BARON HUME'S COMPLIMENT. 395 



pressed myself in a way to sanction them. I had honesty 

 and delicacy enough not to assume the airs of a lady- 

 patroness ; I ever spoke of you as my friend, and as proud 

 that you were such.' In the same letter Miss Dunbar 

 mentioned that Baron Hume, nephew to the historian, 

 pronounced by Kemble ' positively the first ' critic of the 

 day, had seen the prospectus of Miller's book. 'He 

 perused it,' she adds, ' with much interest and no little 

 surprise, and states as his opinion that the writer excels 

 in that classical style which many well-known writers of 

 the present day, so far from attaining to, do not seem 

 even to understand/ Hugh in his reply speaks of Baron 

 Hume before touching on Mrs Grant's proposal. 



'Cromarty, October 25, 1834. 



' Never was my little remnant of modesty in such 

 danger as it has been exposed to by the critical remark of 

 Baron Hume. But if at all worthy of the compliment it 

 conveys, I owe my merit chiefly to accident ;-*-to my 

 having kept company with the older English writers, 

 the Addisons, Popes, and Robertsons of the last century, 

 at a time when I had no opportunity of becoming ac- 

 quainted with the authors of the present time. And the 

 tone of these earlier writers I have, I dare say, contrived in 

 some measure to catch, just as in my spoken language I 

 have caught the tone of our Cromarty Scotch. 



1 1 am much gratified by the kind solicitude of Mrs 

 Grant, but you seem to have anticipated my reply to 

 what she suggests. Though I have sometimes amused 

 my leisure hours with sculpture, my best efforts in this 

 department have been only half-efforts, I made them 

 without either hope or care, and saw them balked with- 

 out disappointment ; and though perhaps rather a supe- 

 rior workman as workmen go, I have become such I 



