LITERATURE AND SCIENCE. 133 



neyed on account of its truth, and if Sir W. Hamilton's 

 favourite lines about man and mind being the only great 

 things on earth are not rhodomontade, and if Shakespeare 

 is higher than Newton among the moderns and Homer 

 higher than Aristotle or Plato among the ancients, it 

 would seem to follow that literary art, as displayed in 

 history, poetry, the drama, and prose fiction, takes le- 

 gitimate precedence of that inquiry into the sequences of 

 the physical world, which bears specifically the name of 

 science. But it was under the influence of no ab- 

 stract considerations that Miller determined in favour of 

 the latter. Literature, as it presented itself to his mind, 

 did not afford scope to his abilities. The traditions, the 

 legends, the history of his native place, the characters 

 of the men he had known since boyhood, did not 

 appear to furnish materials out of which important 

 literary works could be constructed. The vein was 

 worked out. 



It is perhaps surprising that he did not, so far as can 

 be discovered, think of Scottish history as a field in 

 which to employ himself. He might, I think, have 

 written a history of Scotland which the world would 

 have placed among the acknowledged masterpieces in 

 this species of composition ; a history in which the dis- 

 tinctive character of the Scottish race, and the distinctive 

 contribution of Scotland to modern civilization, would 

 have been justly defined, and in which the patriotic en- 

 thusiasm of the writer would have swelled at times into 

 the grandeurs of epic poetry. The view taken of Scottish 

 history by Miller was essentially the same as that taken 

 by Burns, by Scott, by Wilson, by Carlyle, and he was 

 more profoundly in sympathy with the religious genius 

 of his nation than any one of these. His strength as a 

 stylist lay in description, and all his books, particularly 



