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.

    58/168 page 54
    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 rela- tives 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
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