He was assisted and encouraged by Rogers, Lady Blessington and others, to commence as a publisher and bookseller, and was enabled by their kindness to purchase back from Colburn the copyrights of his novels. His place of business was 9, Newgate Street, opposite Christ’s Hospital, and from here he issued several of his own books besides works by well-known authors. Miller did not succeed in business, and gave it up to devote all his time to writing books and contributing to the periodicals and newspapers. He wrote for the Athenæum, Literary Gazette, Chambers’ Journal, Household Words, Boys’ Own Magazine, the Illustrated London News, and other monthlies and weeklies. Many leading articles from his facile pen appeared in the Morning Post. His papers on the months in Chambers’ “Book of Days,” which describe the varied aspects of the country during the year, have been reproduced in an elegant volume bearing the title of “All Round the Year.”
Mr. J. Potter Briscoe, F.R.H.S., kindly supplies me with the following list of books by Thomas Miller:—“All Round the Year,” 1860; “Birds, Bees, and Blossoms,” 1867, 1869 (see also “Original Poems,” etc.); “British Wolf Hunter,” 1859; “Boys’ Own Library,” 6 vols., 1856; “Boys’ Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter Books,” 1847, 1881; “Boys’ Own Country Book, Seasons, and Rural Rides,” 1867, 1868; “Brampton among the Roses,” 1863; “Child’s Country Book,” 1867; “Child’s Country Story Book,” 1867, 1870, 1881; “Common Wayside Flowers,” 1841, 1873; “Country Year book,” 2 vols., 1847, 1 vol., 1836; “Day in the Woods,” 1836; “Desolate Hall,” (in “Friendship’s Offering”) 1838; “Dorothy Dovedale’s Trials,” 2 vols., 1864; “English Country Life,” 1858, 1859, 1864; “Fair Rosamond,” 3 vols., 1839, 1 vol., 1862; “Fortune and Fortitude,” 1848; “Fred and the Gorillas,” 1869, 1873; “Fred Holdsworth” (In Illustrated London News), 1852, 1873; “Gaboon,” 1868; “Gideon Giles, the Roper,” 1840, 1841, 1859, 1867; “Godfrey Malvern,” 1842, 1843, 1844, 1847, 1858, 1877; “Goody Platts and her two Cats,” 1864; “History of the Anglo-Saxons,” 1848, 1850, 1852, 1856; “Jack-of-All-Trades,” 1867; “Lady Jane Grey, a romance,” 3 vols., 1840, 1 vol., 1861, 1864; “Langley-on-the-Lea; or, Love and Duty,” 1858; “Life and [remarkable] Adventures of a Dog,” 1856, 1870; “Lights and Shades of London Life” (forming vol. 5 of Reynolds’ Mysteries of London); “Little Blue Hood,” 1863; “My Father’s Garden,” 1866, 1867; “No Man’s Land, etc.,” 1860, 1861, 1863; “Old Fountain” (in Friendship’s Offering, etc.); “Original Poems for my Children,” 1850 (see also “Birds,” etc.); “Our Old Town” (Gainsborough) 1857, 1858; “Old Park Road,” 1870, 1876; “Picturesque Sketches of London,” 1852 (in the Illustrated London News); “Pictures of Country Life,” 1846, 1847, 1853; “Poacher and other Pictures of Country Life,” 1858; “Poems,” 1841, 1848, 1856; “Poetical Language of Flowers,” 1838, 1847, 1853, 1856, 1865, 1869, 1872; “Royston Gower,” 3 vols., 1830, 1 vol. 1858, 1860, 1874; “Rural Sketches,” 1839, 1861; “Sketches of English Country Life”; “Songs for British Riflemen,” 1860; “Songs of the Sea Nymphs,” 1857; “Songs of the Seasons,” 1865; “Sports and Pastimes of Merry England,” 1859 (?-56); “Summer Morning,” 1844; “Tales of Old England,” 1849, 1881; “Village Queen,” 1851, 1852; “Watch the End” (second edition of “My Father’s Garden”) 1869, 1871, 1873; “Year Book of Country Life,” 1855; “Year Book of the Country,” 1837; “Young Angler,” 1862.
The foregoing volumes are in the Nottingham Public Library, and the librarian, Mr. Briscoe is to be congratulated on bringing together Miller’s works in the city closely associated with his career. In Paxton Hood’s “Peerage of Poverty,” a fine estimate of Miller’s ability as an author is given, though very little about his life is recorded. On the 25th of October, 1874, he died at his residence, a small house in West Street, Kensington, leaving a son and two daughters. Shortly before his death an effort was made to get him placed on the Civil List. Mr. Disraeli was not able to include him at the time, but, with his well-known generosity, made him an allowance from some other fund. Miller only received one quarterly instalment before passing away.
The Cottage Countess.
The late Poet Laureate has given a world-wide interest to the romantic story of “The Peasant Countess” of “Burleigh House by Stamford town,” in his popular poem, “The Lord of Burleigh.” He relates how Henry Cecil, in the guise of a landscape painter in humble circumstances, wooes and weds a rustic maiden, and how a shadow overcasts her bright dream when the real rank of her husband is made known to her:—
“But a trouble weighed upon her,
And perplexed her night and morn,
With the burthen of an honour
Unto which she was not born.
Faint she grew, and ever fainter,
And she murmured, ‘Oh, that he
Were once more that landscape-painter,
Which did win my heart from me.’
So she drooped and drooped before him,
Fading slowly from his side:
Three fair children first she bore him,
Then before her time she died.”
The poet tells how keenly the Lord of Burleigh mourned her loss, and that he buried her in the dress in which she was married.
The real facts, however, are not so poetical; yet Hazlitt says that the story outdoes the “Arabian Nights.” The following particulars may be regarded as a correct version of this romantic tale. Henry Cecil was born in the year 1754, and was the only child of the Hon. Thomas Chambers Cecil by his marriage with Miss Charlotte Gardner. At the age of nineteen he had lost his parents, and was the presumptive heir to his uncle’s estates and the earldom of Exeter. He was by no means popular with his uncle, and seldom troubled the inmates of Burleigh House with his presence. While still a minor, he married into a good old west of England family, his wife being a lady of great personal charms, named Emma Vernon, the only daughter of the Squire of Hornbury Hall, in the county of Worcester. The union was not a happy one, young Cecil being far from an exemplary husband. He wasted much of his time and money in gambling. After fifteen years of married life he sought and obtained a divorce. His own folly and other circumstances rendered him a poor man, and induced him shortly before the time he obtained a divorce to quit the society of those in his rank of life, and settle down in one of the secluded villages in Shropshire. He selected Bolas Magna, a charming little place, nestling among apple orchards and green lanes. Here he was known as John Jones, and was lost to the fashionable world, out of sight and out of mind. For a short time he lodged at the village hostelry, freely conversing with the customers who came at night to smoke their pipes and drink their beer. The days he spent in sketching the pretty bits of scenery in the district.