HIS LEADING ARTICLES. 231 



that the running of Sunday trains on the Edinburgh and 

 Glasgow Railway might bring calamity on the empire, 

 its colouring is avowedly the colouring of a dream. 



In a short preface to a volume of leading articles by 

 Hugh Miller, selected from the file of the Witness, I have 

 made some remarks on his capacities as a writer of jour- 

 nalistic essays which I may be permitted to insert here : 

 ' He meditated his articles as an author meditates his 

 books or a poet his verses, conceiving them as wholes, 

 working fully out their trains of thought, enriching them 

 with far-brought treasures of fact, and adorning them 

 with finished and apposite illustration. In the quality 

 of completeness, those articles stand, so far as I know, 

 alone in the records of journalism. For rough and 

 hurrying vigour they might be matched, or more, from 

 the columns of the Times ; in lightness of wit and smart 

 lucidity of statement they might be surpassed by the 

 happiest performances of French journalists, a Prevost 

 Paradol or a St Marc Girardin ; and for occasional bril- 

 liancies of imagination, and sudden gleams of piercing 

 thought, neither they nor any other newspaper articles 

 have, I think, been comparable with those of S. T. Cole- 

 ridge. But as complete journalistic essays, symmetrical 

 in plan, finished in execution, and of sustained and splendid 

 ability, the articles of Hugh Miller are unrivalled/ 



In short, he modelled his newspaper essays, as he 

 modelled the chapters of his books, on the productions of 

 his beloved Addison and Goldsmith, rather than on those 

 of the ' eminent hands ' whose slashing leaders have made 

 their reputation on the London press. It was his habit 

 to fix upon his subject a few days, or even longer, 

 before the article was to appear, and nothing pleased him 

 better than to have Mrs Miller as volunteer antagonist, 

 to maintain against him, at the supper table, the thesis 



