Hugh Miller

“ To know what the district once was, and what it is now, is to know with peculiar emphasis the meaning of the sacred text, ‘One sinner destroyeth much good.’
The eye of a Triptolemus Yellowlee would have found exceedingly little to gratify it in the parish of Lairg thirty years ago. The parish had its bare hills, its wide, dark moors, its old doddered woods of birch and hazel, its extensive lake, its headlong river, and its roaring cataract. Nature had imparted to it much of a wild and savage beauty; but art had done nothing for it. ”

“ From the times of Magna Charta down to the times of the Revolution, we find every triumph of liberty heralded in by some gross outrage upon it. The history of the British Constitution is a history of great natural rights established piecemeal under the immediate promptings of an indignation elicited by unbearable wrongs. It was not until the barrier that protected the privileges of the citizen from the will of the despot gave way at some weak point, that the parties exposed to the inundation were roused up to re-erect it on a better principle and a surer foundation. ”

“ In little more than nine years a population of fifteen thousand individuals were removed from the interior of Sutherland to its sea-coasts, or had emigrated to America. The inland districts were converted into deserts, through which the traveller may take a long day’s journey, amid ruins that still bear the scathe of fire, and grassy patches betraying, when the evening sun casts aslant its long deep shadows, the half-effaced lines of the plough. ”

“ There are few lovers of art who have looked on the figures or landscapes of a camera obscura without forming the wish that, among the hidden secrets of matter, some means might be discovered for fixing and rendering them permanent. If nature could be made her own limner, if by some magic art the reflection could be fixed upon the mirror, could the picture be other than true? But the wish must have seemed an idle one,––a wish of nearly the same cast as those which all remember to have formed at one happy period of life, in connection with the famous cap and purse of the fairy tale. ”

“ No person can know better than he knows that the company are running their Sabbath trains at a 336 sacrifice of some four or five thousand a year. Were there not a hundred thousand that took the pledge? and can it be held by any one that knows Scotland, that they aren’t worth over-head a shilling a year to the railway? No, no; depend on’t, the man is guiltless of any design of making the shareholders rich by breaking the Sabbath. He is merely supporting a desperate case in the eye of the country, and getting into all the newspapers, that people may see how clever a fellow he is. ”

“ And hence the necessity for maintaining a local breadth of representation sufficient to do justice to the principle of the scheme, and to prevent it, if we may so speak, from sinking in the less solid parts of the kingdom. A parochial breadth of base would serve as if to plank over the unsounder portions of the general surface, and give footing to a system of schools and teachers worthy, as a whole, of the character and the necessities of a country wise and enlightened in the main, but that totters on the brink of a bottomless abyss. ”

“ We can barely hope, after squandering much treasure, after committing a great deal of crime, after occasioning and enduring a vast amount of wretchedness, after a whole country has been whitened with the bones of its inhabitants, after a British army has perished miserably,––we can barely hope that our later successes may have had so far the effect of effacing the memory of our earliest disasters, that we shall be enabled to sit down under their cover on the eastern bank of the Indus, ‘just where we were before.’ And even this is much in the circumstances. ”

“ I see that the walks of the one great city into which it opens are blackened by shoals of unemployed artisans; and that the lanes and alleys of the other number by thousands and tens of thousands their pale and hunger-bitten operatives, that cry for work and food. They testify all too surely that judgment needs no miracle here. Let but the evil continue to grow––nay, let but one of our Scottish capitals, our great mart of commerce and trade sink into the circumstances of its manufacturing neighbour Paisley––and the railway must keep its Sabbaths. ”

“ A spectral poor-law sits by our waysides, wrapped up in death-flannels of the English cut, and shakes its skinny hand at the mansion-houses of our landlords,––vision beyond comparison more direfully portentous than the apparition seen by the lone shepherd of Strathcarron. But in the Highlands, at least, it is merely the landlord of the new and improved state of things––the landlord of widespread clearings and stringent removal-summonses––that it threatens. ”

“ Unlike Lords Bolingbroke, Buckingham, or Bacon, Lord Brougham entered public life a reformer and a patriot. The subject of his first successful speech in Parliament was the slave-trade. He denounced not only the abominable traffic itself,––the men who stole, bought, and kept the slave; but also the traders and merchants,––‘the cowardly suborners of piracy and mercenary murder,’ as he termed them, under whose remote influence the trade had been carried on; and the sympathies of the people went along with him. He was on every occasion, too, the powerful advocate of popular education. ”

“ How is it that these German metaphysicians exhibit their vigour exclusively in walking one way? Where are their works of a practical character, powerful enough to give law to the species? Where their treatises like those of Locke on 376 Toleration or on Government, or their essays like that of Hume or of Adam Smith on the Balance of Power or the Wealth of Nations? Are they doing other, to use a very old illustration, than merely milking rams, leaving their admirers and followers to hold the pail? ”

“ One of our poets, in placing in a strong light the extreme folly of war, describes ‘most Christian kings’ with ‘honourable ruffians in their hire,’ wasting the nations with fire and sword, and then, when fatigued with murder and sated with blood, ‘setting them down just where they were before.’ It is quite melancholy enough that our most sanguine expectations with regard to the Affghan war should be unable to rise higher by a hair’s-breadth than the satiric conception of the poet. ”

“ Is there a ragged-school scheme originated in the capital, to rescue the neglected perishing young among us from out the very jaws of destruction?––forthwith rival institutions start up, on the ground of religious differences, to dwarf one another into inefficiency, like starveling shrubs in a nursery run wild; and projected exertions in the cause of degraded and suffering humanity degenerate into an attack on a benevolent Presbyterian minister, who refuses to accept, from conscientious motives, of a directorship in a Popish institution. ”

“ Nay, dear as the distinctive principles of the Free Church are to the people of Scotland, with superior pulpit talent in the Establishment on the one hand, and in the ranks of the disendowed body, on the other, a goodly supply of those youthful ministers who boast that they either never write their sermons, or write them at a short sitting, we would by no means guarantee to our Church a ten years’ vigorous existence. ”

“ On both sides the river the eye rests on a multitude of scattered patches of green, that seem inlaid in the brown heath. We trace on these islands of sward the marks of furrows, and mark here and there, through the loneliness, the remains of a group of cottages, well-nigh levelled with the soil, and, haply like those ruins which eastern conquerors leave in their track, still scathed with 396 fire. All is solitude within the valley, except where, at wide intervals, the shieling of a shepherd may be seen ”

“ We remember hearing him preach on one occasion on the return of the Jews, as a people, to Him whom they had rejected, and the effect which their sudden conversion could not fail to have on the unbelieving and Gentile world. Suddenly his language, from its high level of eloquent simplicity, became at once that of metaphor: ‘When Joseph,’ he said, ‘shall reveal himself to his brethren, the whole house of Pharaoh shall hear the weeping.’ Could there be an allusion of more classical beauty, or more finely charged with typical truth? ”

“ Many who had no money to give were obliged to relieve them by depositing some of their few portable articles of value, such as bed or body clothes, or, more distressing still, watches and rings and pins––the only relics, in not a few instances, of brave men whose bones were mouldering under the fatal rampart at New Orleans, or in the arid sands of Egypt––on that spot of proud recollection, where the invincibles of Napoleon went down before the Highland bayonet. Their first efforts as fishermen were what might be expected from a rural people unaccustomed to the sea. ”

“ Stewart’s originality was the solidity of the truths which it always evolved. His was not the ability of opening up new vistas in which all was unfamiliar, simply because the direction in which they led was one in which men’s thought had no occasion to travel, and no business to perform. It was, on the contrary, the greatly higher ability of enlarging, widening, and lengthening the avenues long before opened upon important truths, and, in consequence, enabling men to see new and unwonted objects in old, familiar directions. ”

“ Let us now pass on to the consideration of a matter on which we but touched before,––the perfect compatibility of a consistent Voluntaryism with religious teaching in a school endowed by the State, on the principle of Dr. Chalmers. The Witness is as little Voluntary now as it ever was. It seems but fair, however, that a principle should be saddled with only the consequences that legitimately arise from it; and that Voluntaryism should not be exposed, in this contest, to a species of witchcraft, that first caricatures it in an ill-modelled image, and then sticks the ugly thing over with pins. ”

“ Never forget that it is not necessary, in order to overcome gigantic difficulties, that one’s strength should be gigantic. Persevering exertion is much more than strength. We owe to shovels and wheelbarrows, and human muscles of the average size and vigour, the great railway which connects the capitals of the two kingdoms. And the difficulties which encompass the young man of humble circumstances and imperfect education, must be regarded as coming under the same category as difficulties of the purely physical kind. ”

“ It seems as certain that free-trade principles are at last to be established in Britain, as that there is a sun in the sky. Nor does there seem much wisdom in fighting a battle that is inevitably to be lost. The battle which it is their true interest to be preparing to fight, is one in which they must occupy the ground, not of agriculturists, but simply of tenants: it is a battle with the landlords, not with the free-traders.
We believe Dr. Chalmers is right in holding that, ultimately at least, the repeal of the corn-laws will not greatly affect the condition of our agriculturists. ”

“ We have heard of one man, named M’Kay, whose family, at the time of 425 the greater conflagration referred to by M’Leod, were all lying ill of fever, who had to carry two of his sick children on his back a distance of twenty-five miles. We have heard of the famished people blackening the shores, like the crew of some vessel wrecked on an inhospitable coast, that they might sustain life by the shell-fish and sea-weed laid bare by the ebb. ”

“ It is strange how much the lack of a single ingredient in a man’s moral constitution––and that, too, an ingredient in itself of a low and vulgar cast––may affect one’s whole destiny. It was the grand defect of this gifted man, that that sentiment of self-esteem, which seems in many instances so absurd and ridiculous a thing, and which some, in their little wisdom, would so fain strike out from among the components of human character, was almost wholly awanting. As the minister of an attached provincial congregation, a sense of duty led him to study much and deeply ”

“ He can be no young man, who, looking backwards across two whole generations, can recount from recollection, like Nestor of old, some of the occurrences of the third. But there is a green old age, in which the spirits retain their buoyancy, and the intellect its original vigour; and the whole appearance of the poet gives evidence that his evening of life is of this happy and desirable character. ”

“ But the memorable instances of Cicero, of Milton, and still more those of Dryden and Burke, seem to show that there is some natural tendency in the fire of genius to burn more brightly, or to blaze more fiercely, in the evening than in the morning of human life. ”

“ It seems natural to literary men, who fail in realizing their own conceptions of what they had wished and hoped to perform, to cast the blame upon their circumstances. Johnson could speak as feelingly, not much later than the middle of the last century, of the ‘dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer,’ as any literary man of the present time, who, while solicitously desirous to give himself wholly to the muses, is compelled to labour as a periodicalist for the wants of the day that is passing over him. ”

“ The late Duchess found it spread equally over the interior and the sea-coast, and in very comfortable circumstances;––she left it compressed into a wretched selvage of poverty and suffering, that fringes the county on its eastern and western shores. And the law which enabled her to make such an arrangement, maugre the ancient rights of the poor Highlander, is now on the eve of stepping in, in its own clumsy way, to make her family pay the penalty. The evil of a poor-law can be no longer averted from Scotland. ”

“ If you can by voting, or without voting, ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape: if you cannot, the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again; the inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with most chaotic admonition; you will be flung half-frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or jostled into shivers by your iceberg 3 councillors, and will never get round Cape Horn at all.’ Now there is much meaning couched in this quaint figure, and meaning which the Free Church would do well to ponder. ”

“ It is difficult to imagine a situation in life in which Burns would not have written his songs, but very easy to imagine situations in which Robertson would not have produced his Scotland or his Charles V., nor Adam Smith his Wealth of Nations. We have no faith whatever in ‘mute, inglorious Miltons;’ but we do hold that there may be obscure country churchyards in which untaught Humes, guiltless of the Essay on Miracles, may repose, and undeveloped Bentleys and Warburtons, whose great aptitude for acquiring or capacity for retaining knowledge remained throughout life a mere ungratified thirst. ”