HUGH MILLER 23 



studies the facts of Burns' early years and education, 

 and the really remarkable stock of information with 

 which he was to rouse the honest wonder of Dugald 

 Stewart his mathematical attainments and his philo- 

 sophical grasp, not to mention his possession of a very 

 powerful English prose style that makes every line of 

 his Letters really alive and matterful the less we 

 shall hear of peasant genius and untaught writers. We 

 question if one half of the members of the Edinburgh 

 bar, such as Lockhart has described them at the arrival 

 of Burns in Edinburgh, had reached such an amount 

 of general and poetical literature as that easily held in 

 command by the poet. We have heard an old school- 

 fellow of Edward Irving and Carlyle at the burgh school 

 of Annan remark on the misconception of Froude as 

 to the true social rank of their respective parents. 

 Horace and Burns seem, as Theodore Martin has 

 shown, not unlike in the matter of their fathers, and 

 the possession of such sets their children far out of that 

 circle of contracted social and moral surroundings in 

 which the biographers of the Smiles class have too 

 long set them. 



The knowledge of his letters Miller seems, like the 

 elder Weller, to have acquired from a study of the 

 local signboards, and in his sixth year he was sent to 

 a dame's school, where he spelt his way through the 

 old curriculum of a child's education in Scotland the 

 Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testa- 

 ment. He managed to discover for himself the story 



