HUGH MILLER 101 



nature lessened the strain upon the editor. His suc- 

 cessor in the editorial chair of the paper, Dr. Peter 

 Bayne, in the preface to Miller's Essays (1862) says : 



'He meditated his articles as an author meditates his 

 books or a poet his verses, conceiving them as wholes, work- 

 ing fully out their trains of thought, enriching them with far 

 brought treasures of fact, and adorning them with finished 

 and apposite illustration. In the quality of completeness 

 those articles stand, so far as I know, alone in the records 

 of journalism. For rough and hurrying vigour they might 

 be matched, or more, from the columns of the Times ; in 

 lightness of wit and smart lucidity of statement they might 

 be surpassed by the happiest performances of French jour- 

 nalists a Prevost-Paradol, or a St. Marc Girardin ; and for 

 occasional brilliancies of imagination, and sudden gleams 

 of piercing thought neither they nor any other newspaper 

 articles, have, I think, been comparable with those of S. T. 

 Coleridge. But as complete journalistic essays, symmet- 

 rical in plan, finished in execution, and of sustained and 

 splendid ability, the articles of Hugh Miller are unrivalled.' 



Certainly few modern editors could produce such a 

 leader as he did on Dugald Stewart (Aug. 26, 1854), or 

 upon the Encyclopedia Britannica (April 30, 1842), or 

 could, finding themselves for a day in London, ' when 

 time hung heavy on my hands,' buy a cheap reprint of 

 Eugene Sue's Wandering Jew and convert its hurried 

 perusal into a capital paper on the conflict between Con- 

 tinental Ultramontanism and Liberalism. The individu- 

 ality of the writer and the tenacity with which he held 



