30 FAMOUS SCOTS 



one's-self as called to the Church's proper work, and I 

 could not.' His uncles agreed to this view of the case ; 

 and so, reluctantly, the proposed course was abandoned. 

 'Better be anything,' they said, 'than an uncalled 

 minister.' His was not the feeble sense of fitness 

 possessed in such a high degree by the presentees to 

 Auchterarder and Marnoch. As a member of the 

 Moray nation he would naturally have proceeded to 

 King's College in Aberdeen, then at the very lowest 

 ebb of its existence as regards the abilities, or the want 

 of them, of the wondrous corps of professors who filled 

 its chairs. Carlyle in his Sartor has drawn certainly 

 no flattering picture of the Edinburgh of his days, and 

 his friend Professor Masson in the early volumes of 

 Macmillatfs Magazine has put before us the no less 

 wonderful spectacle of the Marischal College of his own 

 student life; nor would the state of King's College 

 about 1820 yield much material for respect. The 

 professoriate was grossly ignorant and conceited, and 

 nepotism was rampant. As a child, we can recall the 

 last expiring flicker of the race, and when we add that 

 one aspiring graduate had published a pamphlet to 

 refute Newton, and that the theology was of the 

 wintriest type of even Aberdonian moderatism, couched 

 in the most remote imitation of the rhetorical flights in 

 The Man of Feeling, we have said enough to show that 

 Miller certainly lost nothing by non-attendance at the 

 classes in Aberdeen. 



But it was not without reluctance that his resolve to 



