CONCLUSION. 503 



his mind to One that walketh on the wings of the wind : 

 at His look the earth trembled in the throes of earth- 

 quake, and at His touch the volcano smoked. 



Hugh Miller stands alone, so far as I am aware, among 

 self-educated men of recent times, first, in the thorough- 

 ness of his education, the technically disciplined and 

 ordered thinking to which he attained, secondly, in the 

 absence from his books and letters of all extravagance, 

 histrionism, paradox, of all trace of that furious, teeth- 

 gnashing humour which has been so much in vogue in 

 our century. Great instincts of order and of common 

 sense, inherited from his father, allied him to what \vas 

 stable in the institutions of his country. Religion, 

 integrity, continence, moderation, obedience, all those 

 virtues against which the waves of modern anarchism 

 beat wild, saw him fighting behind their bulwark. 

 They are shallow critics who recognize genius only, as 

 Uriel recognized Satan, by the violence of its gestures 

 and the devilishness of its scowl ; in healthful times 

 men of genius have neither affected a perverse sin- 

 gularity, nor taken as their dialect an everlasting 

 snarl. That Hugh Miller was a man of genius would 

 never have been called in question had his works not 

 been so free from the distempers of genius. 



THE END. 



