asks our homage as for one of the greatest of Scotch theologians. Others might ransack the rolls of continental, of English, or of Scottish ecclesiastical history for the chief of sacred orators. Hugh Miller found that chief in the friend of his youth. In after years he enjoyed abundant opportunities and ample leisure to correct or modify the partialities of youthful friendship. But in life's gloaming, as in life's noon, Stewart of Cromarty was still the prince of preachers.

As might have been anticipated, such a man was not a tuft-hunter. In the zenith of his fame, no persuasion could induce him to go even for a single day, though often invited, to the mansions of nobility. Urgently and frequently he was pressed to accept the hospitality of the most accomplished of our Scottish nobles, yet that hospitality was invariably and most peremptorily declined. Whether it was Hugh Miller felt he had no talent for carrying duchesses off their feet, like his great countryman, Robert Burns, or whether it was the ambiguous treatment the bard received from the aristocracy, even when they professed to honour him, that made the self-taught man of science chary of their attentions, we do not presume to say; but certain it is, that with the most obdurate inflexibility did he decline their every solicitation.

"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,

His daily teachers had been woods and rills,

The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

and with that love and these teachers he seemed unambitious to extend the circle of his acquaintanceship, even though it should happen to come to him all stars, garters, and coronets. Possibly he carried the feeling to the extreme of susceptibility. Yet it was not without reason he acted thus. He had cast a profoundly penetrative intellectual glance upon the hollowness of the homage offered up to the man of genius by the herd of his bustling patrons. With the tact of the accomplished journalist, and the sagacity of the astute observer of men and things, he seized the opportunity afforded by a now nearly forgotten event, "The Burns' Festival," to show up the sham which heroworship may become.

"Could we but lay open the inner springs of this tendency to manworship, they would enable us, we are convinced, to comprehend . many a curious chapter in the early history of the species. Departed greatness, enveloped by its peculiar atmosphere of reverential respect and awe, and exaggerated by distance, is suffered to retain within the bright circle of its halo many an attendant littleness and impurity that contemporaries would have at least not admired. The greatness is doubtless the staple of the matter—that which dazzles, impresses, attracts; and the littleness and impurities were accidents that have mixed with it; and yet how strange a tone do they not too frequently succeed in imparting to the worship! There was much of apology at the Burns' Festival for the errors of the poet; and it said at least something for the morals of the time, whatever it might for the taste of the speakers, that such should have been the case. In a remoter and more darkened age of the world, like those ages in which hero-worship rose into a religion, the errors would have been remembered, but the apology would have been wanting. Burns would have been deified into an Apollo, and his love passages with the nymphs Daphne, Leucothoe, and Coronis, and his drinking-bouts with Admetus and

ness.

Hyacinthus, would have been registered simply as incidents in his history-incidents which, in the course of time, would have come to serve as precedents for his worshippers. We are afraid that, maugre regret and apology, there is too much of this as it is. His hapless errors, so fatal to himself, have been too often surveyed through the dazzling halo of his celebrity. The felt influence of his greatness has extended to his faults, as if they were part and parcel of his greatThe atmosphere of the sun conceals the sun's spots from the unassisted eye of the observer; but the atmosphere of glory that surrounds the memory of Burns has not had a similar effect. To many, at least, it has the effect of making his blemishes appear less as original flaws, than as a species of beauty-spots, of a fashion to be imitated. How can we marvel that the old worshippers of the offspring of Saturn or Latona should have imitated their gods in their crimes, if in these our days of light, with the model of a perfect religion before our eyes, hero-worship should be found to exert, as of old, a demoralizing influence! But it would not be easy to say, where more emphatic or more honest warning could be found on this head than in the writings of Burns himself. We stake his own deeply-mournful prediction of the fate which he saw awaiting him, against all ever advanced on the opposite side:

"The poor inhabitant below

Was quick to learn, and wise to know.

And keenly felt the social glow,

And softer flame;

But thoughtless follies laid him low,

And stained his name.'

"Despite the authority of high names, we are no admirers of heroworship. We are not insensible to what we may term the natural claims of Burns on the admiration of his country, both as a writer and as a character of great bulk and power. It would be hypocrisy in us to say that we were. Were his writings to be annihilated to-morrow, we could restore from memory some of the best of them entire, and not a few of the more striking passages in many of the others. Nor are we unimpressioned by the massiveness of his character as a man. We bear about with us an adequate idea of it, as developed in that deeply-mournful tragedy-his life. But we would not choose to go and worship at his festival. There was a hollowness about the ceremony, independently of the falseness of the principles on which its ritual was framed. Of the thousands who attended, how many, does the reader

think, would have sympathized, had they seen the light some fifty years earlier, with the man Robert Burns? How many of them grappled in idea at his festival with other than a mere phantom of the imagination—a large but intangible shade, obscure and indefinable as that conjured up, by the uninformed Londoner, of Cromwell or of Johnson? Rather more than fifty years ago, the sinking sun shone brightly one fine afternoon, on the stately tenements of Dumfries, and threw its slant rule of light athwart the principal street of the town. The shadows of the houses on the western side were stretched half-way across the pavement, while on the side opposite, the red beam seemed as if sleeping on jutting irregular fronts and tall gables. There was a world of well-dressed company that evening in Dumfries; for the aristocracy of the adjacent country for twenty miles round had poured in to attend a county ball, and were fluttering in groups along the sunny side of the street, gay as butterflies. On the other side, in the shade, a solitary individual paced slowly along the pavement. Of the hundreds who fluttered past, no one took notice of him-no one seemed to recognise him. He was known to them all as the exciseman and poet, Robert Burns; but he had offended the stately Toryism of the district by the freedom of his political creed; and so-tainted by the plague of Liberalism-he lay under strict quarantine. He was shunned and neglected; for it was with the man Burus that these his cotemporaries had to deal. Let the reader contrast with this truly melancholy scene, the scene of his festival a fortnight since. Here are the speeches of the Earl of Eglinton and of Sir John M'Neill, and here the toast of the Lord Justice General. Let us just imagine these gentlewith all their high aristocratic notions about them, carried back half a century into the past, and dropped down, on the sad evening to which we refer, in the main street of Dumfries. Which side, does the reader think, would they have chosen to walk upon? Would they have addressed the one solitary individual in the shade, or not rather joined themselves to the gay groups in the sunshine who neglected and contemned him? They find it an easy matter to deal with the phantom idea of Burns now: how would they have dealt with the man then? How are they dealing with his poorer relatives-or how with men of kindred genius, their cotemporaries? Alas! a moment's glance at such matters is sufficient to show how very unreal a thing a commemorative feast may be. Reality, even in idea, becomes a sort of Ithuriel spear to test it by. The Burns Festival was but an idle show, at which players enacted their parts."

men,

But in sternly reprobating man-worship, however exalted, Hugh Miller was not, therefore, the less just to his great countryman. None saw more clearly or could estimate more accurately the worth of his work.

"Robert Burns was the man who first taught the Scottish people to stand erect. Let us not be blind to the great national faults, and only lynx-eyed to the faults of the great national poet. A mean and creeping subserviency to the great,—a getting up 'to be hanged in order to please the laird,'—was the master fault of the Scotch people; and a century of persecution had failed to wean them of it. That part of the General Epistle of James which speaks of 'respect of persons,' and the undue partiality shown to men with gold rings and goodly apparel,' might have been more appropriately addressed to the Scotch, even after the rich had oppressed' and 'drawn' them before judgment-seats,' and 'blasphemed the Holy Name,' than to almost any other people of Europe. But the independent peasant, who, in the most trying circumstances, never bent himself before the worthless wealthy or the little great, and who in his ever-living strains asserted the dignity of manhood, taught them another lesson; and they have learned it. Yes! the Scottish people have lost the habitual stoop, and now stand erect; and all honour, say we, to the reformer who, more than any other, effected the change. His life, as certainly as his works, were effectual in producing it; and, had it accomplished nothing else, it would not, with all its errors and shortcomings, have been spent in vain.""

Yet, though doing the amplest justice to the poet, as if to illustrate the imperfection of the justest thinking and the noblest intentions in reprobating "the sham," Hugh Miller insensibly assumed the attitude of "the cynic." With much said about the hollowness of the worship offered to the memory of Coila's bard, all must acquiesce; but it should not be