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LINEAGE 259 



That the debt is great admits of no dispute, and that 

 it is acknowledged to be due could hardly be more 

 fittingly shown than by the wide-spread desire which 

 has brought us here to-day from so many distant places 

 in order to raise in the town of his birth, which he has 

 made a place of pilgrimage to many a lover of English 

 literature, a visible memorial of him in an institution 

 of which he would himself have heartily approved. 



In order adequately to realise the nature and extent 

 of the work achieved by Hugh Miller during his too 

 brief career, we should clearly picture to ourselves the 

 peculiar conditions in which he grew up. Happily he 

 has himself, in one of the most charming pieces of 

 autobiography in the language, told the story of his 

 youth and early manhood. Descended from both a 

 Highland and a Lowland ancestry, he combined in his 

 nature the vivid imagination and poetic impulse of the 

 Celt with the more staid and logical temperament of 

 the Teuton. He was born amidst an English-speaking 

 community, but at a distance of only a few miles from 

 the fringe of the mountainous region within which men 

 use the Gaelic tongue. He knew some survivors of 

 Culloden, and had heard his own grandfather tell how, 

 when a stripling, he watched, from the hills above 

 Cromarty, the smoke wreaths of the battle as they 

 drifted along the ridge on the further side of the 

 Moray Firth. From infancy he was personally familiar 

 with the people of the hills and their traditions, as well 

 as with the ways of the hardy fisher-folk and farmers 

 of the plains. The hereditary predispositions of his 

 mind were in this way fostered by contact with the 

 two races from which they sprang. 



