322 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



they wanted to get something out of him, used to 

 observe. Thanks, by the way, to them, for so doing, 

 since they would not, even for purposes of adulation, 

 have ventured on the remark, if there had not been con- 

 spicuous splendour in the orb. ' Sir, you have an eye,' 

 was what English critics said when Miller's chapters, de- 

 tailing his impressions, were published in the columns 

 of the Witness. A Birmingham editor, ignorant as to 

 Miller, and fancying, for what reason I know not, that he 

 was a ' dominie/ quoted passages descriptive of Birming- 

 ham and its district, and said that the writer must be a 

 very remarkable man, since he had seen a great deal 

 which had escaped the observation of the natives, but 

 which, on its being pointed out to them, they also could 

 see. Mr William Drummond, then sub-editor of the 

 Witness and an esteemed friend of Miller's, showed him 

 the article in the Birmingham paper, and he had a 

 hearty laugh at it. Truth to speak, he had an eye 

 that was worth its place in a man's head; searching, 

 inevitable, keen, swift, sure; which gathered informa- 

 tion at every moment and in all places, to be hoarded 

 up in the cells of a memory which seems never to have 

 lost an atom of the store. 



His judgment on those two grand English institu- 

 tions, the Church of England and Dissent, is shrewd. 

 He discerns the incommensurable strength of the one, 

 and the ineradicable vitality of the other, representing 

 as each does a separate phase of the individualism of 

 English character. While pronouncing the Englishman 

 distinctly superior to the Scot as an asserter of civil 

 independence, he recognizes that, for all religious ends 

 and aims, the Scot is gregarious, the Englishman in- 

 dividual. The Anglican Church does not, for all its 

 Bishops and Convocations, hide from him the fact that 



