Miller in the room alone. Another of the paroxysms was on him. His face was such a picture of horror that she shrunk in terror from the sight. He flung himself on the sofa, and buried his head, as if in agony, upon the cushion. Again, however, the vision flitted by, and left him in perfect health. The evening was spent quietly with his family. During tea he employed himself in reading aloud Cowper's "Castaway," the Sonnet on Mary Unwin, and one of his more playful pieces, for the special pleasure of his children. Having cor rected some proofs of the forthcoming volume, he went up stairs to his study. At the appointed hour he had taken the bath, but unfortunately his natural and peculiar repugnance to physic had induced him to leave untaken the medicine that had been prescribed. He had retired into his sleeping-room, -a small apartment opening out of his study, and which, for some time past, in consideration of the delicate state of his wife's health, and the irregularity of his own hours of study, he occupied at night alone, and lain sometime upon the bed. The horrible trance, more horrible than ever, must have returned. All that can now be known of what followed is to be gathered from the facts, that next morning his body, half dressed, was found lying lifeless on the floor, the feet upon the study rug, the chest pierced with the ball of the revolver pistol, which was found lying in the bath that stood close by.* *The deadly bullet had perforated the left lung, grazed the heart, cut through the pulmonary

The same revolver proved to be the instrument of death to another person, two days after. The circumstances are thus related in the Edinburgh Witness of December 27:

"A most melancholy event, arising out of the following circumstances, occurred yesterday in the shop of Mr. Thomson, gunmaker. In the beginning of July, last year, Mr. Hugh Miller bought a six-shot revolving chamber pistol, size of ball ninety-two to the pound, from the late firm of Messrs. Alexander Thomson & Son, gunmakers, 16 Union Place. A few days after, he called and said he thought it a little stiff in its workings, and got it made to revolve more readily. The pistol has not been seen by Mr. Thomson since then; but in his absence a few minutes at dinner yesterday, Professor Miller called about twenty minutes from two, and asked Mr. Thomson's foreman how many of the six shots had been fired. He added, Mind, it is loaded.' The foreman, instead of removing the breech or chamber to examine it, had incautiously turned the pistol entire towards his own person, and lifting up the hammer with his fingers, while he counted the remaining loaded chambers, he must have slipped his fingers while the pistol was turned to his own head. It exploded, and the ball lodging in the angle of his right eye, he fell back a lifeless corpse. The pistol is a bolted one, which permits of being carried loaded with perfect safety. Having been wet internally, rust may have stopped the action of the bolt. It is a singular fact that Hugh Miller dropped the pistol into the bath, where it remained for several hours. This may account for the apparent incaution of Mr. Thomson's foreman.”

artery at its root, and lored in the rib in the right side. ⚫ Death must have been instantaneous. The servant by whom the body was first discovered, acting with singular discretion, gave no alarm, but went instantly in search of the doctor and minister; and on the latter the melancholy duty was devolved of breaking the fearful intelligence to that now broken-hearted widow, over whose bitter sorrow it becomes us to draw the veil. The body was lifted and laid upon the bed. We saw it there a few hours afterwards. The head lay back sideways on the pillow. There was the massive brow, the firm-set, manly features, we had so often looked upon admiringly, just as we had lately seen them,-no touch nor trace upon them of disease,—nothing but that overspread pallor of death to distinguish them from what they had been. But the expression of that countenance in death will live in our memory forever. Death by gunshot wounds is said to leave no trace of suffering behind; and never was there a face of the dead freer from all shadow of pain, or grief, or conflict, than that of our dear departed friend. And as we bent over it, and remembered the troubled look it sometimes had in life, and thought what must have been the sublimely terrific expression that it wore at the moment when the fatal deed was done, we could not help thinking that it lay there to tell us, in that expression of unruffled, majestic repose that sat upon every feature, what we so assuredly believe, that the spirit had passed through a terrible tornado, in which reason had been broken down; but that it had made the great passage in safety, and stood looking back to us, in humble, grateful triumph, from the other side.

On looking round the room in which the body had been discovered, a folio sheet of paper was seen lying on the table. On the centre of the page the following lines were written,-the last which that pen was ever to trace :

"DEAREST LYDIA,- My brain burns. I must have walked; and a fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought. God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon me. Dearest Lydia, dear children, farewell. My brain burns as the recollection grows. My dear, dear wife, farewell."

HUGH MILLER.

What a legacy of love to a broken-hearted family! and to us, and all who loved him, how pleasing to observe, that in that bewildering hour, when the horror of that great darkness came down upon that

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noble spirit, and some hideous, shapeless phantom overpowered it, and took from it even the capacity to discern the right from the wrong, humility, and faith, and affection, still kept their hold; amid the ruins of the intellect, that tender heart remaining still unbroken! These last lines remain as the surest evidence of the mysterious power that laid his spirit prostrate, and of the noble elements of which that spirit was composed,—humble, and reverent, and lov ing to the last.

Yesterday, at the request of friends, and under the authority of the Procurator-Fiscal, a post mortem examination of the body took place. We subjoin the result:

“EDINBURGH, December 26, 1856.

We hereby certify, on soul and conscience, that we have this day examined the body of Mr. Hugh Miller, at Shrub Mount, Portobello. "The cause of death we found to be a pistol-shot through the left side of the chest; and this, we are satisfied, was inflicted by his own hand.

"From the diseased appearances found in the brain, taken in connection with the history of the case, we have no doubt that the act was suicidal under the impulse of insanity."

JAMES MILLER, W. T. GAIRDner,

A. H. BALFOUR, A. M. EDWARDS.

We must ask to be excused from attempting any analysis of Mr. Miller's character and genius, or any estimate of the distinguished services he has rendered to literature, science, and the Christian faith. His loss is too heavy a one,- his removal has come upon us too suddenly and too awfully for mind or hand to be steady enough for such a task. The voice of the public press has already told what a place he had won for himself in the admiration and affection of his countrymen; and for the delicate and tender way in which the manner of his departure has universally been alluded to, were we permitted to speak in the name of Mr. Miller's friends, we should express our deepest gratitude. It is a beautiful and worthy tribute that his brother journalists have rendered to the memory of one who was a laborer along with them in elevating the talent and tone of our newspaper literature.

As Free Churchmen, however, it would be unpardonable were we to omit all reference, at such a time as this, to what he did on behalf of the church of his adoption. Dr. Chalmers did not err when, self

oblivious, he spake of Mr. Miller, as he so often did, as the greatest Scotchman alive after Sir Walter Scott's death, and as the man who had done more than all others to defend and make popular throughout the country the non-intrusion cause. We know well what the mutual love and veneration was of those two great men for one another whilst living; and now that both are gone,— and hereafter we believe still more so than even now, their two names will be intertwined in the grateful and admiring remembrance of the ministers and members of the Free Church. It was the high honor of the writer of these hurried lines to record the part taken by his venerated relative in that great ecclesiastical struggle which terminated in the Disruption. At that time it was matter to him of great regret that, as his office was that of the biographer, and not of the historian, there did not occur those natural opportunities of speaking of the part taken by Mr. Miller in that struggle, of which he gladly would have availed himself. And he almost wishes now that he had violated what appeared to him to be his duty, in order to create such an opportunity. He feels as if in this he had done some injustice to the dead, an injustice which it would gratify him beyond measure if he could now in any way repair, by expressing it as his own judgment, and the judgment of the vast body of his Church, that, next to the writings and actings of Dr. Chalmers, the leading articles of Mr. Miller in this journal did more than anything else to give the Free Church the place it holds in the affections of so many of our fellow-countrymen.

But Mr. Miller was far more than a Free Churchman, and did for the Christianity of his country and the world a far higher service than any which in that simple character and office was rendered by him. There was nothing in him of the spirit and temper of the sectarian. He breathed too broad an atmosphere to live and move within such narrow bounds. In the heat of the conflict there may have been too much occasionally of the partisan; and in the pleasure that the sweep and stroke of his intellectual tomahawk gave to him who wielded it, he may have forgotten at times the pain inflicted where it fell; but let his writings before and after the Disruption be now consulted, and it will be found that it was mainly because of his firm belief, whether right or wrong, that the interests of vital godliness were wrapped up in it, that he took his stand, and played his conspicuous part, in the ecclesiastical conflict. It is well known that for some time past,- for reasons to which it would be altogether unseasonable to allude, - he has ceased to take any active part in

ecclesiastical affairs. He had retired even, in a great measure, from the field of general literature, to devote himself to the study of Geology. His past labors in this department,— enough to give him a high and honored place among its most distinguished cultivators,— he looked upon but as his training for the great life-work he had marked out for himself,—the full investigation and illustration of the Geology of Scotland. He had large materials already collected for this work; and it was his intention, after completing that volume which has happily been left in so finished a state, to set himself to their arrangement. The friends of science in many lands will mourn over the incompleted project which, however ably it may hereafter be accomplished by another, it were vain to hope shall ever be so accomplished as it should have been by one who united in himself the power of accurate observation, of logical deduction, of broad generalization, and of pictorial and poetic representation. But the friends of Christianity cannot regret, that since it was the mysterious decree of Heaven that he should prematurely fall,— his work as a pure Geologist not half done,- he should have been led aside by the publication of the Vestiges of Creation to that track of semitheological, semi-scientific research to which his later studies and later writings have been devoted. That, as it now seems to us, was the great work which it was given him on earth to do,- to illustrate the perfect harmony of all that science tells us of the physical structure and history of our globe, with all that the Bible tells of the creation and government of this earth by and through Christ Jesus our Lord. The establishment and exhibition of that harmony was a task to which is it too much to say that there was no man living so competent as he? We leave it to the future to declare how much he has done by his writings to fulfil that task; but mourning, as we now can only do, over his sad and melancholy death,- to that very death, with all the tragic circumstances that surround it, we would point as the closing sacrifice offered on the altar of our faith. His very intellect, his reason, God's most precious gift, - a gift dearer than life, — perished in the great endeavor to harmonize the works and word of the Eternal. A most inscrutable event, that such an intellect should have been suffered to go to wreck through too eager a prosecution of such a work. But amid the mystery, which we cannot penetrate, our love, and our veneration, and our gratitude, toward that so highly gifted and truly Christian man shall only grow the deeper because of the cloud and the whirlwind in which he has been borne off from our side.