The year 1856 was one remarkable for garotte robberies. This awakened in the overtaxed brain of Miller a fear for his museum of geological specimens which he had housed for himself at Shrub Mount, Portobello. The last four years of his life he had spent there, and often he would leave the house and return late in the evening after hours of investigation of the coast line and geological features of Leith and the surrounding country. He knew his Edinburgh thoroughly; some of his happiest papers are to be read in his Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood; and it was after one of these excursions that Sir Archibald Geikie had seen him, as he describes in the reminiscence to be found in the last pages of this work. The fear of burglars had taken hold firmly of his imagination, and he resumed the habit of bearing fire-arms which he had begun at Cromarty when carrying the money of the bank between that town and Tain. The inflammation of the lungs in his early days as a mason had again at intervals returned, and his sleep was broken by dreams of such a harassing nature that he would wake in the morning to examine his clothes, in the belief that he was now the victim of evil spirits. In such a condition it was not unnatural that his mind should take a colour from other days, where the reader may remember his own account of seeing the figure at the door after his father's death. Professor Masson, we see, notes this point, and he believes that Miller felt a strange fascination for all stories of second-sight. Though he never wrote or spoke of such, except in the sober tone of science, yet 'my impression,' he says, 'is that Hugh Miller did all his life carry about him, as Scott did, but to a greater extent, a belief in ghostly agencies of the air, earth, and water, always operating, and sometimes revealing themselves. One sees his imagination clinging to what his reason would fain reject.' The only hope lay in a total cessation from all work, but this was found impossible through the almost second nature which over-exertion had become to him. He had also a rooted dislike for all medicines, and it was with difficulty that he was induced to put himself under the management of Dr. Balfour and Professor Miller. The last day of his life was given to the revision of the proof-sheets of his Testimony of the Rocks, and in the evening he turned over the pages of Cowper, whose works had ever been among his standard favourites. By a curious fatality his eye rested on The Castaway, written by the poet in a similar mental condition, and which for sustained force and limpid expression is unrivalled as a religious lyric. He retired to rest on the night of the 24th December 1856. Next morning, his body, half-dressed, was found with a bullet from a revolver through his left lung. He had lifted a heavy woven jersey over his chest before he fired, which showed that death had not been accidental. On a table a loose sheet of paper was found on which had been written these lines to his wife:—
'Dearest Lydia,—My brain burns, I must have walked; and a fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought. God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me. Dearest Lydia, dear children, farewell. My brain burns as the recollection grows. My dear, dear wife, farewell.
Hugh Miller.'
It fell to Dr. Guthrie, in whose church of Free St. John's the deceased had been an office member, to apprise the widow of the real nature of the case; and in order to secure her sanction for a post-mortem examination the above letter had to be produced, showing that his purpose had been executed almost before the ink was dry. On the 26th the verdict was issued:—'From the diseased appearances found in the brain, taken in connection with the history of the case, we have no doubt that the act was suicidal, under the impulse of insanity.' His funeral was the largest Edinburgh had seen since that of Chalmers, and by his side in the Grange Cemetery he was laid. To the mass of his countrymen abroad he was the greatest of living Scotchmen. His works had given him a European reputation in science, while to those at home the work he had accomplished as a tribune of the people had given him a position second only to that of Guthrie.
A generation has arisen since which hears but by vague report the principles for which the men of 1843 contended. It takes many a man to fall in the ditch before glorious revolutions can successfully march over in their pumps and silk stockings, giving their victorious three-times-three. It has been sought to minimise these issues, to explain them away after the manner of 'able editors' and complacent philosophers cheerfully 'at ease in Zion,' and to maintain, with the hardy gravity of ignorance, that the combatants really knew not what they fought for—the Headship of Christ, Anti-Patronage, or resistance to the civil courts. Similar futilities we have seen ventilated over the American Civil War. The North, say the philosophic thinkers, or tinkers, did not know whether it fought for the preservation of the Union or against slavery. Such speculations are too thin to carry much weight. In both cases many went to their grave for what they believed to be principle, and all such men may be safely trusted to have reached some conclusions and clear issues. These issues obviously all met; after Auchterarder on the one hand, and South Carolina on the other, had led the way, no such easy subterfuge was possible for either party.
The lesson then learned at such a cost might never have been necessary, with a better adjustment of the political balance, which has been again found wanting and craves a final and a rational settlement. What Fairfoul in 1662 told Middleton had been simply again repeated in 1843 by Muir and Hope, who held the ear of Sir James Graham, to whom Peel had resigned the whole management of Scottish affairs. For all that Graham knew of them, Peel might as well have left them to a foreigner. It took the death of thousands of Irishmen in the potato famine of 1847 to convince the overfed John Bull of even the barest existence of an Irish Question, and many a man went to his grave before Lord Aberdeen, Peel, Graham, and other official people could learn for themselves the true condition of Scotland. Then it was too late, and their regrets were vain. The bill of Bolingbroke brought in, as Burnet said, to weaken the Scottish Church, had produced its logical effects in widening the gulf between the people and the nobility of Scotland; education at Eton, Harrow, and the English Universities had done the rest. Carlyle is known to have regarded the action of the Church in 1843 as the greatest thing in his time; the sole survivor of the Peel ministry, Mr. Gladstone, has expressed the same opinion; while the critical, wiry, and alert little Jeffrey was 'proud of his country.' It bears to-day the mark very strongly of Hugh Miller. Nor need the workman be ashamed of his work—from which, therefore, let him not be separated.
CHAPTER V
IN SCIENCE
'In league with the stones of the field.'—Job v. 23.
The geologist writes in sand literally and historically, and in the science of the Testimony of the Rocks super-session is the law. 'Such,' says Miller himself in the preface to the first edition of the Old Red Sandstone, 'is the state of progression in geological science that the geologist who stands still but for a very little must be content to find himself left behind.' The advancing tide of knowledge leaves the names of the early pioneers little more than a list of extinct volcanoes. Hooke and Burnet, Ray and Woodward, Moro and Michel, are to the ordinary mass of readers about as obsolete as the saurian and the mastodon. Only the very few can live in a tide so strong, which bears away not only the older landmarks but even such names as Werner and Hutton, Hall and Fleming.