Cromarty stone-mason overboard whenever such a training and reading and writing as to he likes. have made these arts a pleasant possession to him, may be regarded as having had, in the matter of literary education, all the essential outfit. The rest is in his own power. All this, we say, Mr. Miller knows well; and if now, after fourteen years of celebrity as a journalist, a man of letters, and a geologist, he still reverts, in his intercourse with the public, to the circumstances of his former life, it is for a nobler reason than the desire of increased credit for himself. It is because, like Burns, he can regard the fact of having been one of the millions who earn their bread by manual toil, as, in itself, something to be spoken of with manly pleasure. It is because, reverting in his own memory to his past life, and finding that nearly one half the way through which that memory can travel lies through scenes of hard work in quarries, and on roadside moors, and among headstones in Scottish churchyards, he feels that it would be a kind of untruth, if, appearing in the character of a descriptive writer at all, he were to refrain from drawing his facts largely and literally from that part of his experience. Lastly, it is because, having thoroughly discussed with himself that very question of the mutual relations of school education and self education upon which we have been touching, he has come to certain conclusions upon it, which, in sober earnest, he thinks the story of his own life as a Cromarty stone-mason better fitted to illustrate than anything else he knows. Indeed, the whole notion of being unusually charitable or unusually complimentary to what are called "self-educated men," admits of question. This is the case now, at least; and especially as concerns Scotland. There has been far too much said of Burns's having been a ploughman, if anything more is meant than simply to register the fact, and keep its pictorial significance. Burns had quite as good a school education, up to the point where school education is necessary to fit for the general competition of life, as most of those contemporary Scottish youths had, whom the mere accident of twenty or thirty pounds more of family cash, with the paternal or maternal will to spend it in college fees, converted from farmer's sons like himself into parish clergymen, schoolmasters, medical men, and other functionaries of an upper grade. At this day, too, many Scottish mechanics, clerks, and grocers, have had just as good a school education as a considerable number of those who, in the English metropolis, edit newspapers, write books or paint Academy pictures. There are at this moment not a few gentlemen of the press in London, whom no one dreams of calling uneducated, or who, at least, never took that view of the subject themselves, who yet know nothing of Latin, could not distinguish Greek from Gaelic, might suppose syllogistic to be a species of Swiss cheese, and would blunder fearfully if they had to talk of conic sections. After all, the faculty of plain reading and writing in one's own language is As the title shows, it is this last reason, the grand separation between the educated in particular, that has prompted Mr. Miller's and the non-educated. All besides at present book, or, at least, that has been kept least, since books were invented and in- in view in its composition. Under the title creased-is very much a matter of taste, of My Schools and Schoolmasters; or, The perseverance, and apprenticeship in one di- Story of my Education, the book is really rection rather than in another. The funda- an autobiography. Written by Mr. Miller mental accomplishment of reading, applied in his fifty-second year, it is an account of continuously in one direction, produces a his whole life anterior to the period when Cambridge wrangler; applied in another, it public reputation evoked him from obscuturns out a lawyer; applied in many, it turns rity; that is, it closes with his thirty-eighth out a variously cultivated man. The best year, when he left Cromarty for Edinburgh. academic classes are but vestibules to the Mr. Miller had previously published occalibrary of published literature,-in which sional fragments from his autobiography; vestibules students are detained that they and, indeed, as has been stated, an autobiomay be instructed how to go farther; with graphic vein runs through most of his writthe additional privilege of hearing one un- ings, even those which are geological; but published book deliberately read to them, here, for the first time, we have a large porwhether they will or no, and of coming in tion of his autobiography complete. It is, living contact with the enthusiasm of its as all would anticipate, no ordinary book. writer. To have been in those vestibules Written with all Mr. Miller's skill and of literature is certainly an advantage; but power, and exhibiting all his characteristic a man may find his way into the library excellencies, it is about as interesting a piece and make very good use of what is there of reading as exists in the whole range of without having lingered in any of them. In English biographical literature. Its healthishort, whoever has received from schoolsness, its picturesqueness, its blending of the I solid and suggestive in the way of thought, of the others. There are few of the natural with all that is charming and impressive in sciences which do not lie quite as open to the description and narrative, make it a book working men of Britain and America, as geoMy work, then, if logy did to me. for all readers. It is calculated to please have not wholly failed in it, may be regarded the old as well as the young, and be no less as a sort of educational treatise, thrown into popular in England than in Scotland. But the narrative form, and addressed more espethough thus sure to attract generally as a cially to working men. They will find that a work of fine literary execution, and as the considerable portion of the scenes and incidents autobiography of a remarkable man, it is which it records read their lesson, whether of still an autobiography written with a special encouragement or warning, or throw their occasional lights on peculiarities of character or purpose. It is less an account of Mr. Mil- curious natural phenomena, to which their atler's whole life, than an account of what he tention might be not unprofitably directed. considers the process of his education. Pro- Should it be found to possess an interest to any ceeding on the idea, which he may well other class, it will be an interest chiefly derivaassume, that the last fourteen years of his ble from the glimpses which it furnishes of the life are regarded as a result, the steps inner life of the Scottish people, and its bearing towards the attainment of which cannot fail on what has been somewhat clumsily termed 'the condition-of-the-country-question.' My to be interesting to many, and especially to sketches will, I trust, be found true to fact and working men, he undertakes to shew honestly nature. And as I have never perused the autowhat these steps were. The very ambiguity biography of a working man of the more obof the title, My Schools and Schoolmasters, servant type, without being indebted to it for has its effect in relation to the writer's pur- new facts and ideas respecting the circumpose. Reading such a title before seeing stances and character of some portion of the the book itself, one might expect a series of people with which I had been less perfectly sketches of north country pedagogues, some- simply as the memoir of a protracted journey acquainted before, I can hope that, regarded what after the manner of Wilkie's paintings. through districts of society not yet very sedulousCatching the reader in this trap, Mr. Miller ly explored, and scenes which few readers have gains his first point. "Yes," he as much as had an opportunity of observing for themselves, says, addressing more particularly working my story may be found to possess some of the men, "there is the mistake. The word interest which attaches to the narrative of trav'schools' cannot be mentioned without call- ellers, who see what is not often seen, and ing up the idea of certain buildings where know, in consequence, what is not generally youths of different ages sit on forms to be taught; the word 'schoolmasters,' without calling up the idea of certain men in desks teaching in those buildings. This is a mistake, of which the story of my life is calculated, I think, to disabuse you. I have been at schools, but the best of them have not exactly been these; I have had my schoolmasters-good schoolmasters, too-but they have not been chiefly of that kind. My education has been mainly of a kind from which no one is debarred; and, as it may interest you to know what it has been, and where it is to be had, I propose to give an account of it." That this is exactly Mr. Miller's meaning, appears from his own express words in his preface. known." Bearing in mind this definition of the book,-regarding it, to use our own mode of describing it, as an account of the process by which a very notable result has been the name of Hugh Miller, once a Cromarty attained, that result being the addition of stone-mason, to the roll of eminent Scotchmen, we find in it, at the outset, a set of institute a similar process in his own behoof, particulars which (as many a one, eager to will think with a sigh) already contained the main elements of the result. In other Miller's Autobiography is his parentage and words, the first topic of interest in Mr. pedigree. The Hugh Miller was born in Cromarty in the is something bearing on the result even year 1802. Such is the first fact; and there here, if we knew how to bring it out. year 1802 can never come back again; neither can every working man be born in Cromarty. To be a Scotchman of the east coast,-to be one of that half Scandinavian population which inhabits the Scottish shores of the German ocean from Fife to Caithness, and so to have the chance of a bigger head "It has occurred to me that by simply laying before the working men of the country the Story of my Education,' I may succeed in first exciting their curiosity, and next, occasionally at least, in gratifying it also. They will find that by far the best schools I ever attended are schools open to them all,-that the best teachers I ever had are (though severe in their discipline) always easy of access, and that the special form, at which I was, if I may say so, most successful as a pupil, was a form to which I was drawn by a strong inclination, and a more massive build than fall to the but at which I had less assistance from my lot of average mortals, or even of average brother men, or even from books, than at any Britons, is, as some believe, itself a privilege Mr. Miller, however, is not only a Cromarty man; he is the descendant of a long line of Cromarty's most characteristic natives her sailors. As far back as the times of Sir Andrew Wood and the bold Bartons his ancestors had coasted along the Scottish shores; and during the generation or two immediately preceding his birth, hardly a man of them but died a sailor's death. His father, following the family career, had, after a hard and manly sea-faring life, become master of a vessel of his own, when in the mature prime of his age, the family fate overtook him. He was lost with his vessel in a storm off the Scottish coast, when his son was five years old. We know of no tribute of filial affection finer than that paid in the beginning of Mr. Miller's Autobiography to the memory of this father, whom he is just old enough to recollect. One sees him as he was, a noble genuine man, in sailor's garb, of nature. Most eminent Scotchmen, say | black type. His head would be a large one some, have come from the east coast, or in any Scottish parish,-not reaching the from certain districts of the Border. The dimensions of that of Chalmers; but larger "some" who say this, are, we fear, east considerably than that of Burns.* In short, coast people themselves, which may mar if Mr. Miller is an average specimen of a their testimony. It is, at all events, a fact Cromarty man, the men of Cromarty must for their budget, that Hugh Miller is an be a rather formidable race. East-coast man. What special type of the general east coast character belongs to Cromarty, or wherein a Cromarty man should differ from a Fife man, or an Aberdeen man, are points of local Ethnography which we are not qualified to discuss; though we believe there are notions even on these points. The traditions of Cromarty, as a fishing and trading town, go as far back as the Macbeth days; and any time within this century, we suppose, it has contained as many as two thousand inhabitants. It has produced, we have no doubt, many a stalwart fellow in its day; but Hugh Miller, we believe, is the first man of literary eminence to whom it can lay claim. Considering how slow the turn comes round for the appearance of a Scottish product of this kind out of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and one or two other favoured spots, both the town and the shire of Cromarty may think they have had good fortune. How far the Cromarty character-"one of the best sailors that ever sailed the istics, supposing them ascertained, are represented in Hugh Miller, how far he has brought the Cromarty genius into literature, it is for his fellow-townsmen, and not for us, to decide. Some physical traits, at least, which we suppose the Cromarty men share with their brethren of the east coast generally, he does seem to possess in a very pronounced manner. From direct indica tions in his books we gather that he is, as Burns was, a man of unusual personal strength. He speaks of "raising breast high the great lifting stone of the Dropping Cave." near Cromarty,-a feat which those who have seen the stone will be able to appreciate better than we can; and he speaks also of being able, as a mason, to raise weights single-handed which usually required two men. We gather also that phrenologists may place him among their large-brained men,-his hat, on one occasion during his tour in England, almost extinguishing a venturesome Englishman whom he inveigled into an exchange of head-coverings as they were walking together on a dusty road. In fact, not to beat about the bush, we have seen him, and can speak from personal observation on these points. He is a massive, rough-hewn, broad-chested man, upwards of five feet ten inches high,somewhat taller, therefore, than Burns was; from whom he also differs in being of the fair, whereas Burns was of the swarthy or Moray Firth;" one sees yet his sloop, just as it was nearly fifty years ago, with her two slim stripes of white on her sides, and her two square top-sails; and it is with a feeling almost of supernatural awe, as at a death of yesterday, that one follows the fated sloop from her last harbourage in the port of Peterhead out into that storm of November, 1807, in which she foundered. On the very evening when, so far as could afterwards be ascertained, Miller of Cromarty was lost, a strange thing happened in the long low house which he inhabited in Cromarty. A letter from him, written at Peterhead, had just arrived; there were no forebodings of harm, and his wife and child were sitting by the fire, the only person present besides being the servant girl. Here we quote from the Autobiography : * Mr. Miller himself, though not an implicit phrenologist, is a great observer of heads. When visiting Stratford-on-Avon he was particularly struck with the bust of Shakespeare in the church, thinking it, as we do, far likelier to be the true Shakespeare than the idealized portraits of the artists. Speaking of that bust he says, "The head, a powerful mass of brain, would require all Dr. Chalmers's hat; the forehead is as broad as that of the Doctor, considerably taller, and of more general capacity." In this we believe he is wrong. Whatever Shakeis not above average English size; and Mr. Miller's speare's head may have been, the head in that bust own hat would be much too large for it. The professed plaster casts of the bust are too massive. 1854. Hugh Miller of Cromarty. My mother was sitting beside the household fire, plying the cheerful needle, when the house door, which had been left unfastened, fell open, and I was despatched from her side to shut it. What follows must be regarded as simply the recollection, though a vivid one, of a boy who had completed his fifth year only a month before. Day had not wholly disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a gray haze spread a neutral tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the nearer ones comparatively distinct, when I saw at the open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered Hand hand and arm stretched towards me. 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 was fearfully startled, and ran shrieking to my mother, telling what I had seen; and the house-girl, whom she next sent to shut the door, apparently affected by my terror, also returned frightened, and said that she too had seen the woman's hand; which, And however, did not seem to be the case. finally, my mother, going to the door, saw nothing, though she appeared much impressed by the extremeness of my terror, and the minuteness of my description. I communicate the story as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting to explain it.” . This passage, here detached, takes, whe ther intentionally or not on Mr. Miller's part, a kind of ghastly connexion in the text, with the story of a previous shipwreck which happened to his father on a homeward voy age from the same port of Peterhead, almost exactly ten years before; on which occasion, though the master and the crew were saved, a woman and her child, who had been reluctantly taken aboard as passengers, were drowned and washed away. Besides this tinge of the supernatural mingling with the recollections of his father's death, there occurs one other incident in the record of the author's childhood, which, in these days of revived belief in such things, might be construed as indicating something unusual either in the "long low house," or in its boy in mate. The builder of the " long low house" was Mr. Miller's great grandfather, an old sailor named John Feddes, who had made a little money as one of the last of the buccaneers in the Spanish Main, and returned to Cromarty to enjoy it. This old patriarch had died considerably more than half a century before Mr. Miller's birth; but the tradition of him was still fresh in the house; and on one occasion his descendant had a sight of him. "One day when playing all alone at the stair foot-for the inmates of the house had gone out, -something extraordinary caught my eye on 177 the landing-place above; and, looking up, there Let all this pass for what it is worth; the : "A patient, hardy man, of thoughtful brow; With the noble memory of such a father After the death of his father, Mr. Miller, though still living with his mother in the "long low house," was chiefly under the care of two maternal uncles, who lived unmarried in the house of their parents. "Both of them," he says, "bore a marked individuality of character, and were much the reverse of commonplace or vulgar men." Their portraits are thus sketched : : lect of a whole parish, even in this style, was, down upon him complacently from the landafter all, something. But if Mr. M'Kenzie ing-place, it was because a portion of his was no oracle himself, he had a son-in-law other ancestor, the seer, looked out from his who made up for his deficiencies. During eyes. More prosaically, it results from this his incumbency of Nigg his youngest daugh- pedigree that Mr. Miller is not wholly ter had married one of his parishioners, a Scandinavian and sea-faring by descent, but wild young Highland farmer, of the clan has some Highland blood in him. Ross, called, from the colour of his hair, Donald Roy, or Donald the Red. For a great part of his life Donald Roy was no better than his neighbours, except at club playing, broadsword exercise, and other Highland sports. But about the time of the Revolution a great change came over him; religious convictions of a very different kind from those which had been the pulpit stock of his father-in-law, the curate, took possession of his wild Highland nature; and from "My elder uncle, James, added to a clear that period to his death, at a very advanced head and much native sagacity a singularly reage, Donald Roy was known all over Ross- tentive memory and great thirst of information. shire as a man of the same stamp as those He was a harness-maker, and wrought for the farmers of an extensive district of country; and older Presbyterian worthies of the south, as he never engaged either journeyman or apsuch as Welsh and Peden, in whom piety prentice, but executed all his work with his own assumed a character verging on the super- hands, his hours of labour, save that he indulged human. Anecdotes of Donald Roy and his in a brief pause as the twilight came on, and second sight still survive in various districts took a mile's walk or so, were usually protractof Ross-shire, which, if transferred to Peden ed from six in the morning till ten at night. or Cargill, would be found quite in keeping the time for reading, but he often found some Such incessant occupation of course left him litwith the strange stories which are told of one to read beside him during the day; and in their lives. All have heard of the story the winter evenings his portable bench used to made famous in the annals of the Non- be brought from his shop at the other end of the Intrusion controversy, how, when more than dwelling into the family sitting-room, and a hundred years ago, in obedience to the or- placed beside the circle round the hearth, ders of the moderate General Assembly of where his brother Alexander, my younger unthat time, the members of a Highland Pres- cle, whose occupation left his evenings free, bytery were proceeding, in defiance of the would read aloud from some interesting volume wishes of the people, to settle an unpopular ways at the opposite side of the bench, so as to for the general benefit,-placing himself alpresentee in a parish, they were terrified by share in the light of the worker. Occasionally the appearance of a single venerable man the family circle would be widened by the acwho rose up in the empty church, as the re- cession of from two to three intelligent neighpresentative of the absent parishioners, and bours, who would drop in to listen; and then protested against the deed, saying, that "if the book, after a space, would be laid aside, in they settled a man on the walls of that kirk, order that its contents might be discussed in the blood of the parish would be required at James always spent some time in the country conversation. In the summer months, uncle their hands." The parish was the parish of in looking after and keeping in repair the harNigg, in Ross-shire, and the protesting par-ness of the farmers for whom he wrought; and ishioner was Donald Roy. Of three granddaughters, whom he left orphans at his death, and all of whom remained true to the pious principles he had instilled into them, one married a tradesman in Cromarty, and one of her daughters became the second wife of the Cromarty ship-master and the mother of Hugh Miller. Thus, the fourth in descent in one line from old John Feddes, the Cr marty buccaneer, Mr. Miller is the fifth ind scent, in another line, from old Donald Roy, the Ross-shire seer. Persons skilled in this species of investigation might make an ingenious hypothesis, to the effect that when the little boy in the "long low house" saw his one ancestor, the buccaneer, looking during his journeys and twilight walks on these occasions there was not an old castle, or hillfort, or ancient encampment, or antique ecclesiastical edifice, within twenty miles of the town, which he had not visited and examined over and over again. He was a keen local antiquary, knew a good deal about the architectural styles of the various ages, at a time when these subjects were little studied or known, and possessed more traditionary lore, picked up chiefly in his country journeys, than any man I ever knew. What he once heard he never forgot, and the knowledge which he had acquired he could communicate pleasingly and succinetly, in a style which, had he been a writer of books, instead of merely a reader of them, would have had the merit of being clear and terse, and more laden with meaning than words. |