6 THE BOY. 



that the latter is to be regarded simply as one of the 

 sources from which the biographer constructs his narra- 

 tive. Mr Lewes, whose Life of Goethe has a place of 

 honour not only among biographies but among the select 

 masterpieces of biography, may be held to have settled 

 this point. He had before him Goethe's celebrated auto- 

 biography, in three volumes, a work which its author 

 declares to have been composed in a spirit of austere 

 veracity, and yet Mr Lewes finds it characterized by 

 ' abiding inaccuracy of tone! Goethe, looking from the 

 distance of half a century, beheld his own face through 

 a medium which softened, brightened, or obliterated the 

 features. Hugh Miller, when he wrote the Schools and 

 Schoolmasters, was not so old as Goethe when he wrote 

 Poetry and Truth from my Life ; nor am I prepared to 

 say that the former departs from literal accuracy to the 

 same extent as the latter: but in the case of Hugh 

 Miller also, the impression made by an event or spec- 

 tacle, as set down at the moment by the boy or lad, and 

 the account of that impression given by the man of fifty, 

 prove often to be two different things. ' It is possible/ 

 says Hugh Miller himself, ' for two histories of the same 

 period and individual to be at once true to fact, and 

 unlike each other in the scenes which they describe and 

 the events which they record.' 



Hugh Miller was born in the town of Cromarty on 

 the 10th of October, 1802. The occurrence appears to 

 have acted on the imagination of his father, as he had 

 a 'singular dream' respecting his first-born. The mid- 

 wife remarked that the conformation of the head was 

 unusual, and indicated, in her sage opinion, that the 

 child would turn out an idiot.* 



* Letter of Miller to Mr Isaac Forsyth, Feb. 30, 1830. 



