IN EDINBURGH--THE CROMARTY BANK
'I view yon Empress of the North
Sit on her hilly throne.'
SCOTT.
He had not long to experience what Gilbert Burns said was to his
brother the saddest of all sights, that of a man seeking work. He had
called on the town-clerk to see whether some means could be devised of
setting himself free from the property when, on mentioning his
occupation, he was not only told the prospect of a sale was not so
hopeless as he had expected, but was introduced to a builder erecting a
mansion-house in the south of Edinburgh. He lodged in the village of
Niddry Mill, and found his experience of life among metropolitan
labourers the very reverse of favourable.
His not very high opinion of the working classes, for, as we shall
see, Miller remained a Whig to the last with a wholesome horror for
Radicals and Chartists, was doubtless due to the circumstances under
which he found himself, and not to any feeling of superiority on his
part. The social condition of the working classes was then on the eve
of transition, and the organisation of even skilled labour was but in
a rudimentary condition. In Edinburgh at least, the better class of
mechanics sought within the walls of the city a more remunerative
sphere for their labour, so that it was only the inferior body of
workmen that was found on the outskirts. At first, he was subjected
to a good deal of low and petty tyranny from his fellow-labourers,
which was not calculated to improve his opinion of the class. Some
slight relief, however, he managed to find in the new geological
surroundings--the carboniferous deposits--and by observation and
theory he made his way to some good results in his own science, at
a time when there was no map, manual, or even geological primer
in existence. The policies of Niddry and walks in the ruins of
Craigmillar were a solace from the drunken and intemperate habits of
the men, whose forty-eight shillings for the fortnight's wage were
soon consumed by Sunday drives to Roslin or Hawthornden, or by
drinking bouts in the lower rookeries of the High Street. There still
largely prevailed the convivial habits such as Fergusson has described
as characteristic of the Edinburgh of his day, the tavern 'jinks'
alluded to by Scott in _Guy Mannering_, and by Lockhart in his _Life
of Burns_. In the taverns the landlords kept a cockpit or a badger as
a necessary part of their attraction. Employment being constant
through the pressure of the building mania prevalent throughout this
year, the masters were largely at the mercy of the men, so that
strikes were rife and the demands of the workers exorbitant.
Altogether it was no favourable school for Miller to learn regard for
his own class. Again and again, to the end, do we find not undeserved
denunciations of the dangers of Chartism, and his own reiterated
belief that for the skilled workman there is no danger, and for the
thriftless no hope.
The collier villages round Niddry have long since disappeared. The
seams have for all practical purposes been worked out, or have been
given up as unprofitable. There he found the last surviving remains of
slavery in Scotland, for the older men of the place, though born and
bred 'within a mile of Edinburgh toun,' had yet been born slaves. The
modern reader will find much curious information upon this subject in
Erskine's _Institutes_; but, in passing, we may recall the fact that
Sir Walter Scott has mentioned the case of Scott of Harden and his
lady, who had rescued by law a tumbling-girl who had been sold by her
parents to a travelling mountebank, and who was set at liberty after
an appeal to the Lords, against the decision of the Chancellor. Scott
was assoilzied; but, even as late as 1799, an Act of Parliament had to
be passed dealing specially with this last remnant of feudal
slavery--the salters and the colliers of Scotland. The old family of
the Setons of Winton had, along with others, exercised great political
influence and pressure on the Court of Session, and had repeatedly
managed to defeat or evade measures of reform. A law had even been
passed enacting that no collier or salter, without a certificate from
his last place, could find work, but should be held as a thief and
punished as such, while a later ordinance was that, as they 'lay from
their work at Pasche, Yule and Whitsunday, to the great offence of God
_and prejudice of their masters_,' they should work every day in the
week except at Christmas! Clearly there was no Eight Hours Bill in Old
Scotland.
His lodging was a humble one-roomed cottage in Niddry, owned by an old
farm-servant and his wife. The husband, when too old for work, had been
discharged by his master, whose munificence had gone the length of
allowing residence in the dilapidated building, on the understanding
that he was not to be held liable for repairs. The thatch was repaired
by mud and turf gathered from the roadside, and in this crazy tenement
the old man and his wife, both of whom had passed through the world
without picking up hardly a single idea, were exposed to the biting
east winds of the district. A congenial fellow-lodger was fortunately
found in the person of another workman, one of the old Seceders, deep
in the theology of Boston and Rutherfurd, and such works as had formed
the reading of his uncles in Cromarty, for at this time the sense of
religion, at least among the humbler classes, was well-nigh confined to
the ranks of dissent. Many of the inhabitants of the place were or had
been nominal parishioners of 'Jupiter' Carlyle of Inveresk. But the
doctor had not been one to do much for the social or religious advance
of his people. Jupiter, or 'Old Tonans,' as he was called from sitting
to Gavin Hamilton the painter for his portrait of Jupiter, had been the
fanatical defender of the theatre at a time when his friend John Home,
the writer of _Douglas_, had been compelled by public opinion to seek
relief from pulpit duties, and a more fitting sphere for his rants of
'Young Norval on the Grampian Hills' in the ranks of the laity. Carlyle
and his friend Dr. Hugh Blair were constant patrons of the legitimate
drama in the old playhouse in the Canongate, when the burghers at night
would 'dauner hame wi' lass and lantern' after the manner described
with such power by Scott in the Tolbooth scene of _Rob Roy_. On one
occasion, the doctor had, for once in his long life, to play the part
of non-intrusionist, when he repelled vigorously with a bludgeon the
attempt of some wild sparks to force an entry into his box! Missions he
denounced in the spirit of a fanatical supporter of the repressive
régime of Pitt and Dundas. He trusted to the coming of Christ's Kingdom
by some lucky accident or sleight of hand, 'as we are informed it shall
be in the course of Providence.' He had no belief in 'a plan which has
been well styled visionary.' In the closing years of his own life, the
very slight modicum of zeal for the discharge of his ministerial duties
ebbed so low that he left these entirely to an assistant, and spent the
Sunday on the Musselburgh race-course. Yet this is the man whom Dean
Stanley with exquisite infelicity selects as one of the heroes of the
Church of Scotland. In the picture of old 'Jupiter' there is something
that recalls the belief of the erratic Lord Brougham, when he voted
against the Veto Act and the right to protest against unsuitable
presentees, from fear that it might end in 'rejecting men too strict in
morals and too diligent in duty to please our vitiated tastes!'
Carlyle's _Autobiography_ is one of the most instructive of books; like
the similar disclosure by Benvenuto Cellini, it is the presentation of
a man who is destitute of a moral sense.
Although in the pulpits of the metropolis Moderatism was but only too
well represented, there were yet some striking exceptions. Sir Walter
Scott, whose feelings led him strongly in the direction of the
Latitudinarian party, has yet drawn in _Guy Mannering_ an admirable
sketch of Dr. John Erskine, the colleague of Principal Robertson in the
Greyfriars, and for long the leader of the Evangelical party in the
Church of Scotland. Some of the members of that party were gladly heard
by Miller, but his greatest delight he confesses to have been in
hearing the discourses of the old Seceder, Dr. Thomas M'Crie. 'Be
sure,' said his uncles to him on leaving Cromarty, 'and go to hear
M'Crie.' The doctor was no master of rhetoric or of pulpit eloquence,
but the doctrine was the theology of the true descendant of the men of
Drumclog and Bothwell. Nothing is more characteristic of the university
system of Scotland than that the greatest ecclesiastical scholar she
could produce was to be found in a humble seceding chapel at the foot
of Carrubber's Close. In Scotland, at least within the present century,
no more influential book has been published than his _Life of Knox_,
which silently made its appearance in 1811. In the revival of
ecclesiastical and national feeling in the country the book will ever
remain a classic and a landmark. There it occupies the place which, in
the field of classical and historical scholarship, is taken by Wolf's
_Prolegomena to Homer_. Lord Jeffrey could truly declare that to fit
one's-self for the task of even a reviewer of M'Crie, the special
reading of several years would be necessary. Its influence was at once
felt. The 'solemn sneer' of the Humes, Gibbons, Robertsons, and
Tytlers, and, be it mentioned with regret, of even Scott in that
unworthy squib against the religion of his country, _Old Mortality_,
had done much, at least among the _literati_ and the upper classes, to
obliterate and sap a belief or knowledge of the great work which had
been accomplished for civil liberty by the early reformers; but now
the school of flimsy devotees of Mary, Montrose and Claverhouse,
with its unctuous retention of the sneer (or, historically meant,
compliment) of the Merry Monarch as to Presbyterianism being no fit
religion for a gentleman, the school whose expiring flicker is seen in
Aytoun's _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, was for ever exploded by
the research of M'Crie. It was in an unlucky hour that Scott ventured
a reply to the strictures of his reviewer. Never was humiliation more
deep or more bitterly felt by the novelist. The novel of Scott is
about as gross a caricature as 'Carrion' Heath's _Life_ of Oliver
Cromwell, and for the historical restoration of the great Reformer,
M'Crie has done in his book what Carlyle, in his _Letters of
Cromwell_, has for ever effected for the true presentation of the
Protector.
In the bookstalls of the city he would pick up some new additions to
his shelf. At odd hours, too, he would hang about Castle Street in the
hope of seeing Sir Walter Scott. The capital at this time, though sadly
shorn of its old literary coteries in the days of Burns, still numbered
such men as Jeffrey, Cockburn, Dugald Stewart, and Professor Wilson;
and he did manage, one evening, to spend some hours with a cousin in
Ambrose's, where the famous club used to hold their meetings in a room
below. But none of these faces was he then destined to know in the
flesh, and the 'pride of all Scotsmen' whom Carlyle met in the
Edinburgh streets, 'worn with care, the joy all fled,' had passed away
the next time when Miller visited the capital.
Work, we have seen, was plentiful in the town. The great fire had swept
Parliament Close and the High Street, carrying with it the steeple of
the old Tron, and many of the lofty tenements that formed such a
feature of Old Edinburgh. But he was feeling the first effects of the
stone-cutters' disease, and his lungs, affected by the stone dust,
threatened consumption. He states that few of his class reached the age
of forty through the trouble, and not more than one in fifty ever came
to forty-five. But circumstances fortunately enabled him at this
critical juncture to leave work for a time. The house on the Coalhill
had turned out better than was expected, and, with a clear balance of
fifty pounds in his pocket, he could set sail for Cromarty, where,
after a weary seven days' voyage through fog and mist, he was met on
landing by his uncles. Not for ten years, and then under very different
circumstances, was he again to see Edinburgh.
During this period of convalescence he experienced a religious change,
leading to positions from which he never saw reason to recede. 'It is,'
he says, 'at once delicate and dangerous to speak of one's own
spiritual condition, or of the emotional sentiments on which one's
conclusions regarding it are so often doubtfully founded. Egotism in
the religious form is perhaps more tolerated than any other, but it is
not on that account less perilous to the egotist himself. There need
be, however, less delicacy in speaking of one's beliefs than of one's
feelings.' This last remark is eminently characteristic at once of the
individual and of the national type of severe reticence on internal
religious experience. This may serve to throw some light on the taunt
flung by Dr. Johnson, in one of his most boisterous moods in Skye, at
the head of Boswell. 'Can you,' he asked, 'name one book of any value
on a religious subject written by the Scottish clergy?' Johnson does
not seem to be dwelling on specifically theological works; he has
rather in his mind the manuals of a homiletic or devotional order, in
which he rather wildly asserts 'the clergy of England to have produced
the most valuable works in theory and practice.' It might fairly have
been retorted on Johnson that, were this so, the physicians at least
had ministered but poorly to themselves, by quoting to him his own
remark that he had never once met with a sincerely religious English
clergyman; but Bozzy, patriotic for once, fell upon the defence of
faithful discharge of pulpit ministrations and poor endowments. It
might have been wiser to have fallen back on the long and militant
struggle of the Church of Scotland for her existence, wiser still to
have based the defence on national and psychological grounds. Nothing
in the Scottish character is more remarkable than the absence of the
feeling that led Luther and Wesley to a constant introspection, or at
least to its frank outward expression and effusive declaration of their
spiritual state. Some little knowledge of this national trait we think
would have saved much windy and remote declamation about fanaticism,
gloomy austerity, and enthusiasm--that mental bugbear of the eighteenth
century, and well-nigh sole theological stock-in-trade of the
gentlemanly and affected school of Hume and Robertson. The absence of
anything like mysticism either in the nation or in its theology has
been, therefore, unfavourable to the appearance of any cheap or verbal
pietism. Calvinism, it may be added, is poor in comparison with
Lutheranism, poorer still when contrasted in this respect with the
Roman Church; for, while the former has Behmen and Swedenborg, and the
latter many names such as Guyon and Rosmini among a host, Scotland has
nothing of this kind, unless in the case of Erskine of Linlathen or
Campbell of Row. The reason for this would seem to be that Calvinism
has both a religious and a political side. As a philosophic creed, at
least in details, it affords a completeness of presentation that leaves
no room or indeed desire to pass behind the veil and dwell on the
unknowable and the unknown.
Miller, at all events, found that hitherto his life had lacked a
'central sun,' as he expresses it, round which his feelings and
intellect could anchor themselves. This he found by a curiously
instructive combination of historical and geological reasoning.
Professor Blackie has pointed out that the true secret of the vitality
of the old Paganism and its logical internal consistency simply lay in
the fact of the great humanity of the deities it created. This, also,
as Miller himself no less clearly shows, is at the bottom of the
enduring element in the lower reaches of Catholicism. 'There is,' says
our Scottish Neander, Rabbi John Duncan, 'an old cross stone of granite
by the roadside as you wind up the hill at Old Buda, in Hungary, upon
which a worn and defaced image of our Saviour is cut, which I used
often to pass. The thorough woebegoneness of that image used to haunt
me long--that old bit of granite, the ideal of human sorrow, weakness
and woebegoneness. To this day it will come back before me--always with
that dumb gaze of perfect calmness--no complaining--the picture of meek
and mute suffering. I am a Protestant and dislike image-worship, yet
never can I get that statue out of my mind.' This, then, to Miller
formed the 'central sun'--'the Word made flesh;' not merely as a
received mental doctrine, but as a fact laid hold of, and round which
other facts find their true position and explanation. 'There may be,'
he allows, 'men who, through a peculiar idiosyncrasy of constitution,
are capable of loving, after a sort, a mere abstract God, unseen and
unconceivable; though, as shown by the air of sickly sentimentality
borne by almost all that has been said and written on the subject, the
feeling in its true form must be a very rare and exceptional one. In
all my experience of men I never knew a genuine instance of it. The
love of an abstract God seems to be as little natural to the ordinary
human constitution as the love of an abstract sun or planet.'
No less interesting are his arguments from the geological position. It
was a difficulty which had long lain heavy on the mind of Byron when,
the reader may remember, in his last days in 1823 he beat over much
theological and metaphysical jungle with the Scottish doctor
Kennedy--the greatness of the universe and the littleness of the
paragon of animals man, and the consequent difficulty of satisfactorily
allowing a redemptive movement in Heaven for man in all his petty
weakness. Pascal had attempted to meet this by what Hallam calls 'a
magnificent lamentation' and by a metaphysical subtlety, reasoning from
this very smallness to his ultimate greatness. But the geological
reasoning of Miller has the undoubted merit of being scientific and
inductive. In geology the dominant note is, in one word, progress.
'There was a time in our planet,' and it will be noted that the
argument is perfectly independent of the appearance of man, late with
himself, early with Lyell, 'when only dead matter appeared, after which
plants and animals of a lower order were made manifest. After ages of
vast extent the inorganic yielded to the organic, and the human period
began,--man, a fellow-worker with the Creator who first produced it.
And of the identity of at least his intellect with that of his Maker,
and, of consequence, of the integrity of the revelation which declares
that he was created in God's own image, we have direct evidence in his
ability of not only conceiving of God's own contrivances, but even of
reproducing them, and this not as a mere imitator, but as an original
thinker.' Man thus, as Hegel says, re-thinks Creation. But higher yet
the tide of empire takes its way. The geologist is not like the
Neapolitan thinker, Vico, with his doctrine of recurring cycles in man.
The geologist 'finds no example of dynasties once passed away again
returning. There has been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish--of
the reptile--of the mammal. The long ascending line from dead matter to
man has been a progress Godwards--not an asymptotical progress, but
destined from the first to furnish a point of union; and occupying that
point as true God and true man, as Creator and created, we recognise
the adorable Monarch of all the future.' Such an argument is indeed a
reach above the vaguely declamatory theory of Swinburne of man being
the master of all things, and above the theory of Feuerbach that finds
God merely in the enlarged shadow projected by the Ego.
His somewhat impaired strength led him to think of a livelihood through
little jobs of monumental stonework in a style superior to that
introduced as yet into the countryside, and to this period of
observation of the Scottish character acquired through living in the
vicinity of farm-houses, villages, churchyards, as the varying means of
lodging were afforded him, he ascribed much of the knowledge which he
turned to so good an editorial account. In the company, too, of the
parish minister Stewart he was happy, for, according to his own
conviction and the testimony of many others, he was a man of no
ordinary acuteness and of unquestioned pulpit ability. Indeed, Miller
never hesitated to declare that for the fibre of his whole thinking he
was more indebted to Chalmers and to this almost unknown Cromarty
minister than to any two other men. Stewart's power seems to have lain
in the detection of subtle analogies and in pictorial verbal power, in
which he resembled Guthrie. In an obituary notice in _The Witness_ of
Nov. 13, 1847 he dwells with affection on the man, and illustrates
admirably the type of intellect and its dangers. 'Goldsmith,' he
observes, 'when he first entered upon his literary career, found that
all the good things on the side of truth had been already said; and
that _his_ good things, if he really desired to produce any, would
require all to be said on the side of paradox and error. Poor Edward
Irving formed a melancholy illustration of this species of originality.
His stock of striking things on the side of truth was soon expended;
notoriety had meanwhile become as essential to his comfort as ardent
spirits to that of the dram-drinker; and so, to procure the supply of
the unwholesome pabulum, without which he could not exist, he launched
into a perilous ocean of heterodoxy and extravagance, and made
shipwreck of his faith. Stewart's originality was not the originality
of opening up new vistas in which all was unfamiliar, simply because
the direction in which they led was one in which men's thought had no
occasion to travel and no business to perform. It was the greatly
higher ability of enabling men to see new and unwonted objects in old
familiar directions.' For sixteen years Miller sat under his ministry,
and for twelve was admitted to his closest intimacy.
But in time work of even the 'Old Mortality' order grew scarce.
Accordingly, in the summer of June 1828, he visited Inverness, and
inserted in the local papers an advertisement for employment. He felt
that he could execute such commissions with greater care and exactness
than were usual, and in a style that could be depended upon for correct
spelling. He mentions himself the case of the English mason who mangled
Proverbs xxxi. 10 into the bewildering abbreviation that 'A virtuous
woman is 5s. to her husband,' and he might also have mentioned the case
of the statue to George II. in Stephen's Green, Dublin, erected
doubtless under municipal supervision, and which yet in the course of a
brief Latin inscription of thirteen lines can show more than one
mistake to the individual line. He had the curious, yet perhaps after
all not unpractical, idea that his scheme for employment might be
materially improved by his sending a copy of verses to the paper, in
the belief that the public would infer that the writer of correct verse
could be a reliable workman. But nothing came of this. In justice to
the editor it may be allowed that the versification, if easy, was
nothing remarkable, and felicity of epithets may be no guarantee for
perfection of epitaphs. The reflection, however, came to him that there
was no advantage to be won in thus, as he says, scheming himself into
employment. It was not congenial, and walking 'half an inch taller'
along the streets on the strength of this resolution, he was actually
offered the Queen's shilling, or the King's to be chronologically
correct, by a smart recruiting sergeant of a Highland regiment who from
the powerful physique of the man had naturally inferred the possession
of a choice recruit.
He determined, accordingly, to face the worst and publish. He made a
hasty selection of his verses through the last six years and approached
the office of the _Inverness Courier_. This was a highly fortunate
opening, for that paper was, then and up to 1878, edited by Robert
Carruthers of Dumfries, who had been appointed editor of the _Courier_
in the very same year of Miller's visit. His _Life of Pope_ published
in 1853 is still a standard production, and altogether Carruthers was
one of the ablest editors in Scotland, and his paper which was edited
on Liberal lines was a very powerful organ in his day. The friendship
then begun lasted till the death of Miller unbroken, and was mutually
advantageous. While he was still in the Highland capital he received
word of the fatal illness of his uncle James, and his first work on his
return was a neat tombstone for this close friend of his father and
worthy to whom he was so deeply indebted for much of his own subsequent
distinction.
His volume of verse under the title of _Poems Written in the Leisure
Hours of a Journeyman Mason_ issued slowly in 1829 from the press, and
its appearance in the disillusionising medium of black and white
convinced him that after all his true vocation was not to be found in
poetry, for many lines which had appeared as tolerable, if not more, to
the writer in the process of composition were now robbed of their charm
by commission to print. Indeed, at no time does his versification rise
beyond fluent description. It lacks body and form, and was really in
his case nothing but a sort of rudimentary stratum on which he was to
rear a very strong and powerful prose style. He was lacking in ear, and
he confessed to an organ that recognised with difficulty the difference
of the bagpipe and the big drum. The critics were not very partial to
the venture. The tone of the majority was that of the _Quarterly_ upon
Keats, and the autocrats of poetical merit declared that he was safer
with his chisel than on Parnassus. One little oasis, however, in the
desert of depreciation did manage to reach him in a letter, through his
friend Forsyth of Elgin, from Thomas Pringle of Roxburgh who had seen
the book. In early days the poet had been a clerk in the Register House
of Edinburgh, where his _Scenes of Teviotdale_ had secured him an
introduction to Scott, who extended to him the same ready support which
he had bestowed on Leyden. By his influence he was appointed editor of
_Blackwood's Magazine_, and later on emigrated with a party of
relatives to the Cape, where his unsparing denunciations of the
colonial policy in its treatment of the natives, and his advocacy of
what would now be called the anti-Rhodes party brought him into
complications with the officials in Downing Street and the colonial
authorities. Poor Pringle!--among the one-song writers, the singers of
the one lilt that rises out of a mass of now forgotten verse, his name
is high, and he has won for himself an abiding niche in the hearts of
his countrymen by his _Emigrant's Lament_, where he touches with a
faultless hand the scenery of 'bonnie Teviotdale and Cheviot mountains
blue.'
The volume of verses was not without its more immediate results in a
local circle. It brought him under the notice of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder
of Relugas, who is now remembered by his _Wolf of Badenoch_--a not
quite unsuccessful effort at bending the bow of Ulysses, though without
the dramatic force of Scott. By Carruthers he was introduced to
Principal Baird, and thus a link with the past was effected through a
man who had edited the poems of Michael Bruce, had befriended Alexander
Murray for a short period the occupant of the Oriental chair in
Edinburgh, and been a patron of Pringle and a close friend of Scott. By
Baird he was strongly pressed to venture on a literary life in the
capital, but the time was not propitious, and he wisely resolved to
devote himself to several years of accumulation and reflection before
he should embark on a vocation for which he had no great liking, and in
which, even to the last, he had but little belief. For an ordinary
journalist he would indeed have been as little qualified as Burns when
offered a post on Perry's _Morning Chronicle_. The justness of his
resolution was fully shown when the opportunity found him, and he was
then fully prepared for the work he was to do. He was induced by the
Principal to draw up for him a brief sketch of his life, and of this a
draft bringing it up to 1825 was composed and sent to Edinburgh.
There existed at this time in the North the remains of a little coterie
of ladies, numbering among its members Henry Mackenzie's cousin,--Mrs.
Rose of Kilravock, whom Burns had visited on his Highland tour, Lady
Gordon Cumming, and Mrs. Grant of Laggan, whose once well-known
_Letters from the Mountains_ have yielded in popularity to her song of
_Highland Laddie_, which commemorates the departure in 1799 of the
Marquis of Huntly with Sir Ralph Abercromby. By none of them, however,
was he more noticed than by Miss Dunbar of Boath, who occupies in his
early correspondence the place taken in the letters of Burns by Mrs.
Dunlop. During his visits to this excellent lady he explored the
curious sand-dunes of Culbin which still arrest the attention of the
geologist and traveller in his rambles by the Findhorn. By Miss Dunbar
he was pressed to embark on literature, while Mrs. Grant was of the
opinion that he might follow the example of Allan Cunningham, who was
engaged in the studio of Chantrey. But such patronage was in his case
no less wisely exercised than admitted, nor was his the nature to be
in any way spoiled by it; his self-reliant disposition suffered no
such baneful effects as were felt by the much weaker nature of Thom
of Inverurie, the one lyrical utterance of Aberdeenshire, or by Burns
in the excitement of his Edinburgh season. He even became a town
councillor, though he admits that his masterly inactivity was such as
led him to absent himself pretty wholly from the duties, whose onerous
nature may be inferred when the most important business before the
council was, on one occasion, clubbing together a penny each to pay a
ninepenny postage in the complete absence of town funds.
Into his life at this period a new vision was introduced through the
appearance on the scene of a young lady whom he was afterwards to make
his wife. Sauntering through the wood on the hill overlooking the
Cromarty Firth he met Miss Lydia Fraser, who was engaged in reading 'an
elaborate essay on Causation.' The reader may remember--with feelings,
we hope, of contrition for Mr. Lang's railway lyric on the _fin de
siècle_ students of Miss Braddon and Gaboriau, and for the degenerate
tendencies of the age,--the curiously fitting parallel in which the
geologist Buckland met in a Devonshire coach, his future wife, Miss
Morland, deep in a ponderous and recently issued folio of Cuvier, into
which even he himself had not found time to dip! Miller was ten years
the senior of his young friend, whose father had been in business in
Inverness, and whose mother had retired to Cromarty to live in a
retired way upon a small annuity, added to by her daughter's private
pupils. As a girl Miss Fraser had been a boarder in the family of
George Thomson, whose _Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs_,
enriched by the hand of Burns with about a hundred songs, forms an
abiding monument of their joint taste and judgment. The acquaintance
ripened into intimacy and an agreement that for three years they were
to make Scotland their home, when, should nothing then turn up they
were to emigrate and try their fortune in America. But fortunately an
opening occurred which was to retain him at home for the work he was so
naturally fitted to perform.
Cromarty had hitherto been without a bank. Now, through the
representation of local landowners and traders, the Commercial Bank of
Scotland was induced to extend one of its branches to the town. The
services of a local shipowner were secured for the post of agent, and
Miller was offered the place of accountant. It was necessary, of
course, that he should qualify himself for his new duties, and so he
sailed to Leith to acquire his initiation at Linlithgow. He was now in
his thirty-second year.
Before leaving Cromarty he had been engaged upon his _Scenes and
Legends_ of the traditional history of the country, and on his
forwarding his manuscript to Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, to whom it is
dedicated, he was invited by the hospitable baronet to meet Mr. Adam
Black the publisher, whose long retention of the copyright of the
Waverley Novels has shed distinction on the firm of which he was the
head. By him very generous terms were offered, and Miller by his
venture realised £60 over his second book, which still seems to enjoy
in its thirteenth edition no slight share of popularity. He was even
pressed by Sir Thomas to make his own house at Grange his residence
while in the south, but, Linlithgow having been already fixed upon he
took his passage in the fly-boat running on the canal between Edinburgh
and Glasgow and soon 'reached the fine old burgh as the brief winter
day was coming to a close, and was seated next morning at my desk, not
a hundred yards from the spot on which Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh had
taken his stand when he shot the Good Regent.' At first he was rather
diffident of his ability for the work, the swiftness of mechanical
summation never to the end coming to him perfectly natural; though, in
the course of a brief two months' absence from Cromarty, he was able to
join the bank with such a working acquaintance with the details of the
business that, when the policy of Sir Robert Peel threatened an attack
upon the circulation of the one-pound note, he was competent to publish
a series of articles, _Words of Warning to the People of Scotland_, in
which he defended the cash credit system of Scottish banking. This had
before been fully expounded by Hume and Scott, and Miller could show
its peculiar ability for enabling men to 'coin their characters should
they be good ones, even should houses, ships, and furniture be
wanting.' In the years to come his experience enabled him to write his
own business and commercial leaders in his paper, but as yet his income
did not exceed one hundred pounds, and he willingly joined in the
continuation of Wilson's _Tales of the Borders_. This work has retained
its popularity, though probably few are aware of the complexity of the
authorship. As edited by Leighton, it preserves the names of several
writers who occupy a more or less humble niche among the minor singers
of Scotland, and in the list of contributors, along with Miller, to the
work are found the two Bethunes, Alexander and John. He wrote for the
_Tales_ a good deal of rather poorly remunerated work, and his papers
on Burns and Fergusson afford a not unpleasing attempt to weave the
lives of the two poets into an imaginative narrative. On their
appearance, the papers were quoted as original reminiscences, though a
more discriminating criticism could not have failed to detect their
real nature. Miller possessed the logical and personal element too
strong to merge his own individuality successfully in the characters of
others. The dramatic faculty was deficient. Yet it was not quite an
unfortunate attempt to thus anticipate such a sketch as Dr. Hutchison
Stirling has so admirably worked out in his _Burns in Drama_.
Into a very different arena he was now to be drawn. Politically and
ecclesiastically, it was a period of excitement. In 1829 Catholic
Emancipation had no sooner been passed than O'Connell brought in his
motions for the Repeal and the Tithe War. The latter was a protest by
the Romanists against paying tithes for the maintenance of the Irish
Church, whose incumbents were a mere outpost of the Tory and
Episcopalian party, converting, as Lord Rosebery has said, nobody, and
alienating everybody. On the withdrawal of Grey, and the fall of Peel,
Lord Melbourne had carried on for years a sort of guerilla warfare with
a varying majority, too dependent on the Irish vote to give general
satisfaction. The Tithe Act, however, was passed, and this made the
support of the English clergy in Ireland a charge upon rent. The
position in which matters then stood with the Government will be
clearly seen by a reference to the admirable speech of Macaulay, in May
1839, to the electors of Edinburgh. In Ross-shire, the tension of
affairs had been rendered more acute by a wave of Tory reaction which
induced the Church of Scotland to cast the weight of her influence
against the Whigs; but the people, as has ever been the case upon such
aberrations from the national policy, had steadily declined to follow
this lead, although the endowment scheme for new chapels had been dealt
with by the Whigs in a niggard and unsatisfactory way.
In Cromarty the cause of the Church was strong. Since the Revolution,
the succession in the parish had been at once popular and able. The
position taken up hitherto by Miller and his uncles had been a middle
one. With strong hereditary attachment to the national establishment
they united personal leanings which led them to a sympathy with the
standpoint and the theology of the Seceders. But as yet Miller was, he
says, 'thoroughly an Established man.' The revenues of the Church he
regarded as the patrimony of the people; and he looked not unnaturally
to a time 'when that unwarrantable appropriation of them, through
which the aristocracy had sought to extend its influence, but which
had served only greatly to reduce its power in the country, would come
to an end.' Still he confesses that as yet there were no signs of what
he would himself have desired to see--a general and popular agitation
against patronage--though he noted with approval the 'revival of the
old spirit in the Church.' The time had, however, come when he could
hesitate no longer. He saw with anxiety the decisions go against the
Church in March 1838, and of the Lords in May 1839, the victory of his
case by the presentee to Auchterarder, and the declaration of the
illegality of the Veto Act of 1834. 'Now,' he says, 'I felt more
deeply; and for at least one night--after reading the speech of Lord
Brougham and the decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterarder
case--I slept none.' Could he not, he reasoned with himself, do
something in the hour of danger to rescue the patrimony of his country
out of the hands of an alien aristocracy, which since 1712 had
obstinately set itself in hereditary opposition to the people? In the
morning he wrote a letter addressed to Lord Brougham, the grandson of
the historian Robertson, to which we shall have occasion later on
to refer in detail. This admirable piece of reasoning and clever
statement--the result of a week's work--was sent to Robert Paul, the
manager of the Commercial Bank in Edinburgh. By him its value was
quickly seen, and by the strenuous advice of Dr. Candlish it was at
once put in print. Four editions in the course of well-nigh as many
weeks proved its excellence; and it was fortunate enough to secure
encomiums from two men so different in their leanings as Daniel
O'Connell and Mr. Gladstone.
The writer who could at such a critical position produce a pamphlet of
this nature was, of course, a marked man. The leaders of the
Evangelical party of the Church in Edinburgh had been engaged in a
scheme for the starting of a paper. From the press of the capital, and
from such provincial organs as _The Aberdeen Herald_ and _The
Constitutional_, as edited by Mr. Adam and Mr. Joseph Robertson, the
'travelled thane Athenian Aberdeen' who drifted into the Crimean War
later on, and who drifted with the Parliament House party in a
reactionary ecclesiastical policy at this time, had been content to
draw such scanty information as he ever possessed on the real issues
at stake in the Church of Scotland. Indeed, his lordship had gone so
far as to taunt the Evangelical Party as composed but of the
intellectual _débris_ of the country, and of the 'wild men' in the
Church. Sir Robert Peel, who really knew nothing of the intricacies of
the question, was content to believe that there was a conspiracy to
defeat the law and to rend the constitution. But the ignorance of the
Premier and the taunt of Lord Aberdeen came but with an ill grace from
them when flung against such men as Sir David Brewster, Chalmers,
Welsh, Guthrie, Bonar, Duff, and Miller, and the whole intellectual
force of the country at large. Indeed, to the very last, the
indecision and the ignorance as to the state of the country shown by
Lord Aberdeen were but the natural results of his holding his
ecclesiastical conscience in fee from such men as Robertson of Ellon,
Paull of Tullynessle, and Pirie of Dyce--these bucolic personages,
'like full-blown peony-roses glistening after a shower,' whose triple
and conjunct capacity, joined to that of their master, might have been
cut, to borrow the eulogy of Sir James Mackintosh upon Burke, out of
the humblest of their rivals and never have been missed. It was really
high time that something should be done, when Lord Medwyn could pose
as an ecclesiastical scholar by a few garbled quotations from Beza,
professing to set in their true light the views held by the Reformers
upon patronage; and when these very extracts, together with the
copious errors of the press, had been worked up by Robertson of Ellon
to be quoted by Lord Aberdeen third-hand as an embodiment of oracular
learning and wisdom!
No apology, therefore, need here be made for the inclusion of an
extract from that remarkable work by Dr. William Alexander--_Johnny
Gibb_--to which we have before had occasion to refer, and which must
ever rank as the classic of the movement with which Miller's own name
is associated. It deals with the sort of windy pabulum then served up
by the Aberdeen papers to obscure the real issues, and it describes in
the raciest and most mellow style of the lamented writer the meeting
in the schoolhouse of Jonathan Tawse, at whose hospitable board are
assembled the three farmers and the local doctor. Readers in the North
of Scotland can from their own knowledge read much between the lines;
and they will not forget that Mr. Adam and Mr. Joseph Robertson were
the only two men who could be found with effrontery sufficient to
shake hands with Mr. Edwards in the all-too notorious induction at
Marnoch.
'Jonathan took up an Aberdeen newspaper, wherein were recorded
certain of the proceedings of the Evangelical ministers, who were
visiting different parishes for the purpose of holding meetings.
First he put on his "specs," and next he selected and read out
several paragraphs, with such headings as "THE SCHISMATICS IN
A----," "THE FIRE-RAISERS IN B----," and so on, winding up this
part with the concluding words of one paragraph, which were
these:--"So ended this compound of vain, false, and seditious
statements on the position of the Church, and which must have been
most offensive to every friend of truth, peace, or loyalty who
heard it."
"I say Amen to ilka word o' that," said Dr. Drogemweal. "Sneevlin'
hypocrites. That's your non-intrusion meetin's. It concerns every
loyal subject to see them pitten doon."
'"Here's fat the editor says, in a weel-reason't, and vera calm an'
temperate article," continued Jonathan--"he's speakin' o' the
fire-raisers": "How much reliance could be placed on the kind of
information communicated by these reverend gentlemen will be
readily imagined by such of our readers as have read or listened to
any of the harangues which the schismatics are so liberally dealing
forth. If simple laymen, in pursuing objects of interest or of
ambition, were to be guilty of half the misrepresentations of facts
and concealment of the truth which are now, it would seem, thought
not unbecoming on the part of _Evangelical_ ministers, they would
be justly scouted from society." "That's fat I ca' sen'in the
airrow straucht to the mark."'
"Seerly," interposed Mains, who had been listening with much
gravity.
"A weel-feather't shaft, tae," said Dr. Drogemweal.
'"An' it's perfectly true, ilka word o't. They're nae better o' the
ae han' nor incendiaries, wan'erin' here an' there to raise strife
amo' peaceable fowk; and syne their harangues--a clean perversion
o' the constitutional law, an' veelint abuse o' the institutions o'
the countra."'
How many specimens of that style of 'calm and temperate article' were
produced in the North, no one with a recollection for either history or
for humour need recall at this hour. Somewhat later, Miller could say
in _The Witness_ that in a few days he had clipped out of the papers
what he had seen written against such a man of position and courtesy as
Mr. Makgill Crichton of Rankeilour in the course of a fortnight. It
amounted to eleven feet six inches when pieced together, and was for
the most part gross abuse and vulgar personalities.
The hour, then, had come and the man. Miller was invited to Edinburgh
to meet the leaders of the Evangelical party, and he was offered the
position of editor of the newspaper, which started its first issue on
January 15, 1840, appearing bi-weekly upon Wednesdays and Saturdays.
At the end of the bank's financial year, he was presented by his
fellow-townsmen with a breakfast service of plate, and the presence
of his uncle Alexander was to Miller a circumstance of peculiar
satisfaction. In a few days later he was seated at the editorial desk.
For sixteen years he was with undiminished success to edit _The
Witness_. But here we pause. The conflict in which he was to engage
calls for a special chapter. The question has been approached from all
sides, civil as well as ecclesiastical. But it is fitting that here, at
least, an attempt be made to connect the struggle with the history and
the peculiar mental and moral characteristics of the Scottish people.
It will be seen that the question involves far-reaching, deep-rooted,
and closely connected points of issue. It will therefore be the attempt
of the next chapter to show the really national and democratic features
of the conflict, and to briefly indicate how the civil and religious
rights of the people, long before staked and won by the early
Reformers, were again, when surrendered by an alien nobility, saved for
them--from the point, at least, of abiding literature--by two men; who,
sprung themselves from the people, the one the son of a Cromarty sailor
and the other of an Aberdeenshire crofter, wrote the leaders in _The
Witness_ and _Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk_. The best years of Miller's
own life, sixteen years of unceasing turmoil and overwork, were spent
in making these issues abundantly clear to the people. No apology need
then be made for an effort to reset these positions in their historical
connection, and to exhibit the logical nexus of affairs from 1560 to
1843.