UNIVERSITY 



HUGH MILLER 



edited by Robert Carruthers of Dumfries, who had been 

 appointed editor of the Courier in the very same year of 

 Miller's visit. His Life of Pope published in 1853 is 

 still a standard production, and altogether Carruthers 

 was one of the ablest editors in Scotland, and his paper 

 which was edited on Liberal lines was a very powerful 

 organ in his day. The friendship then begun lasted 

 till the death of Miller unbroken, and was mutually 

 advantageous. While he was still in the Highland 

 capital he received word of the fatal illness of his uncle 

 James, and his first work on his return was a neat 

 tombstone for this close friend of his father and worthy 

 to whom he was so deeply indebted for much of his 

 own subsequent distinction. 



His volume of verse under the title of Poems Written 

 in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason issued 

 slowly in 1829 from the press, and its appearance in the 

 disillusionising medium of black and white convinced 

 him that after all his true vocation was not to be 

 found in poetry, for many lines which had appeared as 

 tolerable, if not more, to the writer in the process of 

 composition were now robbed of their charm by 

 commission to print. Indeed, at no time does his 

 versification rise beyond fluent description. It lacks 

 body and form, and was really in his case nothing but 

 a sort of rudimentary stratum on which he was to rear 

 a very strong and powerful prose style. He was lacking 

 in ear, and he confessed to an organ that recognised 

 with difficulty the difference of the bagpipe and the big 



