His became from that hour the most devoted of her friends and champions, and the contriver of her escape. elder brother, Sir William Douglas, the castellan, absolutely refused to be present; entered a protest against the wrong that had been perpetrated under his roof; and besought the queen to give him a letter of exoneration, certifying that he had nothing to do with it, and that it was against his consent-which letter she gave him. William and Mary Howitt, like-minded helpmates and fellow - labourers, were amiable, earnest, and industrious compilers and authors, with a sincere love for letters, and the secret of a charm which secured them popularity in their own days, though now little of their work is remembered but a few of Mary's verses. William Howitt (1792-1879) was born at Heanor, Derbyshire, and educated at Ackworth and Tamworth ; and he served a four years' apprenticeship to a builder and carpenter, but meanwhile wrote poems and an account of a country excursion. In 1821 he married Mary Botham (1799-1888; born at Coleford, Gloucestershire, and brought up at Uttoxeter); they settled at Hanley to conduct a chemist's business, whence they removed in 1823 to Nottingham for twelve years of successful literary industry. Later places of abode were Esher in Surrey, London, Heidelberg, and Rome. In 1852-54, at the height of the gold - fever, William Howitt, with two sons, spent two years in Australia. Husband and wife quitted the Society of Friends in 1847, and later became believers in spiritualism; Mary in 1882 joined the Catholic communion. Both died at Rome. The widow enjoyed a public pension of £100 a year from the time of her husband's death. Mary Howitt wrote from her earliest years, translated Frederika Bremer and Hans Andersen, and contributed poems, stories, essays, to the People's Journal, Howitt's Journal, Chambers's Journal, &c. Joint productions of husband and wife were The Forest Minstrel (poems, 1827), Desolation of Eyam (1827), The Book of the Seasons (1831), Stories of English Life (1853), and Ruined Abbeys and Castles of Great Britain. Among Mary's works (over a hundred, if translations and books edited by her are included) were Wood Leighton, or a Year in the Country; a history of the United States; a threevolume novel called The Cost of Caergwyn; and several volumes of poetry, 'tales in verse,' and books for children. Of the husband's fifty works, among the chief were a History of Priestcraft (1833); Rural Life in England (1837); Visits to Remarkable Places (1838-41); Colonisation and Christianity (1838); The Boy's Country Book (1839); The Student Life of Germany (1841); Homes and Haunts of the Poets (1847); Land, Labour, and Gold (1855); Illustrated History of England (1856-61); History of the Supernatural (1863); Discovery in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand (1865); and The Mad War Planet and other Poems (1871). His books on Germany and German life were regarded by Germans as about the most intelligent and sympathetic written by any foreigner. See Mary's Autobiography, edited by her daughter (1889). Mountain Children. By MARY HOWITT. Dwellers by lake and hill! Merry companions of the bird and bee! Go gladly forth and drink of joy your fill, No city wall impedes your further bounds; Where the wild flock can wander, ye may stray The long day through, 'mid summer sights and sounds. The sunshine and the flowers, And the old trees that cast a solemn shade; The pleasant evening, the fresh dewy hours, And the green hills whereon your fathers played. The gray and ancient peaks These are your joys! Go forth- For in His spirit God has clothed the earth, The voice of hidden rills Its quiet way into your spirits finds; Ye sit upon the earth Hence is it that the lands Of storm and mountain have the noblest sons, Children of pleasant song Are taught within the mountain solitudes; For hoary legends to your wilds belong, And yours are haunts where inspiration broods. Then go forth-earth and sky To you are tributary; joys are spread Profusely, like the summer flowers that lie In the green path, beneath your gamesome tread ! From 'The Rural Life of England.' When you leave [the shepherds of Salisbury Plain], plunge into the New Forest in Hampshire. There is a region where a summer month might be whiled away as in a fairy-land. There, in the very heart of that old forest, you find the spot where Rufus fell by the bolt of Tyrell, looking very much as it might look then. All around you lie forest and moorland for many a mile. The fallow and red deer in thousands herd there as of old. The squirrels gambol in the oaks above you; the swine rove in the thick fern and the deep glades of the forest as in a state of nature. The dull tinkle of the cattle-bell comes through the wood; and ever and anon, as you wander forward, you catch the blue smoke of some hidden abode, curling over the tree-tops; and come to sylvan bowers and little bough-overshadowed cottages, as primitive as any that the reign of the Conqueror himself could have shown. What haunts are in these glades for poets! what streams flow through their bosky banks, to soothe at once the ear and eye enamoured of peace and beauty! What endless groupings and colourings for the painter! At Boldre you may find a spot worth seeing, for it is the parsonage once MARY HOWITT. From a Photograph. inhabited by the venerable William Gilpin-the descendant of Barnard Gilpin, the apostle of the norththe author of Forest Scenery; and near it is the school which he built and endowed for the poor from the sale of his drawings. Not very distant from this stands the rural dwelling of one of England's truest-hearted women, Caroline Bowles; and not far off you have the woods of Netley Abbey, the Isle of Wight, the Solent, and the open sea. But still move on through the fair fields of Dorset and Somerset, to the enchanted land of Devon. If you want stern grandeur, follow its north-western coast; if peaceful beauty, look down into some one of its rich vales, green as an emerald, and pastured by its herds of red cattle; if all the summer loveliness of woods and rivers, you may ascend the Tamar or the Tavy, or many another stream; or you may stroll on through valleys that for glorious solitudes, or fair English homes amid their woods and hills, shall leave you nothing to desire. If you want sternness and loneliness, you may pass into Dartmoor. There are wastes and wilds, crags of granite, views into far-off districts, and the sounds of waters hurrying away over their rocky beds, enough to satisfy the largest hungering and thirsting after poetical delight. . . ... But even there you need not rest; there lies a land of gray antiquity, of desolate beauty, still before you Cornwall. It is a land almost without a tree. That is, all its high and wild plains are destitute of them, and the bulk of its surface is of this character. Some sweet and sheltered vales it has, filled with noble wood, as that of Tresillian near Truro; but over a great portion of it extend gray heaths. It is a land where the wild furze seems never to have been rooted up, and where the huge masses of stone that lie about its hills and valleys are clad with the lichen of centuries. And yet how does this bare and barren land fasten on your imagination! It is a country that seems to have retained its ancient attachments longer than any other. The British tongue here lingered till lately-as the ruins of King Arthur's palace still crown the stormy steep of Tintagel; and the saints that succeeded the heroic race seem to have left their names on almost every town and village. town. Hugh Miller (1802-56), a self-taught man of science with a marvellous command of a good English style, surpassed all his predecessors as an expositor of geology. A native of Cromarty, he came of a race of seafaring men, of Scandinavian descent and well-to-do in the world, who owned coasting-vessels and built houses in their native One of them had done a little in the way of buccaneering on the Spanish Main; most of them perished at sea, including Hugh's father, lost in a storm in 1807. His mother was greatgranddaughter of a Celtic seer, Donald Ross. From boyhood Hugh was a keen observer, given to collecting shells and stones, and at first selfwilled, wild, and somewhat intractable. By the aid of two maternal uncles he received the common education of a Scottish country-school, and at seventeen was by his own desire apprenticed to a stone-mason. In the opening chapters of his work on the Old Red Sandstone he has vividly recorded his geological discoveries made while toiling at his craft in the Cromarty quarries; 'the necessity that had made him a quarrier taught him also to be a geologist.' Towards the end of 1822 his apprenticeship was completed; and he went to Edinburgh for a year (1824-25), where the strongest impression he experienced was from the preaching of Dr Thomas M'Crie. Back in the north again, Miller ventured on the publication of a volume of Poems, written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason (1829); but though the pieces contain many passable things, his prose has more real poetry than his verse. About this time he made the acquaintance of his lifelong friend, Dr Carruthers, collaborator with Robert Chambers in the first edition of this work, who had printed in the Inverness Courier some admirably written letters of his on the fisherman's life at sea. Miller had been a diligent student of the best English authors, and was already nice in his choice of language. This very remarkable mason was now too conspicuous to be much longer employed in hewing jambs, or even cutting inscriptions on tombstones, a department in which (like Telford the engineer in his early days) he greatly excelled. He carried on his geological studies and researches on the coast-lines of the Moray Firth; and the ancient deposits of the lias, with their mollusca, belemnites, ammonites, and nautili, involved a study of nomenclature very different from poetical diction. Theological controversy also claimed his attention; and as Miller was always a stout polemic, and quite sufficiently pugnacious, he mingled freely in local Church disputes, forerunners of the great national ecclesiastical struggle in which he was also to take a prominent part. The Reform Bill gave fresh scope for activity, and Miller was zealous on the popular side. Even before this he had become deeply attached to an accomplished girl in a higher social circle than his own; the course of true love was not quite smooth, but the devotion of the lovers triumphed, and they were married in 1837. Meanwhile Miller had been drawn away from his handicraft; in 1834 he began work as accountant in a Cromarty bank; and the year after he published Scenes and Legends in the North of Scotland, or the Traditional History of Cromarty-a book as remarkable for the variety of its traditional lore as for its admirable style. He was also a contributor to 'Tales of the Borders' and Chambers's Journal, producing stories almost always of a pensive or tragic cast. Fifteen years a stone-mason and about six years a bank-accountant, Miller was next moved into the post in which he spent the rest of his life. The ecclesiastical party in Scotland then known as the 'Non-Intrusionists' or Free Church party projected a newspaper to advocate their views; Miller's sympathies drew him in the same direction, and he had sufficiently shown his literary talents and his zeal in the cause by his letter to Lord Brougham on the Auchterarder case in 1839. By Dr Candlish and other leaders he was now invited to Edinburgh, and in 1840 he entered upon his duties as editor of The Witness, a twice-a-week paper. Diffident at first, he soon stamped his personality upon his paper, and made a deep and permanent impression upon the Scottish people. As Dr Chalmers put it, Miller took a long time to load, but was a great gun when he did go off. He elaborated his leading articles with great care, so that they have been described as 'complete journalistic essays, symmetrical in plan, finished in execution, and of sustained and splendid ability.' Sir Archibald Geikie described Miller as he knew him at this time as 'a man of good height and broad shoulders, clad in a suit of rough tweed, with a shepherd's plaid across his chest and a stout stick in his hand. His locks of sandycoloured hair escaped from under a soft felt hat; his blue eyes, either fixed on the ground or gazing dreamily ahead, seemed to take no heed of their surroundings. His rugged features wore an expression of earnest gravity, softening sometimes into a smile and often suffused with a look of wistful sadness, while the firmly compressed lips betokened strength and determination of character. The springy, elastic step with which he moved swiftly along the crowded pavement was that of the mountaineer rather than that of the native of a populous city.' During the remaining fifteen years of his life, besides contributing largely to his paper Miller wrote his work on The Old Red Sandstone (1841), part of which appeared originally in Chambers's Journal and part in the Witness. Professor Huxley wrote twenty years afterwards: 'The more I study the fishes of the "Old Red" the more I am struck with the patience and sagacity manifested in Hugh Miller's researches and by the natural insight, which in his case seems to have supplied the place of special anatomical knowledge.' A long-projected visit to England in 1845 furnished material for his First Impressions of England and its People (1847). Then followed Footprints of the Creator, or the Asterolepis of Stromness (1850), a reply to the Vestiges of Creation, and a strenuous denial of the development theory; My Betsey, or a Summer Ramble among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides (1858); the SketchBook of Popular Geology (1859); The Headship of Christ (1861); Essays, reprinted from the Witness (1862), and Leading Articles (1870); Tales and Sketches (1863); Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood (1864). Sir Archibald Geikie has declared that the debt which geology owes to Miller in deepening the interest in geological study by his writings has never been adequately repaid; and has insisted that for elegance of narrative, combined with clearness and vividness of description, he knew no writing in the whole of scientific literature superior or perhaps equal to Miller's. In The Old Red Sandstone Miller was a discoverer, adding to our knowledge of organic remains various members of a great family of fishes, one of which bears now the name of Pterichthys Milleri. He illustrated also the less-known floras of Scotland-those of the Old Red Sandstone and the Oolite. But Miller's peculiar gift was his power of vivid description, which threw a sort of romantic splendour over the fossil remains, and gave life and beauty to the geological landscape. In The Testimony of the Rocks (1857) he sought to reconcile his admission of the antiquity of the globe with the Mosaic account of the Creation. He once believed with Buckland and Chalmers that the six days of the Mosaic narrative were simply natural days of twenty-four hours each, but he was compelled by his geological researches to hold that the days of creation were not natural but prophetic days-unmeasured eras of time stretching far back into the bygone eternity. The revelation to Moses he supposed to have been optical-a series of visions seen in a recess of the Midian desert, and described by the prophet in language fitted to the ideas of his times. The hypothesis of the Mosaic vision is old-as old as the time of Whiston, who had propounded it a century and a half before this; but in Miller's hands the vision became a splendid piece of sacred poetry. The Mosaic Vision of Creation. Such a description of the creative vision of Moses as the one given by Milton of that vision of the future which he represents as conjured up before Adam by the archangel would be a task rather for the scientific poet than for the mere practical geologist or sober theologian. Let us suppose that it took place far from man, in an untrodden recess of the Midian desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush had been vouchsafed; and that, as in the vision of St John in Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as certainly addressed as the eye. A great darkness' first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the 'horror;' and as the Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildly troubled waters, as a visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision into a few west. brief moments, pass away; the creative voice is again heard, Let there be light,' and straightway a gray diffused light springs up in the east, and, casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the One heavy, sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint light waxes fainter-it sinks beneath the dim undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits awhile on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night. The light again brightens-it is day; and over an expanse of ocean without visible bound the horizon has become wider and sharper of outline than before. There is life in that great sea-invertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic, life; but, from the comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. That lower stratum of the heavens occupied in the previous vision by seething steam or gray, smoke-like fog is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the previously invisible vapour of the tepid sea has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere, they lie, thick and manifold-an upper sea of great waves, separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament, and, like them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty advance has taken place in creation; but its most conspicuous optical sign is the existence of a transparent atmosphere-of a firmament stretched out over the earth, that separates the waters above from the waters below. But darkness descends for the third time upon the seer, for the evening and the morning have completed the second day. Yet again the light rises under a canopy of cloud; but the scene has changed, and there is no longer an unbroken expanse of sea. The white surf breaks, at the distant horizon, on an insulated reef, formed mayhap by the Silurian or Old Red coral zoophytes ages before, during the bygone yesterday, and beats in long lines of foam, nearer at hand, against the low, winding shore, the seaward barrier of a widely spread country. For at the Divine command the land has arisen from the deepnot inconspicuously and in scattered islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive though flat and marshy continents, little raised over the sea-level; and a yet further fiat has covered them with the great carboniferous flora. The scene is one of mighty forests of conebearing trees-of palms and tree-ferns and gigantic club-mosses on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. There is deep gloom in the recesses of the thicker woods, and low thick mists creep along the dank marsh or sluggish stream. But there is a general lightening of the sky overhead; as the day declines, a redder flush than had hitherto lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern-covered bank and long withdrawing glade. And while the fourth evening has fallen on the prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears on and the fourth dawn approaches, that yet another change has taken place. The Creator has spoken, and the stars look out from openings of deep unclouded blue; and as day rises and the planet of morning pales in the east, the broken cloudlets are transmuted from bronze into gold, and anon the gold becomes fire, and at length the glorious sun arises out of the sea, and enters on his course rejoicing. It is a brilliant day; the waves, of deeper and softer blue than before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with little else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of brighter green; and as the sun declines amid even richer glories than those which had encircled his rising, the moon appears full-orbed in the east to the human eye the second great luminary of the heavens-and climbs slowly to the zenith as night advances, shedding its mild radiance on land and sea. Again the day breaks; the prospect consists, as before, of land and ocean. There are great pine-woods, reed-covered swamps, wide plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines over all. But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands or wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening, over the narrower seas; or brighten with the sunlit gleam of their wings the thick woods. And ocean has its monsters: great tanninim tempest the deep, as they heave their huge bulk over the surface, to inhale the life-sustaining air; and out of their nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a 'seething pot or caldron.' Monstrous creatures, armed in massive scales, haunt the rivers or scour the flat, rank meadows; earth, air, and water are charged with animal life; and the sun sets on a busy scene, in which unerring instinct pursues unremittingly its few simple ends-the support and preservation of the individual, the propagation of the species, and the protection and maintenance of the young. Again the night descends, for the fifth day has closed; and morning breaks on the sixth and last day of creation. Cattle and beasts of the field graze on the plains; the thick-skinned rhinoceros wallows in the marshes; the squat hippopotamus rustles among the reeds or plunges sullenly into the river; great herds of elephants seek their food amid the young herbage of the woods; while animals of fiercer nature-the lion, the leopard, and the bear-harbour in deep caves till the evening, or lie in wait for their prey amid tangled thickets, or beneath some broken bank. At length, as the day wanes and the shadows lengthen, man, the responsible lord of creation, formed in God's own image, is introduced upon the scene, and the work of creation ceases for ever upon the earth. The night falls once more upon the prospect, and there dawns yet another morrow-the morrow of God's rest that Divine Sabbath in which there is no more creative labour, and which, blessed and sanctified' beyond all the days that had gone before, has as its special object the moral elevation and final redemption of man. And over it no evening is represented in the record as falling, for its special work is not yet complete. Such seems to have been the sublime panorama of creation exhibited in vision of old to 'The shepherd who first taught the chosen seed, and, rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth that militates against even the minutest or least prominent of its details. (From The Testimony of the Rocks.) Beginnings of a Working-Man in Geology. It was eighteen years last February since I set out from my mother's cottage a little before sunrise, to make my first acquaintance with a life of labour and restraint; and I have rarely had a heavier heart than on that morning. I was a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time, fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and I was now going to work as a mason's apprentice in one of the Cromarty quarries. Bating the passing uneasinesses occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods, a reader of curious little books, a gleaner of old traditionary stories. I had written bad verses, too, without knowing they were bad, and indulged in unrealisable hopes, without being in the least aware that they were unrealisable; and I was now going to exchange all my day-dreams and all my amusements for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil. The time I had so long dreaded had at length arrived, and I felt that I was going down into a wilderness more desolate than that of Sinai, with little prospect of ever getting beyond it, and no hope of return. It The quarry in which my master wrought lies on the southern side of the bay of my native town, about an hundred yards from the shore, with a little clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on the other. has been opened in the old red sandstone of the district, and is overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, which rises over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet, and which was at this time rent and shivered, wherever it presented an open front to the weather, by a recent frost. A heap of loose fragments which had fallen from above blocked up the face of the quarry, and the first employment assigned me by my master was to clear them away. The friction of the shovel soon blistered my hands, but the pain was by no means very severe; and I wrought hard and willingly, that I might see how the huge strata below, which presented us with so unbroken a frontage, were to be torn up and removed. Picks and wedges and levers were applied by my brother workmen; and simple and rude as I had been accustomed to regard these implements, I found I had much to learn in the way of using them. They all proved insufficient, however, and we had to bore into one of the inferior strata, and employ gunpowder. The process was new to me, and I deemed it a highly amusing one; it had the merit, too, of being attended by some such degree of danger as a boating excursion, and had thus an interest independent of its novelty. We had a few capital shots; the fragments flew in every direction, and an immense mass of the diluvium came toppling down, bearing with it two dead birds that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures to die in the shelter. I felt a new interest in examining them. The one was a pretty cock-goldfinch, with its hood of vermilion, and its wings inlaid with the gold to which it owes its name, as unsoiled and smooth as if it had been preserved for a museum; the other, a somewhat rarer bird of the woodpecker tribe, was variegated with light blue and a greyish yellow. I was engaged in admiring the poor little things, more disposed to be sentimental than if I had been ten years older, and thinking of the contrast between the warmth and jollity of their green |