496 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



the First Impressions. The district was at the time in- 

 fested with ruffians and blackguards, who had come to 

 see a prize-fight between Gaunt and Bendigo for the 

 championship of England. ' About half-way on/ says 

 Miller, ' where the road runs between tall hedges, two 

 fellows started out towards me, one from each side of 

 the way. " Is this the road," asked one, " to Newport 

 Pagnell?" "Quite a stranger here," I replied, without 

 slackening my pace ; " don't belong to the kingdom, 

 even." "No?" said the same fellow, increasing his 

 speed as if to overtake me; "to what kingdom, then?" 

 " Scotland," I said, turning suddenly round, somewhat 

 afraid of being taken behind by a bludgeon. The two 

 fellows sheered off in double-quick time, the one who 

 had already addressed me muttering, " More like an 

 Irishman, I think ; " and I saw no more of them. I 

 had luckily a brace of loaded pistols about me, and had 

 at the moment a trigger under each fore-finger.' He 

 first carried pistols when conveying the Bank's money 

 between Cromarty and Tain. Soon after coming to 

 Edinburgh, he commenced a series of investigations in 

 the Lothian coal-field, which brought him into lonely 

 places where he believed that suspicious characters 

 might lurk. He took with him his fire-arms, therefore, 

 and I should suppose that, in subsequent years, he was 

 seldom abroad in the night without them. 



In conversation, as in his books, he was sensitively 

 orthodox. I once spoke with enthusiastic admiration 

 of that famed vision of Jean Paul's, in which the author, 

 with a view to symbolizing the horror of atheism, in- 

 troduces Jesus Christ looking up into a blank universe, 

 one vast hollow eye-socket, emptied of its eye, and 

 wailing for His Eather. Miller would see in the piece 

 nothing beyond the poetical expression of a lofty Uni- 



