72 THE APPRENTICE. 



because you write seldom. You are possessed of talents 

 which with due culture will enable you to attain no 

 common command of the pen ; for you are an original 

 thinker, your mind is richly embued with poetry, and 

 though devoid of a musical ear, you have from nature 

 something much better, that perception of the har- 

 monies of language which is essential to the formation of 

 a good and elegant style/ So far as I can judge, no 

 critic in Europe could have more correctly estimated 

 Miller's capacity at the time, or given him better advice. 

 A spectator observing these lads, the one appren- 

 ticed to a mason, the other to a house painter, would 

 hardly have guessed the nature of their conversation. 

 Had they been youths of aristocratic birth or University 

 distinction, could their intercourse have been more 

 completely that of gentlemen? We may note how 

 steadily Hugh pushes forward what, without much 

 conscious resolving on the subject, has become the 

 purpose of his life, self-culture. With quiet persistence, 

 undistracted by the commencement of lifelong toil as a 

 mason, he cherishes the ambition of maturing his 

 powers of thought and expression. Attesting, also, the 

 radical nobleness of his character, and the high tone of 

 the society in which he*had lived, this circumstance is to 

 be noted, that the ambition of making money never 

 seized him. The big bells of Babylon dinning into all 

 young ears, never more loudly than in our age, their in- 

 vitation to make fortunes, had no persuasion for him. To 

 extend the empire of his mind, to enrich and beautify 

 the garden of his soul, this was what presented itself as 

 a supreme object of ambition to our Scottish boy of 

 eighteen, with a mallet in his hand. 



