134 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT. 



the Schools and Schoolmasters, and First Impressions of 

 England and its People, afford proof of his skill in con- 

 tinuous narrative. 



In the history of literature, again, he was fitted to 

 excel. He could have given us, for example, a critico- 

 biographical work on Pope, Addison, and their con- 

 temporaries, which might have been unique and super- 

 lative of its kind. He knew those men as if he had 

 lived and talked with them. They were the models 

 whose chastened beauties appeared to him more worthy of 

 emulation than the passionate and metaphorical writing 

 in vogue in his own day. 



No such employment of his powers, however, seems 

 to have occurred to him, and it is certain that neither of 

 the works indicated could have been produced at so 

 great a distance from the original sources of literary 

 information as Cromarty. Science invited him to an 

 unbeaten path to an assured originality and the scene 

 in which her wonders were to be sought had been his 

 playground since infancy. That devotion to science 

 was attaining in his mind the power of a ruling passion 

 is attested in that chapter of the Scenes and Legends in 

 which he presents himself to his readers as the ' Anti- 

 quary of the world.' 



There is a curious interest in observing how much 

 this chapter contains of what, a few years subsequently, 

 made Miller famous as a geologist throughout the world. 

 As yet he is groping his way, feeling darkly round a 

 cave which he surmises to be coated with jewels and 

 precious metals, but able only to guess vaguely what may 

 be their nature and their value. He has already noticed 

 those ' flattened nodules of an elliptical or circular form,' 

 of which all the world was one day to hear. He has 

 laid some of them open and found them to contain, one 



