtedly predominant.
Whence Buchanan drew the possibilities of great fleets in the Firth of
Cromarty is unknown unless he had in his memory some of the vessels of
the old mariners, such as Sir Andrew Wood and the bold Bartons, or even
the 'verrie monstrous schippe the Great Michael' that 'cumbered all
Scotland to get her to sea.' Certain it is that for many a day its
position had marked out the town as the natural centre of a coasting
trade, though shortly after the Union the commerce of the place which
had been considerable had declined. The real commencement of the
prosperity of the place was due to the energy of a native, William
Forsyth, whose life Miller has sketched in a little memoir originally
drawn up for the family, and subsequently republished in his _Tales and
Sketches_ under the title of 'A Scottish Merchant of the Eighteenth
century.' Forsyth had been appointed by the British Linen Company,
established about 1746 in Edinburgh to promote the linen trade, its
agent in the North throughout the whole district extending from Beauly
to the Pentland Firth. The flax which was brought in vessels from
Holland was prepared for use in Cromarty, and distributed by boats
along the coast to Wick and Thurso. In the early days of the trade the
distaff and the spindle were in general use; but Forsyth's efforts were
successful in the introduction of the spinning-wheel, though the older
means of production lasted far into this century in the west of Ross
and in the Hebrides. The coasting schooners of the agent were the means
of introducing into the town teas and wines, cloth, glass, Flemish
tiles, Swedish iron, and Norwegian tar and spars. The rents of the
landed proprietors were still largely paid in kind, or in the feudal
labour by which the Baron of Bradwardine managed to eke out a rather
scanty rent roll. In this way the _mains_ or the demesnes of the laird
were tilled and worked, and the Martinmas corn rents were stocked in a
barn or 'girnal,' like that of the Antiquary's famous John of legend,
often to cause a surplus to hang on the hands of the proprietor, until
the idea was fortunately devised of exporting it to England or to
Flanders for conversion into malt.
Ship-carpentry or boat-building upon a humble scale had been long
established, and the coasting trade lay between the North, Leith,
Newcastle, and London. The Scottish sailors then on the eastern coast
enjoyed a strong reputation for piety, such as, we fear, their
descendants have not maintained. John Gibb of Borrowstouness, the
antiquary may remember as the founder of the now forgotten sect of
Gibbites or 'sweet singers,' who denounced all tolls and statutory
impositions, abolished the use of tobacco and all excisable articles,
and finally made a pilgrimage to the Pentland Hills to see the smoke
and the desolation of Edinburgh as foretold by their founder. The
wardrobes and scrutoires of the local cabinet-maker, Donald Sandison,
enjoyed a reputation through the North, and were, far into this
century, found in the houses of Ross, together with the old eight-day
clocks made in Kilwinning. But the great founder of its modern
prosperity was George Ross, the son of a small proprietor in Easter
Ross, who, after amassing a fortune as an army-agent as the friend of
Lord Mansfield and the Duke of Grafton, had in 1772 purchased the
estate of Cromarty. When he started his improvements in his native
district, there was not a wheeled-cart in all the parish, and the
knowledge of agriculture was rude. Green cropping and the rotation of
crops were unknown, and in autumn the long irregular patches of arable
land were intersected by stretches of moorland that wound deviously
into the land, like the reaches of the Cromarty and the Beauly Firths.
Though long opposed by tenacious local prejudices, he at length
triumphed over the backward habits of the people, who yoked their oxen
and their horses by the tail, and who justified their action by an
appeal to the argument from design, and by a query as to what other end
in creation such tails had been provided? Ross also established in the
town a manufactory for hempen cloth, and erected what at the time was
the largest ale-brewery in the North. A harbour was built at his own
expense, and a pork trade of a thriving nature set on foot, wheat
reared, the rotation of crops introduced, a nail and spade manufactory
set up, and lace manufactures brought from England. Such, then, was the
condition of Cromarty at the beginning of the present century.
Far different was that of the surrounding Highlands. Protestantism had
been at an early period introduced into Ross and Sutherland by its
Earls and by Lord Reay. The Earl of Sutherland had been the first to
subscribe the National Covenant in Greyfriars; and, after the
suppression of the first Jacobite rising, Sir Robert Munro of Fowlis,
as commissioner of the confiscated estates, had set himself to the
creation of parishes and presbyteries in remote districts, where the
Church of Scotland before had been unknown. In the better class of
houses the old Highland fireplace, like a millstone, still occupied its
place in the centre, with no corresponding aperture in the roof for the
smoke. In the Western districts the greatest distress prevailed, for
the country was at the parting of the ways in a time of transition.
About the beginning of the present century the results of the French
Revolution began to make themselves felt. Through the long war the
price of provisions rose to famine price, and the impecunious Highland
laird, like his more degenerate successor that battens on the sporting
proclivities of the Cockney or American millionaire, set himself to the
problem of increasing his rent-roll, and the system of evictions and
sheep-farming on a large scale commenced. The Sutherland clearances
forced the ejected Highlanders to Canada and the United States, while
the poorer classes drifted down from the interior to the already
overpopulated shore-line, where they eked out, as crofters or as
fishermen, a precarious existence without capital or the acquired
experience of either occupation, and laid the seeds of the future
crofter question. The manufacture of kelp, which for a time rendered
profitable to many a Highland proprietor his barren acres on a rocky
shore, was not destined to long survive the introduction of the
principles of Free Trade. The potato blight succeeded finally in
reducing the once fairly prosperous native of the interior to chronic
poverty and distress.
On the West Coast, the heavy rainfall is unfavourable to agriculture on
any extended scale. From Assynt to Mull the average rain-gauge is
thirty-five inches, and the cottars of Ross were threatened with the
fate of the Irish in Connemara, through periodic failures in the
herring fishery and liabilities for their scanty holdings to their
landlords. Miller found the men of Gairloch, in 1823, where the public
road was a good day's journey from the place, still turning up or
scratching the soil with the old Highland _cass-chron_, and the women
carrying the manure on their backs to the fields in spring, while all
the time they kept twirling the distaff--old and faded before their
time, like the women in some of the poorer cantons the traveller meets
with in Switzerland. Their constant employment was the making of yarn;
and, as we have seen, the spinning-wheel was for long as rare as the
possession of a plough or horse. The boats built for the fishing were
still caulked with moss dipped in tar and laid along the seams, the
ropes being made of filaments of moss-fir stripped with the knife,
while the sails were composed of a woollen stuff whose hard thread had
been spun on the distaff, for hemp and flax were practically unknown.
Such, in 1263, had at Largs been the equipment of the galleys of Haco,
'When Norse and Danish galleys plied
Their oars within the Firth of Clyde,
And floated Haco's banner trim
Above Norweyan warriors grim.'
_Marmion_, iii. xx.
Such, too, had been the traditional custom for centuries after of the
boatbuilders in the Western Highlands.
In Cromarty, then, on the 10th of October 1802, Hugh Miller was
born--in a long, low-built six-roomed house of his great-grandfather,
one of the last of the old buccaneers of the Spanish Main, who had
thriftily invested his pieces of eight in house-property in his native
place. His mother was the great-granddaughter of Donald Roy of Nigg, of
whom, as a kind of Northern Peden or Cargill, traditions long lingered.
In his early days, Donald had been a great club and football player in
the Sunday games that had been fostered in the semi-Celtic parish by
King James's _Book of Sports_, and which, it may be remembered, had
been popular in the days of Dugald Buchanan of Rannoch at a time when
the observance of the seventh day and of the King's writ never ran
beyond the Pass of Killiecrankie. At the Revolution, however, Donald
had become the subject of religious convictions; and when, on the death
of Balfour of Nigg in 1756, an unpopular presentee, Mr. Patrick Grant,
was forced upon the parish, resistance was offered. Four years before
this, Gillespie of Carnock had been deposed on the motion of John
Home, author of _Douglas_, seconded by Robertson of Gladsmuir, the
subsequent historian of _Charles V._, for his refusal to participate in
the settlement of Richardson to Inverkeithing; and when some of the
presbytery, in fear of similar proceedings, had met for the induction,
they found an empty church and an old man protesting that 'if they
settled a man to the walls of that kirk, the blood of the parish of
Nigg would be required at their hands.' For long the entire parish
clung to the Church of Scotland, but never could they be induced to
enter the building again, and so they perforce allied themselves to the
Burgher Secession. Thus early was the non-intrusion principle made
familiar to Miller, and thus early were made manifest the miserable
effects of the high-handed policy which, begun in the long reign of
Robertson, was destined a century later to have such disastrous
results.
In early youth his father had sailed in an East Indiaman, and during
the intervals of his Indian and Chinese voyages had learned to write
and add to his nautical knowledge stores of general reading and
information not then common among sailors. Storing up, instead of
drinking, his grog-money, he drove a small trade with the natives of
these countries in little articles that had excited their curiosity,
and for which, hints his distinguished son, the Custom-house dues were
never very punctually or rigorously paid. Pressed, however, by a
man-of-war that had borne down upon the Indiaman when in a state of
mutiny, after a brief experience of the stern discipline of the navy
not yet tempered by the measures of reform introduced after the mutiny
of the Nore, he returned when not much turned thirty to Cromarty, where
his savings enabled him to buy a coasting sloop and set up house. For
this the site was purchased at £400, a very considerable sum in those
days, and thus his son could, even in the high franchise qualifications
after the Reform Bill, exercise the right of voting for the Whig party.
The kelp trade, of which we have spoken, among other things engaged the
efforts of his father, who had been appointed agent in the North and
Hebrides for the Leith Glass-works. Driven by a storm round Cape Wrath
and through the Pentland Firth, the vessel, after striving to reach the
sheltered roadstead of the Moray Firth, was forced to put in at
Peterhead. On the 9th of November 1807 he set sail, but foundered with
all hands, by the starting, as was believed, of a plank. During more
than one hundred years the sea had been the graveyard of the family:
Miller's father, grandfather, and two grand-uncles had been all drowned
at sea.
At the time of his father's death the son had just by one month
completed his fifth year. At that time happened the circumstance which
he himself relates, and which we mention here in this place both for
the interest attaching to it in the history of his own mental
development, and for various subtle psychological reasons to which we
shall advert later, and which cannot fail to be observed by the careful
student of his works. The last letter to his wife had been written by
his father from Peterhead, and on its receipt, 'the house-door, which
had been left unfastened, fell open, and I was despatched from her side
to shut it. I saw at the open door, within less than a yard of my
breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm
stretched towards me. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female:
they bore a livid and sodden appearance; and, directly fronting me,
where the body ought to have been, there was only blank transparent
space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond. I
commemorate the story as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting
to explain it.' In after years he would say of such mental or visual
hallucinations that they were such as 'would render me a firm believer
in apparitions, could I not account for them in this way, as the
creatures of an imagination which had attained an unusual and even
morbid strength at a time when the other mental faculties were scarcely
at all unfolded.' In this connection the similar case of Chatterton
need only be alluded to, but the question will be treated again in
describing his later years.
Like Burns, Carlyle, and Scott, Miller seems to have borne the powerful
impress, mentally and physically, of his father. Yet, like the mothers
of the first two, Mrs. Miller bequeathed to her son his store of legend
and story and the imagination that was thus so early awakened. The new
house which his father had built remained for some little time after
his death untenanted; and, as the insurance of the sloop was deferred
or disputed by an insolvent broker, his mother had recourse to her
needle as the means by which she could best support her family. Three
children had been born, and her brothers came to her assistance and
lightened her task by taking her second daughter, a child of three, to
live with them. Both of the girls died of a fever within a few days of
each other, the one in her twelfth, and the other in her tenth year.
Of these two uncles, the James and Sandy of his _Schools and
Schoolmasters_, Miller has spoken with deserved affection and loyalty.
To them he confesses he owed more real education than ever he acquired
from all other sources; and, belonging as they do to the class of
humble and worthy men that seems pre-eminently the boast and pride of
Scottish life, they will merit a detailed account. Of this type some
little knowledge had been made known by Lord Jeffrey in his review of
Cromek's _Reliques_, where such men as the father of Burns and those of
his immediate circle were first introduced to their proper place as
those 'from whom old Scotia's grandeur springs.' In his own
_Reminiscences_, Carlyle has added to our acquaintance with these men
through his sketch of his own father and others, who are, says
Professor Blackie, the natural outcome of the republican form of our
Scottish Church government, and of the national system of education so
early developed by Knox and the first Reformers.
The elder of the two brothers, James, was a harness-maker in steady
employment in the surrounding agricultural district, so that from six
in the morning till ten at night his time would be fully occupied, thus
leaving him but scanty leisure. But, in the long evenings, he would fix
his bench by the hearth, and listen while his nephew or his own younger
brother or some neighbour would read. In the summer, he would occupy
his spare hours upon his journeys to and from his rural rounds of
labour in visiting every scene of legend and story far and near, and so
keen were his powers of perception and ready expression in matters of a
historical and antiquarian nature, that his nephew regrets he had not
become a writer of books. Some part of this information, however, he
has attempted to preserve in his _Scenes and Legends_.
To the younger brother, Alexander, he seems to have been even more
indebted. If to the one he owed his gift of ready and natural
expression, it was to the other that he was indebted for his powers of
observation. Originally educated as a cart-wright, he had served for
seven years in the navy, sailing with Nelson, witnessing the mutiny at
the Nore, the battle of Camperdown under Duncan, and sharing the
Egyptian campaign of Abercromby. Even on his discharge, he was still
ready in 1803 to shoulder a musket as a volunteer, when Napoleon at
Boulogne 'armed in our island every freeman.' The scientific interest,
too, of the man may be judged from the fact that in the Egyptian
expedition, during the landing, he managed to transfer a murex to his
pocket from the beach, and the first ammonite which formed the nucleus
of his nephew's geological collection was also brought home from an
English Liassic deposit. Facts like these and the presence of such men
should go far to dispel much of the cheap sentiment introduced into the
current of Scottish life by writers such as Smiles and others, who
profess to be ever finding some 'peasant' or 'uneducated genius' in the
subjects of their all too unctuous biographies. Such a class has really
no existence in Scotland, and between such men as Miller, Burns, or
even the unfortunate and sorely buffeted Bethunes, there is a great
gulf fixed when they are sought to be brought into relation with men
like John Clare and Robert Bloomfield. All the Scotchmen, born in
however originally humble circumstances, had the advantage of education
at the parish school; and, slight though in some cases the result may
have been, it yet for ever removes the possibility of illiteracy
which the English reader at once conjures up at the sound of such
surroundings. The more the critic studies the facts of Burns' early
years and education, and the really remarkable stock of information
with which he was to rouse the honest wonder of Dugald Stewart--his
mathematical attainments and his philosophical grasp, not to mention
his possession of a very powerful English prose style that makes every
line of his _Letters_ really alive and matterful--the less we shall
hear of peasant genius and untaught writers. We question if one half of
the members of the Edinburgh bar, such as Lockhart has described them
at the arrival of Burns in Edinburgh, had reached such an amount of
general and poetical literature as that easily held in command by the
poet. We have heard an old schoolfellow of Edward Irving and Carlyle at
the burgh school of Annan remark on the misconception of Froude as to
the true social rank of their respective parents. Horace and Burns
seem, as Theodore Martin has shown, not unlike in the matter of their
fathers, and the possession of such sets their children far out of that
circle of contracted social and moral surroundings in which the
biographers of the Smiles class have too long set them.
The knowledge of his letters Miller seems, like the elder Weller, to
have acquired from a study of the local signboards, and in his sixth
year he was sent to a dame's school, where he spelt his way through
the old curriculum of a child's education in Scotland--the Shorter
Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament. He managed to discover
for himself the story of Joseph; and even in the old six-volume edition
of Lintot the genius of Homer was early made manifest. _The Pilgrim's
Progress_, evidently in some such form as Macaulay has described, made
for the cottage, followed; and, in course of time, the collection of
books which his father had left was eagerly devoured. Among them were
_Robinson Crusoe_, _Gulliver's Travels_--both never so familiar in
Scotland to boys as they are in England--Cook's _Voyages_, John Howie
of Lochgoin's _Worthies_, the _Voyages_ of Anson, Drake, Raleigh,
Dampier, and Byron, 'my grand-dad's narrative' of the poet. It was not
till his tenth year that he became, as he says, 'thoroughly a Scot,'
and this was effected by a perusal of Blind Harry's _Wallace_, that
'Bible of the Scottish people,' as Lord Hailes has called it, following
or anticipating the remark by Wolf as to the similar position of the
_Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ among the Greeks. No one now need be informed
about the influence that quaint old work had produced in Burns, and
through him on the subsequent re-awakening of the national spirit at
the end of the eighteenth century. Barbour's _Bruce_ has remained the
possession of the scholar and the antiquary, while this work of the old
minstrel, literally 'sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer,
at festivals and other days of merriment,' as Bentley had said of his
great predecessor, has had an abiding influence on literature, and on
the national character. 'Up to Crummade (Cromarty) and through the
Northland' had blind Harry, with a fine patriotism, and, we fear, a
total disregard for geography, made his hero effect a raid. When a man
has got a view from Dan to Beersheba in which to smite the enemy hip
and thigh, he need not be troubled with a few outlying counties.
The parish school of Cromarty which Miller attended numbered about a
hundred and twenty boys and girls. The windows of the building fronted
the opening of the Cromarty Firth, recalling at least by 'the mystery
of the ships' the Portland of Longfellow's own early days. The tax of
twenty peats to the school from the Highland boatmen paid for every
boat in the trade recalls the salary of the public hangman of Inverness
and Aberdeen, and the dues often formed the subject of debate between
the boys and the irate Gaels, who did not fail to retort the taunt of
the hangman's perquisite. The schoolmaster was a worthy that might have
sat for the figure of Jonathan Tawse in Dr. Alexander's _Johnny Gibb_,
and was, though a fair scholar, rather inefficient as a disciplinarian
and teacher. Yet it was his boast--one now, alas, in these days sadly
becoming obsolete--that he sent forward more lads to the bursary
competition at the Northern university than any other teacher, and his
'heavy class' of a few boys in Latin was increased by his persuading
the willing Uncle James to set Miller to the _Rudiments_ in that
time-honoured volume by Ruddiman, who had in his own days been a first
bursar at Aberdeen. The teaching of Latin had been one of the props to
education introduced by the Reformers, and so distinct had been the
little note of pedantry, perhaps in this way fostered, that Smollett
makes the barber in _Roderick Random_ quote Horace in the original, and
Foote in a farce has made a valet insist on its possession as a
shibboleth of nationality. We need but mention the favourite quotations
in the ancient tongue by the Baron of Bradwardine and Dugald Dalgetty
as a reminiscence of his own old days 'at the Marischal College'; while
Miller also could remember an old cabinet-maker who carried for the
sake of the big print a Latin New Testament to church. But no more with
him than with Darwin could the linguistic faculty be stimulated. The
_Rudiments_ he thought the dullest book he had ever seen, and though in
after-life he regretted the lost opportunity that at five-and-twenty
might have made him a scholar and thus have saved ten of the best
working years of his life, it may be doubted if in his case the loss
amounted to more than in the case of Macaulay, who affected to bewail
his loss of mathematics. In their truest form, scholars, like
naturalists, are born and not made, nor will any labour in the
linguistic field yield much to the scientist. The poet Gray wisely
lamented the loss of time in his own case through forced labour at
mathematics, a remark not even yet fully appreciated in Scotland, where
the system of general excellence--that system under which Johnson so
happily remarked that, while each man got a bite, no one got a
bellyful--has too long stunted the learning of the country and proved
the bane alike of her schools and universities. 'As for Latin, I
abominate it,' we find him writing from Cromarty in December 1838, in a
letter now before us, 'and ever did since I burnt my _Rudiments_.'
More congenial amusement he found in the exercise of his story-telling
faculty. When the master's back was turned, the _Sennachie_, as the
master called him, would gather round him the other boys and narrate to
them the adventures of his uncle, the story of Gulliver, and the
shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe, or even the mysteries of Mrs. Radcliffe.
When the sixty volumes of his father and the hundred and sixty of his
uncles had been consumed, he fell in with a collection of essayists
from Addison to Henry Mackenzie, the influence of which, along with
Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_, remained to the last as a powerful
impress upon his prose style. But he was rapidly finding his national
and true school. The Hill of Cromarty, part of De Beaumont's Ben-Nevis
system, and the rich Liassic deposit of Eathie, were his favourite
haunts, and his uncle Alexander, after his own work was done, would
spend with him many an hour in the ebb tide. To the training thus
acquired from this untaught naturalist he owed much of his own close
powers of observation, which led, however, well-nigh to a fatal
termination through an adventurous visit to the Doo-cot caves, from
which he was rescued late at night during a high tide. This formed the
subject of his first copy of juvenile verse, which was recited 'with
vast applause' by the handsomest girl at the Cromarty boarding
establishment kept by Miss Elizabeth Bond. In her own early days she
had known the father and mother of Scott; and, when in 1814 she had
published her _Letters of a Village Governess_, she had dedicated them
to the great novelist, who later on in the midst of his own troubles,
living in lodgings away from Abbotsford, could yet remember to send her
ten pounds 'to scare the wolf from the door,' as he cheerily remarked,
when she had found the truth of her own saying that it was hard for a
single woman to get through the world 'without a head'--unmarried.
His reading at this time received a curious extension through there
falling into his hands a copy of _Military Medley_ belonging to a
retired officer, and on the shore he would carry out plans of
fortification as therein set forth by the great French engineer Vauban.
With sand for towers, and variegated shells and limpets for soldiers,
he worked his way through the evolutions of troops, and no reader of
Scott will fail to remember the similar action by Sir Walter which, in
the introduction to the third canto of _Marmion_, he describes as
taking place at Sandy Knowe, in the air of the Cheviots, near the old
tower of Smailholme that 'charmed his fancy's waking hour':--
'Again I fought each combat o'er,
Pebbles and shells in order laid
The mimic ranks of war displayed.'
Nor will he fail to note the exact and characteristic point of
difference in the two children, and how in each the child was father of
the man. So early in both was the natural instinct of the future
historian and the geologist awakened.
At a later period he seems rather to have become an unruly lad, and to
have proved too much for his relations to manage. He was in the stage
when such boys run away to sea or enlist, and his father's own calling
might, from its well-nigh hereditary nature, have been thought to be
the one most likely to be adopted. He enjoyed a somewhat dangerous
reputation through carrying a knife and stabbing a companion in the
thigh, but these escapades may in later years have been unconsciously
heightened by remorse for wasted opportunities, and which in his case
we have seen to amount to little or nothing. But the circle of his own
companions was changing or breaking up, and it became necessary to
decide on the future. His mother, after being a widow for well-nigh a
dozen years, had married again, and he determined on being a mason, an
occupation which he thought would, by his being employed in labour at
intermittent seasons, afford him plenty leisure. Against this
resolution both his uncles stoutly protested, and were prepared to
assist him to the Northern university. 'I had no wish,' he says, 'and
no peculiar fitness to be either lawyer or doctor; and as for the
Church, that was too serious a direction to look in for one's bread,
unless one could necessarily regard one's-self as called to the
Church's proper work, and I could not.' His uncles agreed to this view
of the case; and so, reluctantly, the proposed course was abandoned.
'Better be anything,' they said, 'than an _uncalled_ minister.' His was
not the feeble sense of fitness possessed in such a high degree by the
presentees to Auchterarder and Marnoch. As a member of the Moray nation
he would naturally have proceeded to King's College in Aberdeen, then
at the very lowest ebb of its existence as regards the abilities, or
the want of them, of the wondrous corps of professors who filled its
chairs. Carlyle in his _Sartor_ has drawn certainly no flattering
picture of the Edinburgh of his days, and his friend Professor Masson
in the early volumes of _Macmillan's Magazine_ has put before us the no
less wonderful spectacle of the Marischal College of his own student
life; nor would the state of King's College about 1820 yield much
material for respect. The professoriate was grossly ignorant and
conceited, and nepotism was rampant. As a child, we can recall the last
expiring flicker of the race, and when we add that one aspiring
graduate had published a pamphlet to refute Newton, and that the
theology was of the wintriest type of even Aberdonian moderatism,
couched in the most remote imitation of the rhetorical flights in
_The Man of Feeling_, we have said enough to show that Miller certainly
lost nothing by non-attendance at the classes in Aberdeen.
But it was not without reluctance that his resolve to become a mason
was allowed by his uncles. However, at last, there being another uncle
on the mother's side who was a mason contracting for small jobs, and
who employed an apprentice or two, he was bound apprentice for three
years, from February 1820 to November 1822 and entered on the trade of
mason and quarryman, for in the North the combination was constant.
Long after, in the _Old Red Sandstone_ he has described his first day's
experience in the sandstone quarry, when, in that early spring morning
and with a heavy heart, he set out to experience his first battle in
the stern school of the world:
'I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time, fond of the
pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad
awake; and, woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has
instanced in his _Twa Dogs_ as one of the most disagreeable of all
employments. Bating the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few
gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone
by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer
among rocks and woods--a reader of curious books when I could get
them--a gleaner of old traditional stories; and now I was going to
exchange all my day-dreams and all my amusements for the kind of
life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat,
and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil. The quarry in
which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or
firth rather (the Bay of Cromarty), with a little clear stream on
the one side and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened
in the Old Red Sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a
huge bank of diluvial clay, and which rose over it in some places
to the height of nearly thirty feet.'
He was to experience constant fits of depression and exhaustion, which
caused sleep-walking; and though this after a time passed away, it was
yet in later years to recur with fatal effects. In his master he was
fortunate. He was one who would fully have come up to Carlyle's
standard of his own father, 'making a conscience of every stone he
laid.' Unconsciously, also, the apprentice was laying the foundations
of the educated sense of sight so essential to the mason, and which
was to stand him in excellent service in later years of geological
ramblings. But the life was a hard one, from the surroundings in which
the trade of a north-country mason had to be carried on. Living in a
small village, where the lack of steady employment was naturally often
felt, he had to eke out a living by odd jobs in the country, building
farm-steadings or outhouses, with but scanty shelter and in
surroundings too often unfavourable to comfort or morality. His
experience of the bothy-system thus acquired by personal hardship he
was in later years to turn to account in his leaders in _The
Witness_--'I have lived,' he says, 'in hovels that were invariably
flooded in wet weather by the over-flowings of neighbouring swamps,
and through whose roofs I could tell the hour at night, by marking
from my bed the stars that were passing over the openings along the
ridge.' He was now to feel the truth of his uncles' warnings in
dissuading him from the occupation. They had pointed to a hovel on a
laird's property, who had left it standing that at some future date it
might be turned to profit when he should have a drove of swine, or
when a 'squad' of masons would pass that way. The life which had been
introduced by the large farm system had been criticised already by
Burns, who in the jottings of his _Highland Tour_ had been struck by
the superior intelligence of the Ayrshire cottar to the stolid
boorishness of the agricultural labourer in the districts of the
Lothians and the Merse. Recent legislation has largely mitigated the
evils of the system which, even in a higher scale of comfort, has
received a stern indictment in the eighth chapter of Dr. William
Alexander's excellent work which we have before quoted, and to which,
as the classic of the movement with which Miller's life is associated,
we shall again refer. 'Better,' said Cobbett, who had studied it
during a brief sojourn in the country, 'the fire-raisings of Kent than
the bothy system of Scotland.'
Even geological rambles and communings with the Muse afforded but scant
alleviation of the hardships endured. During rainy weather the food
would often be oatmeal eaten raw, at times with no salt save from a
passing Highland smuggler, or consist of hastily prepared gruel or
_brochan_. In time he learned to be a fair plain cook and baker,
so as at least to satisfy the demands of the failing teeth of his old
master. Accordingly, he was not sorry when the three years of his
apprenticeship closed, and as a skilled labourer he could retire about
the Martinmas of 1822 to Cromarty, where his first piece of work was a
cottage built with his own hands for his aunt.
In 1823 he was with a working party at Gairloch, and was there for the
last time to experience the discomforts in the life of the working
mason when employed by a niggard Highland laird. Forced from the barn
in which they were at first domiciled into a cow-house to make room for
the hay, they found themselves called upon to convert the materials of
this hovel into the new building upon which they were engaged. This
they effected by demolishing the entrance gradually, and hanging mats
over it, leaving themselves ultimately to the cold October wind which
not even Miller's experiences as a boy of the caves in the Sutors of
Cromarty could render tolerable. But he had begun to see that the
sphere of constant employment was narrow and narrowing in his native
place, and, as the building mania in the South at the time seemed to
afford a better opening for a steady workman, to Edinburgh accordingly
he resolved to betake himself.
There was the additional reason in a desire to free the family from
the burden of a house on the Coalhill of Leith, which had long before
fallen to his father through the legacy of a relative, and which had
threatened, through legal expenses, lack of tenants, and depreciated
value, to become a serious legacy indeed. The parish church of North
Leith had been erected, and he had been rated as a heritor for a sum
so considerable that the entire year's rental of the dilapidated
tenement was swallowed up, together with most of his savings as a
mason. He had come of age when in the miserable hovel at Gairloch we
have described, and was now competent to deal with his luckless
property. Setting sail in the Leith smack running between Cromarty and
that port, he entered the Firth of Forth four days after losing sight
of the Sutors. He saw with interest Dunottar Castle and the Bass Rock
chronicled in the well-known lines of his friend, Dr. Longmuir of
Aberdeen. Indeed the latter had for him peculiar associations through
one of the Ross-shire worthies in the times of Charles II.--James
Fraser of Brea;--for, when the sun set on the upland farm on which he
had been born, Miller knew that it was time to collect his tools at
the end of his day's labour. In 1847, when he visited the rock on the
geological expedition which he has commemorated by his paper on the
structure of the Bass, his thoughts again reverted to Fraser, and to
two other captives from his own district, Mackilligen of Alness and
Hog of Kiltearn. His uncle James had at an early period introduced him
to Burns and Fergusson, while from his boyish days the old novel of
Smollett, _Humphrey Clinker_, had been no less familiar than from the
pages of _David Copperfield_ we know it to have been to Dickens. It
was, therefore, with no small interest that he caught his first view
of Arthur Seat and the masts of the shipping in the harbour of Leith.
It was still the veritable Auld Reekie' of Fergusson, preserving its
quaint distinctiveness by the happy blending of the divisions of the
old town and the new--the old town through which, says Lockhart, the
carriage of Scott would creep at the slowest of paces, driven by the
most tactful and discriminating of Jehus, while every gable and
buttress in what a recent prosaic English guide-book denominates the
most dilapidated street in Europe would crowd its storied memories
upon the novelist and poet of the _Chronicles of the Canongate_. To
the last, like Carlyle, he preserved the memory, ever a landmark to
the patriotic Scot, of his first day in the old 'romantic town' of Sir
Walter, and of his impressions of the most picturesque of European
capitals.