HUGH MILLER in 



Candlish, who had been translated to the college chair 

 left vacant by Chalmers. None of his friends were 

 nearer to him than Mackgill-Crichton of Rankeillour 

 in Fife, and there we find him one Christmas along 

 with Sir David Brewster and Guthrie. Both Miller and 

 his host were men of great physical powers, and 

 as Professor Masson notes the geologist had a habit 

 of estimating men by their physique. Crichton had 

 narrated how he had started by the side of the mail 

 coach as it passed his gates, and after a run of twenty 

 miles he had been the first at the ferry. 'A horse 

 could do more than either of you,' was the amused 

 rejoinder of Brewster. 



The issue of his Schools and Schoolmasters (1854), 

 republished from the columns of his paper, brought him 

 warm encomiums from Carlyle, Robert Chambers, and 

 others. Miller in politics and otherpoints differed strongly 

 from Chambers, and of course at this time the secret 

 of the authorship of the Vestiges had not been divulged. 

 Yet beautifully does Chambers, to whom Scottish 

 publishing and periodical literature owes so much, refer 

 to the early days in Cromarty in comparison with his 

 own struggles in Peebles. Readers who may have not 

 quite forgiven some passages in Chambers's History of 

 the Rebellion of 174$ will doubtless soften their asperity 

 after reading Chambers's account of his struggling 

 through a whole set of the Encyclopedia Britannica 

 which he had in a lumber garret, setting out at sixteen, 

 ' as a bookseller with only my own small collection of 



