would describe its scenery; but to describe its scenery as he deemed description, such knowledge was necessary. From a peculiarity of his mental nature, manifested from the very earliest epoch, and not, as some have alleged, from an overweening fondness for those scientific pursuits with which his name has become so honourably associated, is he found so frequently treating literary questions in a semi-geological strain. His was preeminently a pictorial and analogical, rather than analytical mind; and being so, his geological studies were on all occasions of pre-eminent service, furnishing him with a perennial source of fresh and apposite illustration. In this pecular idiosyncrasy, we apprehend, is to be sought the wholeness of Hugh Miller's scientific speculations. With the positive school of philosophy he had no sympathy, being, in point of fact, the most conspicuous illustration of its falsity modern times have furnished. Instead of finding in Hugh Miller's works a winnowing of science from those philosophical and theological puzzles with which in earlier ages it was laden,—on the contrary, we find it oppressed with the same problems which, from the remotest antiquity, have engaged and exhausted the ingenuity of man-problems which baffled the acumen of the sages of Arabia thousands of years before they tasked the acumen of the doctors of the Sorbonne, or exercised the wits of the illuminati of our own age

while the positive philosophy does not encounter those difficulties, only because it wants courage to come abreast with them. It had been the dread of Hugh Miller, in entering upon his editorial duties, that he might possibly be deprived of the opportunities he had formerly enjoyed of prosecuting his favourite geological investigations. The first year of his connection with the Witness set these fears at rest. The brilliant success of his papers on the "Old Red Sandstone" showed how compatible, in his case at least, are the duties of the journalist with the tastes of the man of science.

Some, we know, for whom the records of the rocks have no charm, have lamented that so much of his time should have been given up to the stony science, thinking it might have been better spent upon topics of the day. In reply to such fault-finders, we have only to say, that on looking over that large mass of controversy upon questions of the hour which the Witness contains, and on which its editor long so freely lavished the opulence of his intellectual powers, he surely must have a most unhealthy relish for polemics, who would have desired any greater attention to them than they seem to have received. There is, however, a class of persons who, because the editor of the Witness was something more than the echo of the opinions of a coterie of Church leaders, a presbytery, or an assembly, see in that fact a want of interest in the pet schemes of his

party. Such is ever the fate of the man of superior powers. He is not absorbed by a special pursuit. A cause which has swallowed up the entire energies of the ordinary man, can have justice done it by the extraordinary, and yet leave him leisure for devotion to other themes, which it may be supposed by the fanatic bear no relation to what should have been the absorbing passion of his life. But so far, therefore, from lamenting Hugh Miller's devotion to science, we believe mainly to that devotion we owe it, that the magnificent powers with which he was gifted budded and bloomed to the last. Had it been possible for him to have lost that taste for those studies nursed in his many wanderings, until it had become an overmastering passion, and sunk down into the mere party leader— the fighting man of his Church-he might indeed oftener have received the bigot's huzza, but he would have dwarfed his highest endowments. Operating under such conditions, that purely illustrative and beautifully analogical power which he possessed, would have borne no more likeness to the native faculty, than the stunted and doddered oak upon the blasted heath bears to the monarch of the forest in his pristine glory;

"The form of beauty smiling at his heart,"

must have drooped and withered beneath that wintry sky.

CHAPTER XII.

STATE CARPENTERS.

"THE quarrel among the Scotch parsons,' 99 which English statesmen expected the decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterarder case would effectually set at rest, after a brief breathing-time became only all the more portentous in consequence of that decision. It had not been anticipated the judgment of the Court of Session would have been affirmed in the face of so influential a dissent as Lords Fullarton, Glenlee, Moncrieff, Cockburn, and Jeffrey. And though anticipation was disappointed by a tribunal from whose decision there lay no appeal, the Church was not disposed to accept either Lords Brougham or Cottenham as true exponents of the polity of the Scottish Establishment. In point of fact, the evangelical party looked upon Lord Brougham, whose lead Lord Cottenham seemed implicitly to have followed, as not an independent exponent of the principles of their Church, but simply the echo of the policy of his great relative, Principal Robertson. To them it seemed the historian's literary eminence veiled the odiousness of his ecclesiastical policy, and in the

shadow of a great name the ex-chancellor forgot his own brilliant antecedents. Long years of earnest toil in behalf of popular rights, it was thought, might have inspired some other feeling than hostility to a principle that aimed to carry into the Church a measure of that liberal policy of which, in other days, Harry Brougham's name had been the symbol. Much of the power of Hugh Miller's first pamphlet springs from the dexterity and adroitness with which his lordship's political and ecclesiastical opinions are pitted against each other. With the more logical, or the more earnest of the whig school of politicians, such considerations would doubtless have their force.

It was, however, the misfortune of the evangelical section of the Establishment, that it should have entered upon its crusade in behalf of spiritual independence while its political antagonists were in power. Fully more than three-fourths of the movement party in the Church of Scotland belonged to the conservative camp. The government of Lord Melbourne looked upon Dr. Chalmers as not merely a political, but almost a personal foe. Animated by such feelings, mutual distrust was inevitable. It was no secret to the whig cabinet, that the party which now approached the treasury in behalf of their favourite schemes of Church extension and spiritual independence, sighed for the hour that would dismiss those now besought to redress their grievances