FIRST SIGHT OF EDINBURGH. 131 



in the town of Leith, my head dizzied with the confused 

 cries of watermen and carters, and my thoughts scattered 

 by a multiplicity of objects, any of which I might have 

 thought curious, but all of which only tended to con- 

 fuse/ 



This, it must be admitted, is a rather common-place 

 epistle, and the verses are so poor that an apology may 

 seem necessary for presenting them to the reader. But 

 here we have at least the lad Miller in his habit as he 

 lived, with no gleam from the after-time to disturb the 

 artless unconsciousness of modest, simple-hearted youth. 

 Both in his letter to Baird and in the Schools and School- 

 masters there are elaborate pictures of his first sight of 

 Edinburgh; but what first impressed him in the scene 

 the emergence of the chimneys of the new town and 

 the summit of Arthur's Seat, from the mist always 

 reappears. It is well, also, to remember that the bare- 

 ness in the record of his impressions which meets us in 

 these contemporary letters on Edinburgh, may arise 

 partly from his inexperience in composition, and partly 

 from the restraints imposed upon epistolary correspond- 

 ence in days long antecedent to the introduction of the 

 penny post. We may believe that it was not merely in 

 the autobiographic retrospect that he ' felt as if he were 

 approaching a great magical city like some of those in 

 the Arabian Nights that was even more intensely 

 poetical than nature itself ; ' and that reminiscences of 

 Ramsay and Ferguson, Smollett's Humphrey Clinker and 

 Scott's Marmion, heightened the interest with which he 

 looked through the canopy of mist upon the spires and 

 roofs of Edinburgh, 



The great city to one who had never seen a larger 

 town than Inverness it was very great threw him at 

 first out of all his habitudes. He frankly confesses, 



