IN THE VAULT OF THE URQUHARTS. 179 



This wild and buoyant humour was not, however, 

 constant with him. ' You seem,' he writes, ' to have been 

 in low spirits. Are you also subject to those strange 

 rises and falls of spirit which, without any assignable 

 cause, make your humble servant happy, miserable, and 

 mad by turns ? I wish the college session over, and you 

 fairly settled at your mother's fireside. I am really 

 vexed on seeing you determined on killing yourself. Is 

 he not as much a suicide who swallows death in the form 

 of a mathematical problem, as he who takes an ounce of 

 opium ? The latter is certainly the easiest way of getting 

 out of the world there is no pedantry in it/ Affecting 

 words, when read in connection with the history of Mil- 

 ler's closing years ! How little did he think, while re- 

 joicing in the freedom of the hill-side and the sea-shore, 

 and warning his friend with gentle earnestness not to 

 overtask his brain, that he should himself yield to the 

 terrible temptation, and pay the penalty with his life ! 

 ' Happy and miserable and mad by turns : ' the expres- 

 sion is striking and strange. 



The strutting and declamation of this visit to the 

 Dropping Cave are not the sole illustration we have of 

 an extravagant and freakish humour indulged by Miller 

 in this period of his life, tolerabiles inepiioe, the trifling 

 of a powerful mind which has not yet found its work. 

 Some years later, in February, 1830, he details to a cor- 

 respondent the particulars of an attempt made by him 

 to ' create incident ' by descending into the vaulted 

 tomb of the Urquharts, in the ancient burying-ground 

 adjoining the ruinous chapel of St Regulus or St Rule 

 in the neighbourhood of Cromarty. ' A few weeks ago/ 

 he writes, ' upon a dark and stormy night, I procured a 

 tinder box, three torches, and a small quantity of fuel, and 

 went to the old chapel of St Rule. I descended to the 



