144 FAMOUS SCOTS 



a vigorous imagination. As an editor, he had not to go 

 to memory for his metaphors, and to his imagination for 

 his facts. Both came easily and naturally; and his 

 writing, even in its most sustained flights, shows no 

 signs of effort. Some critics have detected in his style 

 an element of exuberance ; and this may be allowed in 

 his narrative and descriptive passages. There would 

 appear to have been, as it were, a Celtic lobe of 

 imagination in his mind for the feeling of discursive 

 description and external nature. Thus, in his slightest 

 landscapes his imagination or eye is not satisfied with 

 the few bold touches such as Carlyle would, after his 

 manner, throw upon the canvas. It expands, like the 

 method of Ruskin, over the surface. But in each case 

 the defect is the result of original endowment. The 

 eye, he says, had been in his case exclusively trained as 

 a mason, and this habit of seeing the projected line 

 complete from the beginning was at the bottom of his 

 often spoiling the effect of his narrative with flamboyant 

 additions, through his possession of the geological eye 

 for its conformation in detail. Johnson said of Thom- 

 son that he had a true poetical genius the power of 

 seeing even a pair of candles in a poetical light. The 

 landscape became to Miller at once anatomised into its 

 geological aspects. 



But in his strictly scientific passages this is not so. 

 There the style is simple in expression and close in 

 reasoning. When we consider the great amount of solid 

 literary performance, and of minute observation, re- 



