26 THE BOY. 



Scotland and to Wallace, that his book was for centuries 

 the Bible of the Scottish people/ and that it profoundly 

 affected the boyish imaginations of Robert Burns, of 

 Walter Scott, and of Hugh Miller. The fiery patriotism 

 of this book inspired those national songs of Burns, and 

 those magical tones occurring at intervals in all his 

 poems, which will thrill readers to their inmost hearts 

 so long as love of country endures. Its effect on Hugh 

 Miller was to make him a Scottish patriot to the finger- 

 tips. Affection for his country was from that time a 

 ruling passion in his breast, and his ideal of a great man 

 was a great Scotchman. 



No wise critic will dispute that this was an im- 

 portant and an auspicious advance in the development of 

 the boy. It appears to be a law of the feelings that, to 

 be sound, strong, and healthful, they must proceed from 

 the particular to the general, philanthropy rooting itself 

 in household kindness, cosmopolitan interest in the hu- 

 man race growing out of undistinguishing ardour of 

 affection for one's countrymen. He who, as a boy, is in- 

 different to his own country, will as a man be indifferent 

 to all countries. Hugh Miller, we need not doubt, owed 

 much of that home-bred vigour, that genial strength, racy 

 picturesqueness and idiomatic pith, which characterize 

 his writings, to the e:.ily influence of Blind Harry. 



Meanwhile he has been learning to read in a book 

 whose lessons he could not outgrow, and whose illumin- 

 ated lettering, of gem and flower and shell, has a charm 

 for eye and heart which had been absent from the 

 Latin Rudiments. Upon the sands at ebb-tide, when 

 the slant sunlight strikes ruddy from the west, the boy 

 may be seen trotting by the side of Uncle Sandy, hunt- 

 ing for lump-fish in the weeded pools, hanging in 

 ecstasy over the sea-mosses, that glance through the lucid 



