500 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



into clearness and use the gift born with him, a gift 

 traceable in his earliest letters, a gift of tempered 

 mental strength, of brightly keen perception and broad 

 imaginative vision, a rare gift of expression, in subtly- 

 modulated sentence, and exquisitely-felicitous image, 

 and solemn harmony of sense and sound, and tenderly- 

 brilliant colour lighting up the whole. Mr Robert 

 Chambers proved himself to have the true critical eye 

 when he referred, at a very early period of their inter- 

 course, to the singular interest attaching to all he wrote. 

 The omniscient little critics who deny him genius may 

 imitate that if they can ; it secured Miller a large and 

 intelligent audience throughout the civilized world, an 

 audience whose ear he caught so soon as his power was 

 revealed, and which, thirty years after the publication 

 of the Old Red Sandstone, continues to extend. 



So far as I can penetrate the charm of his composi- 

 tion, it lies mainly in the fine continuity of it, in the 

 absence of all jerking, jolting movement, in the callida 

 junctura not of word to word merely, but of sentence to 

 sentence, thought to thought, illustration to illustration. 

 An author's peculiar excellence, if we have rightly dis- 

 criminated it, will give us a hint as to where we should 

 look for his besetting fault, and in reading Miller long 

 at one time, we may find in his billowy regularity and 

 smoothness of movement a sense of monotony. Yet on 

 the whole there is a marvellous enchantment in his 

 books ; the breath of the hills is in them, the freshness 

 of the west wind and the sea. Shall we not now venture 

 to decide the question was left open when it last came 

 before us that it was advantageous for him to break 

 away from school, and betake himself to the caves and 

 the wood ? Nature is the only safe nurse of genius ; 

 education is indispensable, but even the education must 



