DIFFICULTIES OF PUBLICATION. 295 



sions to the rocks, exploring rambles on the shore, pic- 

 nics to the Burn of Eathie. All the time, he was pur- 

 suing his enterprise of self-culture with the steady 

 enthusiasm of a Goethe. He never wrote a letter or 

 penned a paragraph for the Inverness Courier without 

 striving to make it a means of improving himself in 

 composition. He grudged no toil in writing and re- 

 writing his Traditions, resolutely bent upon bringing 

 them, in style, thought, and interest, to his high standard. 

 It need not seriously qualify our estimate of his 

 felicity to know that the business of getting his volume 

 into print proved for him, as it has proved for so many 

 authors, a business of difficulty. Sir Thomas Dick 

 Lauder known to literature by his novel, The Wolf of 

 Badenoch, and to science by his account of the great 

 Morayshire floods and dissertation on the parallel roads 

 of Glen Roy had formed a high opinion ]of the Cromarty 

 poet's capacity, and exerted himself to procure the pub- 

 lication of his book. Sir Thomas submitted the manu- 

 script to an Edinburgh critic, an expert, it appears, in 

 the tasting department of the literary guild, whom he 

 describes as c one of the first literary judges of the day.' 

 The response was more flattering than satisfactory. ' I 

 do not,' wrote this minister of fate, ' pretend to have 

 read the whole with much care ; but I have read quite 

 enough to impress me with a decided opinion of his 

 [Miller's] very extraordinary powers as a prose writer/ 

 There is, however, an objection to the history, to wit, 

 ' its great lengthiness ; ' and though the great man 

 repeats his conviction that Mr Miller is ' a very extra- 

 ordinary person/ he does not say that he will recom- 

 mend any of the purveyors of literary viands whom he 

 professionally advises to place it on their bill of fare. 

 Messrs Oliver and Boyd and Mr Andrew Shortrede, to 



