164 EDITOR. 



carious and very powerless rule of conduct ; and the 

 " progress of the species " will turn out equally unfitted 

 for deeply exciting the imagination. It is not with 

 freedom that we can sympathize, but with free men. 

 There ought, indeed, to be in history a spirit superior to 

 petty distinctions and vulgar partialities ; our particular 

 affections ought to be enlightened and purified ; but they 

 should not be abandoned, or, such is the condition of 

 humanity, our feelings must evaporate, and fade away in 

 that extreme diffusion. Perhaps, in a certain sense, the 

 surest mode of pleasing and instructing all nations is to 

 write for one.' During the most active and stirring 

 years of Hugh Miller's life, he emphatically wrote for 

 his country ; his literary activity formed part of the 

 history of Scotland. The sympathies which linked him 

 to humanity at large were rooted in his native soil. 



From the point of view of the philosophical historian, 

 two principal causes are discernible as having combined 

 to make Scotland what she has been in modern times. 

 The first is the assertion of Scottish independence, under 

 Wallace and Bruce, in the commencement of the four- 

 teenth century ; the second, the predominance of the Re- 

 formed Church in Scotland, from the middle of the six- 

 teenth century downwards. On this point also we may 

 profitably listen to Mr Carlyle. In Past and Present, 

 he thus refers to the Scottish war of independence : 

 'A heroic Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot 

 hinder that his Scotland become, one day, part of Eng- 

 land ; but he does hinder that it become, on tyrannous un- 

 fair terms, a part of it ; commands still, as with a god's 

 voice, from his old Valhalla and Temple of the Brave, that 

 there be a just real union as of brother and brother, not 

 a false and merely semblant one as of slave and master. 

 If the union with England be in fact one of Scotland's 



