236 THE JOURNEYMAN. 



the Courier might have produced in the way of orders 

 for gravestones. The editor did not insert the verses, 

 they are in truth uncommonly poor. Miller, how- 

 ever, piqued by their non-appearance, and confident in 

 his poetical powers, resolved to print on his own account, 

 and with this view made application afresh at the office 

 of the newspaper. 



He thus formed the acquaintance of Mr Robert 

 Carruthers, then as now editor of the Inverness Courier, 

 and the acquaintance ripened rapidly into a friendship 

 which continued during the life of Hugh Miller. With 

 that critical acumen which all the world has learned to 

 acknowledge in the biographer of Pope, Mr Carruthers 

 discerned the originality and worth of Miller, and though 

 he came in the guise of a stone-mason, shy, taciturn, 

 ungainly, with a quire of rugged verses in his pocket, 

 admitted him at once to the enjoyment of that equality 

 and that fraternity which have from of old prevailed 

 in the republic of letters. Miller had indeed made 

 a notable acquisition, and he did not fail to appreciate it. 

 The perfect judgment, the perfect temper, the literary 

 sympathy not less intelligent than warm, the indestruct- 

 ible cordiality, unchilled by forty years' editorial experi- 

 ence, which have endeared Mr Carruthers to thousands 

 from London to Inverness, won his confidence and his 

 heart. To his dying day there was no newspaper which 

 he read with half the interest with which he hung over 

 the Inverness Courier. 



An address to the Northern Institution, an anti- 

 quarian and scientific society which had its head-quarters 

 in Inverness, though couched in the pompous rhetoric 

 proper to such addresses, and written out in that old 

 English hand which was one of Miller's valued accom- 



