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