LETTER FROM MR R. CHAMBERS. 437 



volume to the few hurried words I had an opportunity 

 of saying last week. Not that I am excitedly grateful 

 for the kind reference you have made to myself, but 

 because I have read your first 350 pages with a heart 

 full of sympathy for your early hardships and efforts, 

 and an intense admiration of the observant and intelli- 

 gent mind which I see working in that village boy on 

 the shore of the Cromarty Frith. I cannot refrain from 

 congratulating you on the publication of this book, 

 which I consider as yet your best, and the one that will 

 prove most enduringly useful, interesting, and popular 

 simply because yourself have been the best phenomenon 

 you have ever had to describe. I cannot refrain from 

 congratulating you on the triumphs you have achieved 

 over the great difficulties of your early position, which 

 now appear to me far beyond anything I had previously 

 imagined. And believe me, I am most cordially sin- 

 cere when I offer you my best wishes for the remainder 

 of a career, the early part of which has been so credit- 

 able to you. Be assured that Scotland has few dearer 

 living names at present than Hugh Miller, and must 

 henceforth feel the deepest interest and concern in 

 everything you do. 



1 Your autobiography has set me a thinking of my 

 own youthful days, which were like yours in point of 

 hardship and humiliation, though different in many im- 

 portant circumstances. My being of the same age with 

 you, to exactly a quarter of a year, brings the idea of a 

 certain parity more forcibly upon me. The differences 

 are as curious to me as the resemblances. Notwith- 

 standing your wonderful success as a writer, I think 

 my literary tendency must have been a deeper and 

 more absorbing peculiarity than yours, seeing that I 

 took to Latin and to books both keenly and exclusively, 



