Hugh Miller : a Critical Study. By N. M. Mackenzie.
(Hodder and Stoughton. 65. net.)—There is no tendency to hero-worship in Mr. Mackenzie. He does not give Hugh Miller more than his due. Where he praises, accordingly, he does it with effect. And yet we should have liked something more sympathetic. But then Miller cannot be to the younger generation—to which we presume Mr. Mackenzie to belong—what he was to the readers of fifty years ago. This latest critic, whose penetration and fairness we gladly acknowledge, says very truly that in estimating Miller we should "strive to reconstruct the mental landscape of which he was a part." How about the "mental landscape" of the public to which he was almost as a prophet, so fresh, so full of reality were his utterances ? "My Schools and Schoolmasters," to speak of the book in which the man most showed himself, had an effect which it is not easy to realise for those who have been born, so to speak, into another world.
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