HUGH MILLER 45 



enabled him at this critical juncture to leave work for a 

 time. The house on the Coalhill had turned out better 

 than was expected, and, with a clear balance of fifty 

 pounds in his pocket, he could set sail for Cromarty, 

 where, after a weary seven days' voyage through fog and 

 mist, he was met on landing by his uncles. Not for 

 ten years, and then under very different circumstances, 

 was he again to see Edinburgh. 



During this period of convalescence he experienced a 

 religious change, leading to positions from which he 

 never saw reason to recede. 'It is,' he says, 'at once 

 delicate and dangerous to speak of one's own spiritual 

 condition, or of the emotional sentiments on which 

 one's conclusions regarding it are so often doubtfully 

 founded. Egotism in the religious form is perhaps 

 more tolerated than any other, but it is not on that 

 account less perilous to the egotist himself. There 

 need be, however, less delicacy in speaking of one's 

 beliefs than of one's feelings.' This last remark is 

 eminently characteristic at once of the individual and 

 of the national type of severe reticence on internal 

 religious experience. This may serve to throw some 

 light on the taunt flung by Dr. Johnson, in one of his 

 most boisterous moods in Skye, at the head of Boswell. 

 * Can you,' he asked, ' name one book of any value on a 

 religious subject written by the Scottish clergy?' John- 

 son does not seem to be dwelling on specifically 

 theological works ; he has rather in his mind the 

 manuals of a homiletic or devotional order, in which he 



