offered to assist him to enter the ministry, but he felt no call to the sacred office, and from 1820 to 1822 he was apprenticed to a stone-mason. During the next few years he obtained employment as a journeyman mason in Edinburgh, Inverness and various other parts of Scotland. The writing of verses occupied his leisure hours, and in 1826 he sent to the Scotsman an “Ode on Greece” which was refused. It was not until 1829 that he met with his first success in the publication of Poems written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason. These were printed and issued from the office of the Inverness Courier. Miller now turned his attention to prose and contributed many essays to the Inverness Courier. As remarked by Sir A. Geikie, “These made so favourable an impression that they were soon afterwards reprinted separately. They marked the advent of a writer gifted with no ordinary powers of narration and with the command of a pure, nervous and masculine style.”
At the age of thirty-two he was still a stone-mason, but in the latter part of 1834 he was offered a post as accountant in the Commercial Bank of Scotland, and was almost immediately transferred to the Cromarty branch. His prose writings had now attracted much notice, and he next issued in 1835 Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, or the traditional history of Cromarty, in which he introduced some memoranda on the geology. This work met with a cordial reception. Miller, while still a stone-mason, had observed the abundant fossils in the Jurassic shales on the shores of Ethie, but it was not until 1830 that he first obtained remains of fossil fishes in the Old Red Sandstone. These for many years he collected and studied as far as he could, and in 1837 some of his specimens were brought to the notice of R. I. Murchison and Professor Agassiz. In the following year he was in communication with Murchison and his career as a geologist was definitely opened.
In 1837 Miller married Lydia Falconer Frazer (1811?–1876), a lady of good position and great natural ability, whom he had met six years previously. He set up his household in Cromarty, on a salary of sixty pounds a year, aided by the small sums he then earned by literary work; and his wife took a few pupils. Mrs Miller eventually became well known under the pseudonym of Mrs Harriet Myrtle as author of the Ocean Child (1857) and other story-books for children.
Soon after his marriage, Miller became greatly stirred by the internal dissensions in the Church of Scotland, of which he was a staunch member, and he published two pamphlets which brought him to the notice of some of the prominent members of the liberal church party. In 1839 he went by invitation to Edinburgh to edit a new Whig newspaper, the Witness, which was intended to support the views of those who after the disruption in 1843 formed the Free Church. The paper rapidly attained a large circulation; and this was no doubt largely due to his own literary and scientific essays. In 1840 he contributed a series of articles on The Old Red Sandstone, and these were reprinted in book form in the following year. The charm of this work was widely appreciated, as was also the natural sagacity shown in the descriptions and restorations of some of the fossil fishes. His Footprints of the Creator was published in 1849, and My Schools and Schoolmasters in 1854. He was engaged on the final proofs of his Testimony of the Rocks on the day of his death. During the last year of his life he suffered from inflammation of the lungs; and the strain of ill-health proving too severe, he died by his own hand in Edinburgh on the 23rd of December 1856. By request of his wife, The Cruise of the Betsey, with Rambles of a Geologist (1858) previously printed only in the Witness newspaper was published under the editorship of the Rev. W. S. Symonds.
In memory of Hugh Miller a monument was erected by public subscription in 1860 at Cromarty; and the cottage in which he was born was acquired at a later period by his son Hugh. In it have been placed part of his library, a set of the Witness newspaper, some letters addressed to him, and a number of geological specimens, including many referred to in his Old Red Sandstone. On the 22nd of August 1902 the centenary of his birth was celebrated at Cromarty, and was attended by scientific representatives from all parts of the world.
His elder son, Hugh Miller (1850–1896), passed through the Royal School of Mines and joined the Geological Survey in England in 1873; afterwards he was transferred to Scotland and surveyed the country around Cromarty and other parts of Ross-shire and Sutherlandshire. He was author of Landscape Geology, 1891.
See The Life and Letters of Hugh Miller, by Peter Bayne (2 vols., 1871); Hugh Miller; his work and influence, address by Sir A. Geikie, at the centenary celebration. (H. B. Wo.)
MILLER, JOAQUIN (Cincinnatus Heine) (1841–),
American poet, was born in Indiana, on the 10th of November
1841, and was educated for the law. After some experiences of
mining and journalism in Idaho and Oregon, he settled down in
1866 as judge in Grant county, Oregon, and during his four
years’ tenure of this post he began to write verse. In 1870 he
travelled in Europe, and in 1871 he published his first volume of
poetry, full of tropical passion, Songs of the Sierras, on which his
reputation mainly rests. His Songs of the Sunlands (1873)
followed in the same vein, and after other volumes had appeared,
his Collected Poems were published in 1882. He also wrote plays,
The Danites in the Sierras having some success as a sensational
melodrama. On his return from Europe he became a journalist
in Washington, but in 1887 returned to California. His
penname, “Joaquin Miller,” by which he is known, was assumed by
him when he published his first book, in consequence of his
having written an article in defence of Joaquin Murietta, the
Mexican brigand.
Revised editions of his Complete Poetical Works appeared at San Francisco in 1902.
MILLER, JOE (Joseph or Josias) (1684–1738), English actor,
first appears in the cast of Sir Robert Howard’s Committee at
Drury Lane in 1709 as Teague. Trinculo in The Tempest, the
First Grave-digger in Hamlet and Marplot in The Busybody, were
among his many favourite parts. He is said to have been a
friend of Hogarth. He died on the 16th of August 1738. After
his death, John Mottley (1692–1750) brought out a book called
Joe Miller’s Jests, or Wit’s Vade Mecum (1739), a collection of
contemporary and ancient coarse witticisms, only three of which
are told of Miller. Owing to the quality of the jokes in Mottley’s
book, their number increasing with each of the subsequent
editions, any time-worn jest has, somewhat unjustly, come to be called a “Joe Miller.”
MILLER, SAMUEL FREEMAN (1816–1890), American jurist,
was born in Richmond, Kentucky, on the 5th of April 1816, of
Pennsylvania-German stock. He was brought up on a farm, was
a clerk in a drug-store, graduated from the medical department
of Transylvania University in 1838, and practised medicine in
Barboursville, Kentucky, until 1847. In that year he was
admitted to the bar, and entered politics as a Whig. His antislavery
sympathies induced him to settle in Iowa, where in 1850
he freed his slaves and began to practise law in Keokuk, and he
soon became a leader of the Republican party in the state. In
1862 he succeeded Justice Peter V. Daniel (1784–1860), as a
justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and served until his death in
Washington, D.C., on the 13th of October 1890, when he was
senior justice. Miller was a man of great mental force and
individuality, and his judgments carried great weight. In 1877
he was a member of the electoral commission, which adopted his
motion that Congress could not “go behind the returns” as
properly accredited by state officials. He was a prominent
member of the Unitarian Church and for three years was president
of its national conference. He published a volume of Lectures
on the Constitution of the United States (New York, 1891).
See Wm. A. Maury, in The Juridical Review of Edinburgh (for January 1891), and Chas. M. Gregory, in Yale Law Journal (for April 1908).
MILLER, WILLIAM (1782–1849), leader of the Second
Adventists in America, was born on the 5th of February 1782 at
Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was a recruiting officer at the
beginning of the War of 1812, and after Plattsburg he was
promoted captain, retiring from the army in 1815. About 1816
he settled in Low Hampton, Washington county, New York.
