104 FAMOUS SCOTS 



game laws. The Maynooth grant and Macaulay he 

 opposed. He was an Oliverian for Ireland, and the 

 cause of much trouble in the most distressful country 

 he viewed as associated with that subsidy, which he 

 would have preferred to see converted into a grant for 

 science. 



Indeed, like most of his countrymen he had a strong 

 view of historical, as distinguished from mere party, 

 conservatism. The last has of course been rendered 

 simply impossible in Scotland by the history and the 

 ecclesiastical tenets of the country, but he ever carried 

 about him something like the conviction of Dr. Living- 

 stone, that the common people of Scotland had read 

 history and were no levellers. Thus he held, like 

 Burke, to what Mr. Morley calls 'the same energetic 

 feeling about moral laws, the same frame of counsel 

 and prudence, the same love for the slowness of time, 

 the same slight account held of mere intellectual 

 knowledge.' This historic conservatism of Burke 

 would be taken by most Scotchmen as a pretty good 

 basis for reasoned Liberalism, and the fixity of Miller's 

 main positions only exposed him the more to the weari- 

 some Tory vocabulary of ' high-flyer, fire-raiser, fanatic,' 

 etc. Admirably in the Letter to Brougham does he 

 seize on the ground of the political Liberalism of 

 Scotland : 



* I, my Lord, am an integral part of the Church of Scot- 

 land, and of such integral parts, and of nothing else, is 

 the body of this Church composed ; nor do we look to the 



