His somewhat impaired strength led him to think of a livelihood through little jobs of monumental stonework in a style superior to that introduced as yet into the countryside, and to this period of observation of the Scottish character acquired through living in the vicinity of farm-houses, villages, churchyards, as the varying means of lodging were afforded him, he ascribed much of the knowledge which he turned to so good an editorial account. In the company, too, of the parish minister Stewart he was happy, for, according to his own conviction and the testimony of many others, he was a man of no ordinary acuteness and of unquestioned pulpit ability. Indeed, Miller never hesitated to declare that for the fibre of his whole thinking he was more indebted to Chalmers and to this almost unknown Cromarty minister than to any two other men. Stewart's power seems to have lain in the detection of subtle analogies and in pictorial verbal power, in which he resembled Guthrie. In an obituary notice in The Witness of Nov. 13, 1847 he dwells with affection on the man, and illustrates admirably the type of intellect and its dangers. 'Goldsmith,' he observes, 'when he first entered upon his literary career, found that all the good things on the side of truth had been already said; and that his good things, if he really desired to produce any, would require all to be said on the side of paradox and error. Poor Edward Irving formed a melancholy illustration of this species of originality. His stock of striking things on the side of truth was soon expended; notoriety had meanwhile become as essential to his comfort as ardent spirits to that of the dram-drinker; and so, to procure the supply of the unwholesome pabulum, without which he could not exist, he launched into a perilous ocean of heterodoxy and extravagance, and made shipwreck of his faith. Stewart's originality was not the originality of opening up new vistas in which all was unfamiliar, simply because the direction in which they led was one in which men's thought had no occasion to travel and no business to perform. It was the greatly higher ability of enabling men to see new and unwonted objects in old familiar directions.' For sixteen years Miller sat under his ministry, and for twelve was admitted to his closest intimacy.
But in time work of even the 'Old Mortality' order grew scarce. Accordingly, in the summer of June 1828, he visited Inverness, and inserted in the local papers an advertisement for employment. He felt that he could execute such commissions with greater care and exactness than were usual, and in a style that could be depended upon for correct spelling. He mentions himself the case of the English mason who mangled Proverbs xxxi. 10 into the bewildering abbreviation that 'A virtuous woman is 5s. to her husband,' and he might also have mentioned the case of the statue to George II. in Stephen's Green, Dublin, erected doubtless under municipal supervision, and which yet in the course of a brief Latin inscription of thirteen lines can show more than one mistake to the individual line. He had the curious, yet perhaps after all not unpractical, idea that his scheme for employment might be materially improved by his sending a copy of verses to the paper, in the belief that the public would infer that the writer of correct verse could be a reliable workman. But nothing came of this. In justice to the editor it may be allowed that the versification, if easy, was nothing remarkable, and felicity of epithets may be no guarantee for perfection of epitaphs. The reflection, however, came to him that there was no advantage to be won in thus, as he says, scheming himself into employment. It was not congenial, and walking 'half an inch taller' along the streets on the strength of this resolution, he was actually offered the Queen's shilling, or the King's to be chronologically correct, by a smart recruiting sergeant of a Highland regiment who from the powerful physique of the man had naturally inferred the possession of a choice recruit.
He determined, accordingly, to face the worst and publish. He made a hasty selection of his verses through the last six years and approached the office of the Inverness Courier. This was a highly fortunate opening, for that paper was, then and up to 1878, edited by Robert Carruthers of Dumfries, who had been appointed editor of the Courier in the very same year of Miller's visit. His Life of Pope published in 1853 is still a standard production, and altogether Carruthers was one of the ablest editors in Scotland, and his paper which was edited on Liberal lines was a very powerful organ in his day. The friendship then begun lasted till the death of Miller unbroken, and was mutually advantageous. While he was still in the Highland capital he received word of the fatal illness of his uncle James, and his first work on his return was a neat tombstone for this close friend of his father and worthy to whom he was so deeply indebted for much of his own subsequent distinction.
His volume of verse under the title of Poems Written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason issued slowly in 1829 from the press, and its appearance in the disillusionising medium of black and white convinced him that after all his true vocation was not to be found in poetry, for many lines which had appeared as tolerable, if not more, to the writer in the process of composition were now robbed of their charm by commission to print. Indeed, at no time does his versification rise beyond fluent description. It lacks body and form, and was really in his case nothing but a sort of rudimentary stratum on which he was to rear a very strong and powerful prose style. He was lacking in ear, and he confessed to an organ that recognised with difficulty the difference of the bagpipe and the big drum. The critics were not very partial to the venture. The tone of the majority was that of the Quarterly upon Keats, and the autocrats of poetical merit declared that he was safer with his chisel than on Parnassus. One little oasis, however, in the desert of depreciation did manage to reach him in a letter, through his friend Forsyth of Elgin, from Thomas Pringle of Roxburgh who had seen the book. In early days the poet had been a clerk in the Register House of Edinburgh, where his Scenes of Teviotdale had secured him an introduction to Scott, who extended to him the same ready support which he had bestowed on Leyden. By his influence he was appointed editor of Blackwood's Magazine, and later on emigrated with a party of relatives to the Cape, where his unsparing denunciations of the colonial policy in its treatment of the natives, and his advocacy of what would now be called the anti-Rhodes party brought him into complications with the officials in Downing Street and the colonial authorities. Poor Pringle!—among the one-song writers, the singers of the one lilt that rises out of a mass of now forgotten verse, his name is high, and he has won for himself an abiding niche in the hearts of his countrymen by his Emigrant's Lament, where he touches with a faultless hand the scenery of 'bonnie Teviotdale and Cheviot mountains blue.'
The volume of verses was not without its more immediate results in a local circle. It brought him under the notice of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder of Relugas, who is now remembered by his Wolf of Badenoch—a not quite unsuccessful effort at bending the bow of Ulysses, though without the dramatic force of Scott. By Carruthers he was introduced to Principal Baird, and thus a link with the past was effected through a man who had edited the poems of Michael Bruce, had befriended Alexander Murray for a short period the occupant of the Oriental chair in Edinburgh, and been a patron of Pringle and a close friend of Scott. By Baird he was strongly pressed to venture on a literary life in the capital, but the time was not propitious, and he wisely resolved to devote himself to several years of accumulation and reflection before he should embark on a vocation for which he had no great liking, and in which, even to the last, he had but little belief. For an ordinary journalist he would indeed have been as little qualified as Burns when offered a post on Perry's Morning Chronicle. The justness of his resolution was fully shown when the opportunity found him, and he was then fully prepared for the work he was to do. He was induced by the Principal to draw up for him a brief sketch of his life, and of this a draft bringing it up to 1825 was composed and sent to Edinburgh.
There existed at this time in the North the remains of a little coterie of ladies, numbering among its members Henry Mackenzie's cousin,—Mrs. Rose of Kilravock, whom Burns had visited on his Highland tour, Lady Gordon Cumming, and Mrs. Grant of Laggan, whose once well-known Letters from the Mountains have yielded in popularity to her song of Highland Laddie, which commemorates the departure in 1799 of the Marquis of Huntly with Sir Ralph Abercromby. By none of them, however, was he more noticed than by Miss Dunbar of Boath, who occupies in his early correspondence the place taken in the letters of Burns by Mrs. Dunlop. During his visits to this excellent lady he explored the curious sand-dunes of Culbin which still arrest the attention of the geologist and traveller in his rambles by the Findhorn. By Miss Dunbar he was pressed to embark on literature, while Mrs. Grant was of the opinion that he might follow the example of Allan Cunningham, who was engaged in the studio of Chantrey. But such patronage was in his case no less wisely exercised than admitted, nor was his the nature to be in any way spoiled by it; his self-reliant disposition suffered no such baneful effects as were felt by the much weaker nature of Thom of Inverurie, the one lyrical utterance of Aberdeenshire, or by Burns in the excitement of his Edinburgh season. He even became a town councillor, though he admits that his masterly inactivity was such as led him to absent himself pretty wholly from the duties, whose onerous nature may be inferred when the most important business before the council was, on one occasion, clubbing together a penny each to pay a ninepenny postage in the complete absence of town funds.
Into his life at this period a new vision was introduced through the appearance on the scene of a young lady whom he was afterwards to make his wife. Sauntering through the wood on the hill overlooking the Cromarty Firth he met Miss Lydia Fraser, who was engaged in reading 'an elaborate essay on Causation.' The reader may remember—with feelings, we hope, of contrition for Mr. Lang's railway lyric on the fin de siècle students of Miss Braddon and Gaboriau, and for the degenerate tendencies of the age,—the curiously fitting parallel in which the geologist Buckland met in a Devonshire coach, his future wife, Miss Morland, deep in a ponderous and recently issued folio of Cuvier, into which even he himself had not found time to dip! Miller was ten years the senior of his young friend, whose father had been in business in Inverness, and whose mother had retired to Cromarty to live in a retired way upon a small annuity, added to by her daughter's private pupils. As a girl Miss Fraser had been a boarder in the family of George Thomson, whose Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, enriched by the hand of Burns with about a hundred songs, forms an abiding monument of their joint taste and judgment. The acquaintance ripened into intimacy and an agreement that for three years they were to make Scotland their home, when, should nothing then turn up they were to emigrate and try their fortune in America. But fortunately an opening occurred which was to retain him at home for the work he was so naturally fitted to perform.
Cromarty had hitherto been without a bank. Now, through the representation of local landowners and traders, the Commercial Bank of Scotland was induced to extend one of its branches to the town. The services of a local shipowner were secured for the post of agent, and Miller was offered the place of accountant. It was necessary, of course, that he should qualify himself for his new duties, and so he sailed to Leith to acquire his initiation at Linlithgow. He was now in his thirty-second year.
Before leaving Cromarty he had been engaged upon his Scenes and Legends of the traditional history of the country, and on his forwarding his manuscript to Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, to whom it is dedicated, he was invited by the hospitable baronet to meet Mr. Adam Black the publisher, whose long retention of the copyright of the Waverley Novels has shed distinction on the firm of which he was the head. By him very generous terms were offered, and Miller by his venture realised £60 over his second book, which still seems to enjoy in its thirteenth edition no slight share of popularity. He was even pressed by Sir Thomas to make his own house at Grange his residence while in the south, but, Linlithgow having been already fixed upon he took his passage in the fly-boat running on the canal between Edinburgh and Glasgow and soon 'reached the fine old burgh as the brief winter day was coming to a close, and was seated next morning at my desk, not a hundred yards from the spot on which Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh had taken his stand when he shot the Good Regent.' At first he was rather diffident of his ability for the work, the swiftness of mechanical summation never to the end coming to him perfectly natural; though, in the course of a brief two months' absence from Cromarty, he was able to join the bank with such a working acquaintance with the details of the business that, when the policy of Sir Robert Peel threatened an attack upon the circulation of the one-pound note, he was competent to publish a series of articles, Words of Warning to the People of Scotland, in which he defended the cash credit system of Scottish banking. This had before been fully expounded by Hume and Scott, and Miller could show its peculiar ability for enabling men to 'coin their characters should they be good ones, even should houses, ships, and furniture be wanting.' In the years to come his experience enabled him to write his own business and commercial leaders in his paper, but as yet his income did not exceed one hundred pounds, and he willingly joined in the continuation of Wilson's Tales of the Borders. This work has retained its popularity, though probably few are aware of the complexity of the authorship. As edited by Leighton, it preserves the names of several writers who occupy a more or less humble niche among the minor singers of Scotland, and in the list of contributors, along with Miller, to the work are found the two Bethunes, Alexander and John. He wrote for the Tales a good deal of rather poorly remunerated work, and his papers on Burns and Fergusson afford a not unpleasing attempt to weave the lives of the two poets into an imaginative narrative. On their appearance, the papers were quoted as original reminiscences, though a more discriminating criticism could not have failed to detect their real nature. Miller possessed the logical and personal element too strong to merge his own individuality successfully in the characters of others. The dramatic faculty was deficient. Yet it was not quite an unfortunate attempt to thus anticipate such a sketch as Dr. Hutchison Stirling has so admirably worked out in his Burns in Drama.
Into a very different arena he was now to be drawn. Politically and ecclesiastically, it was a period of excitement. In 1829 Catholic Emancipation had no sooner been passed than O'Connell brought in his motions for the Repeal and the Tithe War. The latter was a protest by the Romanists against paying tithes for the maintenance of the Irish Church, whose incumbents were a mere outpost of the Tory and Episcopalian party, converting, as Lord Rosebery has said, nobody, and alienating everybody. On the withdrawal of Grey, and the fall of Peel, Lord Melbourne had carried on for years a sort of guerilla warfare with a varying majority, too dependent on the Irish vote to give general satisfaction. The Tithe Act, however, was passed, and this made the support of the English clergy in Ireland a charge upon rent. The position in which matters then stood with the Government will be clearly seen by a reference to the admirable speech of Macaulay, in May 1839, to the electors of Edinburgh. In Ross-shire, the tension of affairs had been rendered more acute by a wave of Tory reaction which induced the Church of Scotland to cast the weight of her influence against the Whigs; but the people, as has ever been the case upon such aberrations from the national policy, had steadily declined to follow this lead, although the endowment scheme for new chapels had been dealt with by the Whigs in a niggard and unsatisfactory way.