minds were nearly the antipodes of each other. And without robbing either of the guerdon justly due to great talents perseveringly and honourably exerted in a most honourable cause, it may be acknowledged, that while to Miller belongs the credit of that far-reaching sagacity which comprehended at a glance the future of the Free Church, and could define its peculiar sphere with an almost mathematical precision; to Candlish belongs the honour of having breathed into what might else have proved a mere inert mass of pretentious ecclesiastical machinery, the energy and resolution of his own dauntless, and restless as it is dauntless, spirit; and if occasionally, on field days, he boasted a larger muster-roll than was altogether warranted by facts, let men forget his error in his devotion—the ends he sought were at least always noble, if the means by which he sought them were not always equal to the ends. And yet, perhaps, it was well the impetuosity of Candlish was tempered and kept in check by the sagacity of Miller. Through a dearth of men either able or willing, we do not exactly presume to say which, Dr. Candlish has been necessitated to do much of a kind of work in church courts, usually left by a leader to his lieutenants. The consequence has been, that, occasionally forgetting the more exalted in the more subordinate position, he has been seen, as sometimes Napoleon's best generals were seen, compromising the common safety by a special im

petuosity. In point of fact, for a commander-in-chief he mingles too much in the ranks, and as a natural consequence, the smoke and tumult of the battle occasionally deprive him of that clearness of vision and serenity of soul so indispensable in the direction of all great contests, whether on the tented field or on the floor of a general assembly.

CHAPTER V.

EDINBURGH,

WHEN just attaining his majority, work failing in the North, Hugh Miller, bidding adieu to his beloved mother and his worthy uncles, sailed from his native town for the south of Scotland. On the evening of the fourth day from losing sight of the hill of Cromarty, he landed at Leith. After a somewhat hasty survey of a small property he was unfortunate enough to possess—a property not of the advantageous sort with which the freehold societies profess to invest the working classes, but a property reminding us rather of Rip Van Winkle's farm, the most pestilent bit of ground in the whole parish-Hugh Miller proceeded at once to the Scottish capital. While sauntering along the streets, admiring with a fresh eye the picturesque groups of ancient buildings with which that most magnificent of cities abounds as yet looking but little to the population, he was laid hold of by a slim lad in pale moleskins: it was William Ross; and during what remained of that night, the stone-cutter and the house-painter explored the city

together. With that true eye for the beautiful and the sublime, whether in art or nature, which never failed him, Hugh Miller at once detected what gives to Edinburgh its peculiar fascination. Like Jerusalem of old, beautiful for situation, that beauty is superlatively enhanced by the circumstance, that to the stranger it discloses at a glance, not one, but two cities, a city of the past and a city of the present. When Hugh Miller first visited Edinburgh, its ancient features were in a state of considerably more perfect preservation than they now are. Many mementos of the renown of centuries have disappeared within the last thirty-five years. No small portion of the old town now exists only in the recollections of the antiquary. As in the country, the small crofting of other days has given place to the large farm, so the memorials of her antiquity with which Edina was erewhile so thickly studded, have, in some of their most interesting features, been swept away by the march of modern improvement, which is yet in many instances not improvement. All old enough to remember the vanished glories, whose places these so-called improvements have usurped, are filled with feelings much akin to those which inspired such of the captivity of Judah as, recollecting the glory of the first temple, lived to witness and to share in the erection of the second.

Through the good offices of a friend, Hugh Miller procured work at a manor-house then being erected in

the vicinity of Niddry mill, and beneath the shade of Niddry woods did the Cromarty stone-cutter commence his labours. The squad with which he worked appears to have been tainted in even an extreme degree with the narrowness and exclusiveness common among the more ignorant class of operatives, and to them Miller became an object of undisguised hostility and dislike. The Norlander, in their opinion, if not chased back to his own cold clime, would carry home half the money of the country. This district into which the exigencies of his daily toil had brought him, extended Hugh Miller's acquaintance at once with natural and social phenomena. In the woods of Niddry he discovered not a little that had no existence two degrees farther north, and in the immediate neighbourhood of Niddry mill he met a rude and ignorant race still bearing the stain, if not the brand of slavery.

It will scarcely be believed that so late as 1842, when Parliament issued a commission to inquire into the results of female labour in the coal pits of Scotland, there was a collier, still living, that had never been twenty miles from the metropolis; who could state to the commissioners, that his father, his grandfather, and himself were slaves; and that he had wrought for years in a pit in the neighbourhood of Musselburgh where the majority of the miners were also serfs. How singular the anomalies and contradictions that, even in a