Short Notices [pp. 554-564]

Short Notices.
SHORT NOTICES.
First Impressions of England and its People. By Hugh Miller, Author of
the Foot-prints of the Creator, the Old Red Sandstone, &c. Boston:
Gould & Lincoln, 59 Washington street, 1851. 12mo. pp. 430.
The intellectual characteristics of the author, displayed in
this volume, are acuteness, comprehensiveness, versatility, and
power. He touches with equal facility, and handles with equal
ability, topics the most varied and distinct. We find him, for
example, in the compass of a few consecutive pages, in amusing
personal adventure, "trying the metaphysics of Scotch Calvinism" on English Socinians and Methodists, silencing the conceited sciolism of ignorant errorists, vindicating against the
cavils of English traders the dignity and utility of theological
discussion in which his countrymen are such adepts; interpreting first the geology, and then the history and antiquities, even
back to the time of the Romans, of theeventful Border Line
between England and Scotland, from the collections in the Newcastle Museum; contrasting in eloquent phrase, amid.dashing
rain storms, the monumental fidelity of nature in the countless
fossils embalmed in the marble tombstones of the great cathedral at York, with the perishing records of human vanity
engraved upon their crumbling tablets, describing in terms as
graphic and lucid as they are lofty, the magnificent architecture of York Minster; reciting the antiquarian history of York,
like one who had made it the study of his life, qioting incidents
a propos from the novels of Sir Walter Scott, DeoFoe and Bulwer, picking up at a book-stall a rare old copy of the original
Trial of Eugene Aram, and looking for Knaresborough from
the battlements of the Minster, with as much interest as if he
were a sentimental novel-reader, or a bibliographic monomaniac
of the Dibdin school; discussing with equal skill the cause of
the potato-rot, and pointing out with the ken of a political seer
the changes it was destined to enact in British history; then,
sliding into a disquisition on the anti-corn-law league and the
Scottish law of entail; apparently equally at home in science,
in literature, in theology, in antiquities, in the technics of art,
in-political jurisprudence, and in the principles and practice of
rhetoric and criticism, the whole pervaded by the pure and
lofty spirit of evangelical piety. There is no author, whom we
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