IN EDINBURGH--LAST YEARS
'In close fights a champion grim,
In camps a leader sage.'
SCOTT.
'We have had,' says Dr. Guthrie in a letter dated 6th September 1839,
'a meeting about our newspaper. Miller, I may say, is engaged, and will
be here, I expect, in the course of two or three weeks. His salary is
to begin with £200, and mount with the profits of the paper. I think
this too little, but I have no doubt to see it double that sum in a
year or two--Johnstone to be the publisher, we advancing £1000, and he
will need other two. I am down with Brown, Candlish, and Cunningham for
£25 each. A few individuals only have as yet been applied to, and
already £600 of the £1000 has been subscribed.' His household he left
behind him in Cromarty for the time, and he lodged in St. Patrick
Square. Fortunate was it for the people that at the right time its ear
should have been caught by such a writer, one whose voice in the arena
was at once recognised by the individuality of its tone. The Edinburgh
press had long been held by the Moderate party, and the belief had been
that the conflict was a mere clerical striving for power. It remained
for Miller to educate the party, and to such effect was this done that,
while the non-intrusion petition to Parliament in 1839 from Edinburgh
had borne but five thousand signatures, the number, says Robert
Chambers, mounted in the first year of _The Witness_ to thirteen
thousand. It was clear to all Scotland that there was a new Richmond in
the field. It is the more necessary to insist on this, because the
clerical mind, which after Malebranche is too prone to see everything
in itself and its own surroundings, has never fully confessed the
services to the country of the layman. As Guthrie points out, a silence
is maintained all through Buchanan's _Ten Years' Conflict_ on Miller.
This he regrets, not only on the ground that it would be Hamlet without
the Prince of Denmark, but also for its missing the cardinal principle
that at such a time the press and public meetings form the most
influential of factors. This such a kindred spirit and public orator as
Guthrie is quick to see, nor does he go beyond the facts of the case,
or the judgment now of the country, in maintaining that 'Miller did
more than any dozen ecclesiastical leaders, and that, Chalmers
excepted, he was the greatest of all the men of the Ten Years'
Conflict.'
He certainly was no half advocate or mere 'able editor' in the
Carlylean phrase. If Chalmers, Candlish, and Cunningham were the
leaders in the ecclesiastical courts, Murray Dunlop the jurist, Miller
was the pen-man of the party. 'His business,' says Guthrie, the orator
of the movement, 'was to fight. Fighting was Miller's delight. On the
eve of what was to prove a desperate conflict, I have seen him in a
high and happy state of eagerness and excitement. He was a scientific
as well as an ardent controversialist; not bringing forward, far less
throwing away, his whole force on the first assault, but keeping up the
interest of the controversy, and continuing to pound and crush his
opponents by fresh matter in every succeeding paper. When I used to
discuss questions with him, under the impression, perhaps, that he had
said all he had got to say very powerful and very pertinent to the
question, nothing was more common than his remarking, in nautical
phrase, "Oh, I have got some shot in the locker yet--ready for use, if
it is needed"!'
And that it was needed, in his own and the Church's interest, the
pamphlets of abuse by which he was attacked, and which would form a
small library, would remain to show. Thus he was really, all the more
from his isolated position, as we shall see, indebted to what Professor
Masson, in an appreciation of him in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for 1865,
describes as the Goethean 'demonic element.' He had a better knowledge,
he shows, of the country and its ecclesiastical history than was
possessed by his clerical colleagues, and along with this went what he
calls 'a tremendous element of ferocity, more of the Scandinavian than
the Celt, leaving his enemy not only slain but battered, bruised and
beaten out of shape.' This, though in a sense exaggerated, is true to
the extent that he entered the lists not as a mere servant, but as a
convinced defender of the liberties of the people. To touch on anything
that infringed upon the Presbyterian history of the country--be it by
the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Sutherland, or other site-refusing
landlords of the day, or by some flippant alien and Episcopalian
pamphleteer among the briefless of the Parliament House, was certainly
to court a bout from which the unwary disputant emerged in a highly
battered condition. Yet his pugnacity was really foreign to the nature
of the man. His surviving daughter informs the writer he was 'a very
mild and gentle father, and his whole attitude was one depressed with
humility.' It was, however, well for site-refusers and factors riding
on the top of their commission from absentee landlords to feel that
attacks upon their policy in _The Witness_ were not to be lightened by
any hopes of an apology or by appeals to fear. 'The watchman,' he
writes in a letter before us, dated 9th October 1840, 'is crying
half-past twelve o'clock, and I have more than half a mile to walk out
of town between two rows of trees on a solitary road. Fine opportunity
for cudgel-beating factors I carry, however, with me a five-shilling
stick, strong enough to break heads of the ordinary thickness, and like
quite as well to appeal to an antagonist's fears as to his mercy.'
_The Witness_ started with a circulation of six hundred. Its position
among the Scottish papers was at once assured, and no greater proof of
the personality of the editor and the quality of 'the leaders' remains
than in the curious fact that, now after half a century, to the great
mass of the people his name has been not Miller, nor Mr. Miller, but
Hugh Miller. As in the similar case of John Bright the people seized on
the fact that here was a writer and speaker sprung from themselves, and
his christian name was as familiar as his surname. Yet, curiously
enough, from first to last he never believed in the profession of an
editor, and from the 'new-journalism' of the paragraph and the
leaderette he would have turned in disdain. Nothing but the fact that
he felt convinced of his mission would have induced him to leave
Cromarty for the post. 'I have been,' he could truly say, 'an honest
journalist. I have never once given expression to an opinion which I
did not conscientiously regard as sound, nor stated a fact which, at
the time at least, I did not believe to be true.' He never mastered, or
felt it necessary to master, the routine details of the business, for
the paper was read not for its Parliamentary reports, or the exposition
of party politics, but for the essays, sketches, or leaders which were
known to be by him. Accordingly the mere fluent production of 'copy,'
and the diurnal serving up of the editorial thunder by which the
members of the fourth estate fondly delude themselves that they lead
public opinion, never really came naturally to him. He prepared himself
carefully for his work; and perhaps the bi-weekly issue of the paper
and its peculiar nature lessened the strain upon the editor. His
successor in the editorial chair of the paper, Dr. Peter Bayne, in the
preface to Miller's _Essays_ (1862) says:
'He meditated his articles as an author meditates his books or a
poet his verses, conceiving them as wholes, working fully out their
trains of thought, enriching them with far brought treasures of
fact, and adorning them with finished and apposite illustration. In
the quality of _completeness_ those articles stand, so far as I
know, alone in the records of journalism. For rough and hurrying
vigour they might be matched, or more, from the columns of the
_Times_; in lightness of wit and smart lucidity of statement they
might be surpassed by the happiest performances of French
journalists--a Prévost-Paradol, or a St. Marc Girardin; and for
occasional brilliancies of imagination, and sudden gleams of
piercing thought neither they nor any other newspaper articles,
have, I think, been comparable with those of S. T. Coleridge. But
as complete journalistic essays, symmetrical in plan, finished in
execution, and of sustained and splendid ability, the articles of
Hugh Miller are unrivalled.'
Certainly few modern editors could produce such a leader as he did on
Dugald Stewart (Aug. 26, 1854), or upon the _Encyclopoedia Britannica_
(April 30, 1842), or could, finding themselves for a day in London,
'when time hung heavy on my hands,' buy a cheap reprint of Eugene Sue's
_Wandering Jew_ and convert its hurried perusal into a capital paper on
the conflict between Continental Ultramontanism and Liberalism. The
individuality of the writer and the tenacity with which he held to his
opinions gave the journal a tone naturally impossible to an ordinary
party paper. The great mass of the readers of _The Witness_ were of
course Liberals, yet he strenuously contended against making it an
organ of any political party. Part of the prospectus ran--'_The
Witness_ will not espouse the cause of any of the political parties
which now agitate and divide the country. Public measures, however,
will be weighed as they present themselves, in an impartial spirit, and
with care proportioned to their importance.' He had noticed, he said,
the Church of Scotland for a time converted by Conservatism into a mine
against the Whigs, and he was determined that no 'tool-making
politician' should again convert it to a party weapon. It was to remain
the organ of 'the Free Church people against Whig, Tory, Radical, and
Chartist.' So careful was he of the good name of the paper that he
'often retained communications beside him for weeks and months, until
some circumstance occurred that enabled him to determine regarding
their real value.' Chalmers read the paper to the last with approval,
and this was a source of joy and support to Miller. Nothing but such a
wise supervision could have piloted _The Witness_ through the abuse and
the inventions of the Tory organs. When the _Edinburgh Advertiser_, of
June 13, 1848, could try to improve on that rhetorical flight of
Barrère, characteristically fathered by its author on 'an ancient
author,' about the tree of liberty being watered by the blood of
tyrants, by an assertion that _The Witness_ had 'menaced our nobles
with the horrors of the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied
its nightly task, and the bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled in
buttonholes on the streets of Paris!'--proof was naturally wanting. A
phantom of a 'grey discrowned head sounding hollow on the scaffold at
Whitehall' was also served up by that paper, in its devotion to the
house of Buccleuch, as a threat in which the irate scribe professed to
detect a subtle attack on the House of Hanover in the interests of the
Free Church. 'I am a Whig, in politics,' he said, 'never a Radical or
Conservative.' He had no cheap sympathy with the working men, for them
he had seen on their worst side. 'Three-fourths of the distress of the
country's mechanics (of course not reckoning that of the unhappy class
who have to compete with machinery) and nine-tenths of their
vagabondism will be found restricted to inferior workmen, who like
Hogarth's "Careless Apprentice," neglected the opportunity of their
second term of education. The sagacious painter had a truer insight
into this matter than most of our modern educationists.' He was no
believer in household, much less in universal, suffrage, and as an
admirer of Delolme's views on our constitution, the radical he regarded
as a 'political quack,' convinced as he was that 'those who think must
govern those that toil.' But he advocated, along with Guthrie, a system
of undenominational education of a kind pretty much what is now
established, a moderate extension of the franchise, abolition of
entail, and the game laws. The Maynooth grant and Macaulay he opposed.
He was an Oliverian for Ireland, and the cause of much trouble in the
most distressful country he viewed as associated with that subsidy,
which he would have preferred to see converted into a grant for
science.
Indeed, like most of his countrymen he had a strong view of historical,
as distinguished from mere party, conservatism. The last has of course
been rendered simply impossible in Scotland by the history and the
ecclesiastical tenets of the country, but he ever carried about him
something like the conviction of Dr. Livingstone, that the common
people of Scotland had read history and were no levellers. Thus he
held, like Burke, to what Mr. Morley calls 'the same energetic feeling
about moral laws, the same frame of counsel and prudence, the same love
for the slowness of time, the same slight account held of mere
intellectual knowledge.' This historic conservatism of Burke would be
taken by most Scotchmen as a pretty good basis for reasoned Liberalism,
and the fixity of Miller's main positions only exposed him the more to
the wearisome Tory vocabulary of 'high-flyer, fire-raiser, fanatic,'
etc. Admirably in the _Letter to Brougham_ does he seize on the ground
of the political Liberalism of Scotland:--
'I, my Lord, am an integral part of the Church of Scotland, and of
such integral parts, and of nothing else, is the body of this
Church composed; nor do we look to the high places of the earth
when we address ourselves to its adorable Head. The Earl of Kinnoul
is not the Church, nor any of the other patrons in Scotland. Why,
then, are these men suffered to exercise, and that so exclusively,
one of the Church's most sacred privileges? You tell us of
"existing institutions, vested rights, positive interests." Do we
not know that the slave-holders, who have so long and so stubbornly
withstood your Lordship's truly noble appeals in behalf of the
African bondsman, have been employing an exactly similar language
for the last fifty years; and that the onward progress of man to
the high place which God has willed him to occupy has been impeded
at every step by existing institutions, vested rights, positive
interests?'
Bitter words, surely, all this for the ecclesiastical wirepullers of
1874, and inheritors of the policy of the Hopes and Muirs, when in
approaching the Government with a statement of the intolerable strain
of patronage, they tabled that same _Letter to Brougham_!
To the last, Miller clung to 'the Established principle.' This need not
seem wonderful. The Free Church he regarded as the Church of Scotland
in all but the state tie, the more so that the coercion by the civil
courts had not failed to impress him with the conviction that the
Headship, as stipulated for the Scottish Establishment by the Treaty of
Union, though defeated by Bolingbroke and lost in the stagnation of the
eighteenth century, had passed as an integral part of her constitution
to the Free Church. The difficulty attaching to his position proved an
unfortunate source of tension between him and some of the leaders, and
to this was due that lamentable quarrel with Dr. Candlish which he
carried to his grave, and which perhaps broke his heart, for he was
what Lord Cockburn had called their mutual friend Murray Dunlop, 'the
purest of all enthusiasts' and though Miller triumphed absolutely, yet
it was not in human nature to forget that the attack was, however
sincere, an attack upon cherished convictions.
There can be, therefore, no good now in minimising the fact that Dr.
Candlish, in his zeal to secure a political and tempting opportunity
against the Tory party, was led to enter on a quarrel with Miller. The
action really amounted to a motion of no confidence in his editorial
management. He proposed to centralise the Church press, and to secure
the intrusion of a sub-editor on the existing staff, and the conversion
of the paper into an explicit and active party organ. But by this time
Miller had become one of the proprietors, by undertaking to pay back
by instalments the thousand pounds advanced by Johnstone to the
subscribers, with the interest, year by year, of the unpaid portion
till the whole debt should be extinguished. The most objectionable
feature was the proposal to secure the services of some smart
Parliament House 'able editor.' _The Witness_ had been accused of
'preferring Protestantism to Macaulay, and damaging the elections.' In
this was shown the cloven foot, for it was an attempt to run the paper
for the Whigs, and to render it the organ of the legal lights of the
Parliament House in pursuit of official posts and spoil, of which
Miller justly thought they had enough. Besides, the fall of a
Government would mean the fall of that Government paper, and thus its
influence as the organ of Free Churchmen would be damaged. Already the
paper had parted with one of its best men who had been attracted to
_The Times_, and in the whole scheme Miller saw 'a censorship; and the
censor, assisted by the nice taste and tact of the Parliament House
editor, is to be Dr. Candlish.' But, he asks, 'who was to control Dr.
Candlish?' He could not see the paper jockeyed for a Government, and he
stood aloof from 'Exhalations blown aslant, over the faces of even the
Evangelical Churches, from the bogs and fens of a hollow Liberalism
that professes to respect all religions, and believes none.' He felt
that he had the people behind him, and 'possessing their confidence, I
do not now feel justified in retiring from my post: Dr. Candlish and
his Parliament House friends are not the ministers and people of the
Free Church of Scotland--"of wiles, more inexpert, I boast not,"--the
difference must either close entirely, or the people of Scotland must
be made fully acquainted with the grounds on which it rests.' The
unfortunate rupture closed by the very pointed question by Chalmers,
'Which of you could direct Hugh Miller?'
Meanwhile, in the Highlands and Islands, things were for a time going
hard with the now disestablished Church. In some cases they had to
preach 'where the snow was falling so heavily upon the people, that
when it was over they could scarcely distinguish the congregation from
the ground, except by their faces.' Baird of Cockburnspath had passed
away in a room, 'a few inches above which were the slates of the roof,
without any covering, and as white with hoar frost within as they were
white with snow without. His very breath on the blankets was frozen as
hard as the ice outside.' At Canonbie, Guthrie had passed Johnny
Armstrong's Tower, and preached in wind and rain to a large
congregation, 'old men, apparently near the grave, all wet and benumbed
with the keen wind and cold rain.' In Cromarty, Miller's old friend
Stewart was now preaching in the factory close, and there, in the
summer of 1843, after a night of rain had swept the streets, his mind
reverts to the congregations over Scotland in the open air--'I do
begrudge the Moderates our snug, comfortable churches. I begrudge them
my father's pew. It bears date 1741, and has been held by the family,
through times of poverty and depression, a sort of memorial of better
days, when we could afford getting a pew in the front gallery. But
yonder it lies, empty within an empty church, a place for spiders to
spin undisturbed, while all who should be occupying it take their
places on stools and forms in the factory close.' The subtle mark of
Scottish _gentility_ in the allusion to the pew will not fail to
strike the reader. Let it not be said that it savours of
'gigmanity'--in that standing bugbear of Carlyle!
In 1844 he set out on a geological ramble round the Hebrides in the
floating manse, '_The Betsey_,' by which the Church served the islands
in the west, owing to the refusal of sites by Lord Macdonald and
others. The yacht was but thirty feet by eleven, and there with his old
Cromarty friend Swanson, the 'outed' minister of the Small Isles, he
learned the hardships to which the miserable policy of the landlords
had exposed the poor Highlanders. But if 'the earth was the _lairds'_
and the fulness thereof,' the water was not! The building in which
the congregation met was of turf--'the minister encased in his
ample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by a
genuine sou'wester, of which the broad posterior rim sloped half a yard
down his back; and I, closely wrapped up in my grey maud, which proved,
however, a rather indifferent protection, against the penetrating
powers of a Hebridean drizzle.' In none of his works does he exhibit a
happier descriptive view than in _The Cruise of the Betsey_, though in
popularity it has been surpassed by his _First Impressions of England_,
where he records the results of an eight weeks' tour, in 1845, from
Newcastle to London, passing York, Birmingham, and Stratford on the
way. In 1847 he published his _Footprints of the Creator_, in reply to
the _Vestiges_ by Robert Chambers, in which he seeks to controvert the
theory of development, at least in the form in which it was then
presented, by attempting to prove the fishes and the fossils of the Old
Red to be as advanced in character as those now existing. A racy sketch
on _The Geology of the Bass_ formed part of a contribution to a work
then issued, dealing with the history, botany, and zoology of the Bass
Rock. The copyright of this he reserved with a view to its subsequent
incorporation into a long-projected geological survey of Scotland. But
this cherished idea he never lived to accomplish, though such a work
from his hand would have been well-nigh final and perfect in its
descriptive graces.
He was still in the enjoyment of his great physical power in spite of
the severe strain to which his editorial and literary labours exposed
him, added to as these were by his appearances in London and elsewhere
as a public lecturer. As an exponent of science he could attract an
audience in Exeter Hall of five thousand persons, whose attention he
held to the close in spite of his northern accent; though perhaps this,
like the Fifeshire speech of Chalmers and the Annandale tongue of
Carlyle, may have given an extra charm to the individuality of the
lecturer. The quarrel with Candlish had thinned the ranks of some of
his friends, nor did he ever draw to the circle of Edinburgh as he had
done to those in Cromarty. He was not to be easily got at by the
eminent men who sought his acquaintance, yet it is with pleasure we
catch occasional glimpses of him in the society of the best that either
Edinburgh or London could produce. Stewart in Cromarty had passed away,
in 1847, during the prosecution to him of a call to St. George's to
succeed Candlish, who had been translated to the college chair left
vacant by Chalmers. None of his friends were nearer to him than
Mackgill-Crichton of Rankeillour in Fife, and there we find him one
Christmas along with Sir David Brewster and Guthrie. Both Miller and
his host were men of great physical powers, and--as Professor Masson
notes--the geologist had a habit of estimating men by their physique.
Crichton had narrated how he had started by the side of the mail coach
as it passed his gates, and after a run of twenty miles he had been the
first at the ferry. 'A horse could do more than either of you,' was the
amused rejoinder of Brewster.
The issue of his _Schools and Schoolmasters_ (1854), republished from
the columns of his paper, brought him warm encomiums from Carlyle,
Robert Chambers, and others. Miller in politics and other points
differed strongly from Chambers, and of course at this time the secret
of the authorship of the _Vestiges_ had not been divulged. Yet
beautifully does Chambers, to whom Scottish publishing and periodical
literature owes so much, refer to the early days in Cromarty in
comparison with his own struggles in Peebles. Readers who may have not
quite forgiven some passages in Chambers's _History of the Rebellion of
1745_ will doubtless soften their asperity after reading Chambers's
account of his struggling through a whole set of the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_ which he had in a lumber garret,--setting out at sixteen,
'as a bookseller with only my own small collection of books as a
stock--not worth more than two pounds, I believe, quickly independent
of all aid--not all a gain, for I am now sensible that my spirit of
self-reliance too often manifested itself in an unsocial, unamiable
light, while my recollections of "honest poverty" may have made me too
eager to attain and secure worldly prosperity. Had I possessed uncles
such as yours, I might have been much the better of it through life.'
The close was cheered by the thought that he had fairly earned the
admiration and confidence of his country. Yet nothing that could in any
way fetter his editorial independence or freedom of action could he
permit. When the money invested in _The Witness_ was offered to him by
Chalmers it was firmly declined, and the proposal to requite his
services to the country by providing him with a residence he would
not allow. 'I know,' he said, 'that as the defender of Free Church
principles my intentions have been pure and loyal, but I am not quite
sure I have been successful in doing the right thing, nor have I done
anything that is worthy of such consideration from my friends. I
believe my way is to make yet.' The same was his answer to a proposal
to allow his name to stand for election as Lord Rector of Marischal
College in Aberdeen; he met it pretty much in the vein of Carlyle at
Edinburgh, when he felt that here was a generation in young Scotland
rising up who seemed to say that he had not altogether, after a
hard-spent day, been an unprofitable servant. Time had softened the
ecclesiastical asperities of other years, and in 1853 Lord Dalhousie
wrote to Lord Aberdeen to secure his election for the vacant Chair of
Natural History in Edinburgh. But it fell to Edward Forbes. Again he
was singled out by Lord Breadalbane, in 1855, and he was offered the
post of Distributor of Stamps for Perthshire, an office which would to
him have been a comfortable sinecure, securing alike competence and
much leisure. For twenty-eight years Wordsworth in Westmoreland filled
such a post, and Miller's banking experiences would have fitted him
perfectly for it. But he felt that a man turned fifty could not take up
a new vocation with success. That in this he was too modest there can
be no doubt; but after a brief consideration he made up his mind to
decline. 'I find,' he said, 'my memory not now so good as it was
formerly. I forget things which I was wont to remember with ease. I am
not clear, in such circumstances, about taking upon me any money
responsibility.'
In fact, the long and severe strain of sixteen years had told. Of the
extraordinary memory whose failure he regrets, Guthrie supplies a
forcible example. In the shop of Johnstone the publisher a discussion
turned on some debate in the Town Council, when Miller said it reminded
him of a scene in Galt's _Provost_. He repeated the passage, halting at
the speech of the convener of the trades, but was evidently vexed at
the temporary breakdown. He got a copy from the front shop, and turned
up the passage. Then they learned that, though it was fifteen years
since last he had seen the book, he had repeated page after page
_verbatim_.
The year 1856 was one remarkable for garotte robberies. This awakened
in the overtaxed brain of Miller a fear for his museum of geological
specimens which he had housed for himself at Shrub Mount, Portobello.
The last four years of his life he had spent there, and often he would
leave the house and return late in the evening after hours of
investigation of the coast line and geological features of Leith
and the surrounding country. He knew his Edinburgh thoroughly; some
of his happiest papers are to be read in his _Edinburgh and its
Neighbourhood_; and it was after one of these excursions that Sir
Archibald Geikie had seen him, as he describes in the reminiscence to
be found in the last pages of this work. The fear of burglars had taken
hold firmly of his imagination, and he resumed the habit of bearing
fire-arms which he had begun at Cromarty when carrying the money of the
bank between that town and Tain. The inflammation of the lungs in his
early days as a mason had again at intervals returned, and his sleep
was broken by dreams of such a harassing nature that he would wake in
the morning to examine his clothes, in the belief that he was now the
victim of evil spirits. In such a condition it was not unnatural that
his mind should take a colour from other days, where the reader may
remember his own account of seeing the figure at the door after his
father's death. Professor Masson, we see, notes this point, and he
believes that Miller felt a strange fascination for all stories of
second-sight. Though he never wrote or spoke of such, except in the
sober tone of science, yet 'my impression,' he says, 'is that Hugh
Miller did all his life carry about him, as Scott did, but to a greater
extent, a belief in ghostly agencies of the air, earth, and water,
always operating, and sometimes revealing themselves. One sees his
imagination clinging to what his reason would fain reject.' The only
hope lay in a total cessation from all work, but this was found
impossible through the almost second nature which over-exertion had
become to him. He had also a rooted dislike for all medicines, and it
was with difficulty that he was induced to put himself under the
management of Dr. Balfour and Professor Miller. The last day of his
life was given to the revision of the proof-sheets of his _Testimony of
the Rocks_, and in the evening he turned over the pages of Cowper,
whose works had ever been among his standard favourites. By a curious
fatality his eye rested on _The Castaway_, written by the poet in a
similar mental condition, and which for sustained force and limpid
expression is unrivalled as a religious lyric. He retired to rest
on the night of the 24th December 1856. Next morning, his body,
half-dressed, was found with a bullet from a revolver through his left
lung. He had lifted a heavy woven jersey over his chest before he
fired, which showed that death had not been accidental. On a table a
loose sheet of paper was found on which had been written these lines to
his wife:--
'DEAREST LYDIA,--My brain burns, I _must_ have _walked_; and a
fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought.
God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me.
Dearest Lydia, dear children, farewell. My brain burns as the
recollection grows. My dear, dear wife, farewell.
HUGH MILLER.'
It fell to Dr. Guthrie, in whose church of Free St. John's the deceased
had been an office member, to apprise the widow of the real nature of
the case; and in order to secure her sanction for a _post-mortem_
examination the above letter had to be produced, showing that his
purpose had been executed almost before the ink was dry. On the 26th
the verdict was issued:--'From the diseased appearances found in the
brain, taken in connection with the history of the case, we have no
doubt that the act was suicidal, under the impulse of insanity.' His
funeral was the largest Edinburgh had seen since that of Chalmers, and
by his side in the Grange Cemetery he was laid. To the mass of his
countrymen abroad he was the greatest of living Scotchmen. His works
had given him a European reputation in science, while to those at home
the work he had accomplished as a tribune of the people had given him a
position second only to that of Guthrie.
A generation has arisen since which hears but by vague report the
principles for which the men of 1843 contended. It takes many a man to
fall in the ditch before glorious revolutions can successfully march
over in their pumps and silk stockings, giving their victorious
three-times-three. It has been sought to minimise these issues, to
explain them away after the manner of 'able editors' and complacent
philosophers cheerfully 'at ease in Zion,' and to maintain, with the
hardy gravity of ignorance, that the combatants really knew not what
they fought for--the Headship of Christ, Anti-Patronage, or resistance
to the civil courts. Similar futilities we have seen ventilated over
the American Civil War. The North, say the philosophic thinkers, or
tinkers, did not know whether it fought for the preservation of the
Union or against slavery. Such speculations are too thin to carry much
weight. In both cases many went to their grave for what they believed
to be principle, and all such men may be safely trusted to have reached
some conclusions and clear issues. These issues obviously all met;
after Auchterarder on the one hand, and South Carolina on the other,
had led the way, no such easy subterfuge was possible for either party.
The lesson then learned at such a cost might never have been necessary,
with a better adjustment of the political balance, which has been again
found wanting and craves a final and a rational settlement. What
Fairfoul in 1662 told Middleton had been simply again repeated in 1843
by Muir and Hope, who held the ear of Sir James Graham, to whom Peel
had resigned the whole management of Scottish affairs. For all that
Graham knew of them, Peel might as well have left them to a foreigner.
It took the death of thousands of Irishmen in the potato famine of 1847
to convince the overfed John Bull of even the barest existence of an
Irish Question, and many a man went to his grave before Lord Aberdeen,
Peel, Graham, and other official people could learn for themselves the
true condition of Scotland. Then it was too late, and their regrets
were vain. The bill of Bolingbroke brought in, as Burnet said, to
weaken the Scottish Church, had produced its logical effects in
widening the gulf between the people and the nobility of Scotland;
education at Eton, Harrow, and the English Universities had done the
rest. Carlyle is known to have regarded the action of the Church in
1843 as the greatest thing in his time; the sole survivor of the Peel
ministry, Mr. Gladstone, has expressed the same opinion; while the
critical, wiry, and alert little Jeffrey was 'proud of his country.' It
bears to-day the mark very strongly of Hugh Miller. Nor need the
workman be ashamed of his work--from which, therefore, let him not be
separated.