43 THE BOY. 



would tell as constraint. Had Hugh Miller found such 

 a teacher, the advantage to himself and the world might 

 doubtless have been great. He had capacities in him 

 for consummate scholarship ; an exact and tenacious 

 memory, great attention, great application, true taste 

 and clear judgment. Learning could never with him have 

 been pedantry ; and it is indisputable that the man who 

 can converse with the ancients in their own tongues 

 commands a wider intellectual horizon than the man who 

 knows only his native language. One cannot help wish- 

 ing that Hugh Miller had seen Homer himself lead out 

 Achilles to poise a javelin, or had perceived how different 

 a person is the brawny, broad-shouldered, highly unrhe- 

 torical Ulysses of the Odyssey, from the Ulysses whom 

 Pope taught to look and speak ' in a manner worthy of the 

 times of civilization/ Had Hugh Miller's father sur- 

 vived, his shrewd sense and peremptory authority might 

 have given a new colour to the schooling of the boy ; 

 and, without sacrificing his freedom, Hugh might have 

 taken enough along with him to go to College. Once at 

 a University, the ambition of scholarship would have laid 

 hold on him, and with genius unimpaired and materials 

 extended, he might, in the first bloom of his manhood, 

 have taken his place among the foremost intellectual 

 workers of his time. 



There is another consideration which lends a melan- 

 choly emphasis to these regrets. Hugh Miller came of 

 a long-lived, strong-boned race, and we have learned 

 from himself that he was the most athletic boy of his 

 years in Cromarty. Had he proceeded to a University 

 he would have avoided those fifteen years in the quarry 

 and the he wing-shed, during which his robust constitu- 

 tion was shaken, and the seeds of ineradicable disease 



