The knowledge of his letters Miller seems, like the elder Weller, to have acquired from a study of the local signboards, and in his sixth year he was sent to a dame's school, where he spelt his way through the old curriculum of a child's education in Scotland—the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament. He managed to discover for himself the story of Joseph; and even in the old six-volume edition of Lintot the genius of Homer was early made manifest. The Pilgrim's Progress, evidently in some such form as Macaulay has described, made for the cottage, followed; and, in course of time, the collection of books which his father had left was eagerly devoured. Among them were Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels—both never so familiar in Scotland to boys as they are in England—Cook's Voyages, John Howie of Lochgoin's Worthies, the Voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Byron, 'my grand-dad's narrative' of the poet. It was not till his tenth year that he became, as he says, 'thoroughly a Scot,' and this was effected by a perusal of Blind Harry's Wallace, that 'Bible of the Scottish people,' as Lord Hailes has called it, following or anticipating the remark by Wolf as to the similar position of the Iliad and the Odyssey among the Greeks. No one now need be informed about the influence that quaint old work had produced in Burns, and through him on the subsequent re-awakening of the national spirit at the end of the eighteenth century. Barbour's Bruce has remained the possession of the scholar and the antiquary, while this work of the old minstrel, literally 'sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment,' as Bentley had said of his great predecessor, has had an abiding influence on literature, and on the national character. 'Up to Crummade (Cromarty) and through the Northland' had blind Harry, with a fine patriotism, and, we fear, a total disregard for geography, made his hero effect a raid. When a man has got a view from Dan to Beersheba in which to smite the enemy hip and thigh, he need not be troubled with a few outlying counties.
The parish school of Cromarty which Miller attended numbered about a hundred and twenty boys and girls. The windows of the building fronted the opening of the Cromarty Firth, recalling at least by 'the mystery of the ships' the Portland of Longfellow's own early days. The tax of twenty peats to the school from the Highland boatmen paid for every boat in the trade recalls the salary of the public hangman of Inverness and Aberdeen, and the dues often formed the subject of debate between the boys and the irate Gaels, who did not fail to retort the taunt of the hangman's perquisite. The schoolmaster was a worthy that might have sat for the figure of Jonathan Tawse in Dr. Alexander's Johnny Gibb, and was, though a fair scholar, rather inefficient as a disciplinarian and teacher. Yet it was his boast—one now, alas, in these days sadly becoming obsolete—that he sent forward more lads to the bursary competition at the Northern university than any other teacher, and his 'heavy class' of a few boys in Latin was increased by his persuading the willing Uncle James to set Miller to the Rudiments in that time-honoured volume by Ruddiman, who had in his own days been a first bursar at Aberdeen. The teaching of Latin had been one of the props to education introduced by the Reformers, and so distinct had been the little note of pedantry, perhaps in this way fostered, that Smollett makes the barber in Roderick Random quote Horace in the original, and Foote in a farce has made a valet insist on its possession as a shibboleth of nationality. We need but mention the favourite quotations in the ancient tongue by the Baron of Bradwardine and Dugald Dalgetty as a reminiscence of his own old days 'at the Marischal College'; while Miller also could remember an old cabinet-maker who carried for the sake of the big print a Latin New Testament to church. But no more with him than with Darwin could the linguistic faculty be stimulated. The Rudiments he thought the dullest book he had ever seen, and though in after-life he regretted the lost opportunity that at five-and-twenty might have made him a scholar and thus have saved ten of the best working years of his life, it may be doubted if in his case the loss amounted to more than in the case of Macaulay, who affected to bewail his loss of mathematics. In their truest form, scholars, like naturalists, are born and not made, nor will any labour in the linguistic field yield much to the scientist. The poet Gray wisely lamented the loss of time in his own case through forced labour at mathematics, a remark not even yet fully appreciated in Scotland, where the system of general excellence—that system under which Johnson so happily remarked that, while each man got a bite, no one got a bellyful—has too long stunted the learning of the country and proved the bane alike of her schools and universities. 'As for Latin, I abominate it,' we find him writing from Cromarty in December 1838, in a letter now before us, 'and ever did since I burnt my Rudiments.'
More congenial amusement he found in the exercise of his story-telling faculty. When the master's back was turned, the Sennachie, as the master called him, would gather round him the other boys and narrate to them the adventures of his uncle, the story of Gulliver, and the shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe, or even the mysteries of Mrs. Radcliffe. When the sixty volumes of his father and the hundred and sixty of his uncles had been consumed, he fell in with a collection of essayists from Addison to Henry Mackenzie, the influence of which, along with Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, remained to the last as a powerful impress upon his prose style. But he was rapidly finding his national and true school. The Hill of Cromarty, part of De Beaumont's Ben-Nevis system, and the rich Liassic deposit of Eathie, were his favourite haunts, and his uncle Alexander, after his own work was done, would spend with him many an hour in the ebb tide. To the training thus acquired from this untaught naturalist he owed much of his own close powers of observation, which led, however, well-nigh to a fatal termination through an adventurous visit to the Doo-cot caves, from which he was rescued late at night during a high tide. This formed the subject of his first copy of juvenile verse, which was recited 'with vast applause' by the handsomest girl at the Cromarty boarding establishment kept by Miss Elizabeth Bond. In her own early days she had known the father and mother of Scott; and, when in 1814 she had published her Letters of a Village Governess, she had dedicated them to the great novelist, who later on in the midst of his own troubles, living in lodgings away from Abbotsford, could yet remember to send her ten pounds 'to scare the wolf from the door,' as he cheerily remarked, when she had found the truth of her own saying that it was hard for a single woman to get through the world 'without a head'—unmarried.
His reading at this time received a curious extension through there falling into his hands a copy of Military Medley belonging to a retired officer, and on the shore he would carry out plans of fortification as therein set forth by the great French engineer Vauban. With sand for towers, and variegated shells and limpets for soldiers, he worked his way through the evolutions of troops, and no reader of Scott will fail to remember the similar action by Sir Walter which, in the introduction to the third canto of Marmion, he describes as taking place at Sandy Knowe, in the air of the Cheviots, near the old tower of Smailholme that 'charmed his fancy's waking hour':—
'Again I fought each combat o'er,
Pebbles and shells in order laid
The mimic ranks of war displayed.'
Nor will he fail to note the exact and characteristic point of difference in the two children, and how in each the child was father of the man. So early in both was the natural instinct of the future historian and the geologist awakened.
At a later period he seems rather to have become an unruly lad, and to have proved too much for his relations to manage. He was in the stage when such boys run away to sea or enlist, and his father's own calling might, from its well-nigh hereditary nature, have been thought to be the one most likely to be adopted. He enjoyed a somewhat dangerous reputation through carrying a knife and stabbing a companion in the thigh, but these escapades may in later years have been unconsciously heightened by remorse for wasted opportunities, and which in his case we have seen to amount to little or nothing. But the circle of his own companions was changing or breaking up, and it became necessary to decide on the future. His mother, after being a widow for well-nigh a dozen years, had married again, and he determined on being a mason, an occupation which he thought would, by his being employed in labour at intermittent seasons, afford him plenty leisure. Against this resolution both his uncles stoutly protested, and were prepared to assist him to the Northern university. 'I had no wish,' he says, 'and no peculiar fitness to be either lawyer or doctor; and as for the Church, that was too serious a direction to look in for one's bread, unless one could necessarily regard one's-self as called to the Church's proper work, and I could not.' His uncles agreed to this view of the case; and so, reluctantly, the proposed course was abandoned. 'Better be anything,' they said, 'than an uncalled minister.' His was not the feeble sense of fitness possessed in such a high degree by the presentees to Auchterarder and Marnoch. As a member of the Moray nation he would naturally have proceeded to King's College in Aberdeen, then at the very lowest ebb of its existence as regards the abilities, or the want of them, of the wondrous corps of professors who filled its chairs. Carlyle in his Sartor has drawn certainly no flattering picture of the Edinburgh of his days, and his friend Professor Masson in the early volumes of Macmillan's Magazine has put before us the no less wonderful spectacle of the Marischal College of his own student life; nor would the state of King's College about 1820 yield much material for respect. The professoriate was grossly ignorant and conceited, and nepotism was rampant. As a child, we can recall the last expiring flicker of the race, and when we add that one aspiring graduate had published a pamphlet to refute Newton, and that the theology was of the wintriest type of even Aberdonian moderatism, couched in the most remote imitation of the rhetorical flights in The Man of Feeling, we have said enough to show that Miller certainly lost nothing by non-attendance at the classes in Aberdeen.
But it was not without reluctance that his resolve to become a mason was allowed by his uncles. However, at last, there being another uncle on the mother's side who was a mason contracting for small jobs, and who employed an apprentice or two, he was bound apprentice for three years, from February 1820 to November 1822 and entered on the trade of mason and quarryman, for in the North the combination was constant. Long after, in the Old Red Sandstone he has described his first day's experience in the sandstone quarry, when, in that early spring morning and with a heavy heart, he set out to experience his first battle in the stern school of the world: