Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask.

  • William Keith Leask
Date:
[pref. 1896]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    books as a stock—not worth more than two pounds, I believe, quickly independent of all aid—not all a gain, for I am now sensible that my spirit of self- reliance too often manifested itself in an unsocial, unamiable light, while my recollections of “honest poverty ” may have made me too eager to attain and secure worldly prosperity. Had I possessed uncles such as yours, I might have been much the better of it through life.’ The close was cheered by the thought that he had fairly earned the admiration and confidence of his country. Yet nothing that could in any way fetter his editorial independence or freedom of action could he permit. When the money invested in The Witness was offered to him by Chalmers it was firmly declined, and the proposal to requite his services to the country by providing him with a residence he would not allow. ‘ I know,’ he said, ‘ that as the defender of Free Church principles my intentions have been pure and loyal, but I am not quite sure I have been successful in doing the right thing, nor have I done anything that is worthy of such consideration from my friends. I believe my way is to make yet.’ The same was his answer to a proposal to allow his name to stand for election as Lord Rector of Marischal College in Aberdeen; he met it pretty much in the vein of Carlyle at Edinburgh, when he felt that here was a generation in young Scotland rising up who seemed to say that he had not altogether, after a hard-spent day, been an unprofitable
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