The knowledge of his letters Miller seems, like the elder Weller, to have acquired from a study of the local signboards, and in his sixth year he was sent to a dame's school, where he spelt his way through the old curriculum of a child's education in Scotland--the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament. He managed to discover for himself the story of Joseph; and even in the old six-volume edition of Lintot the genius of Homer was early made manifest. _The Pilgrim's Progress_, evidently in some such form as Macaulay has described, made for the cottage, followed; and, in course of time, the collection of books which his father had left was eagerly devoured. Among them were _Robinson Crusoe_, _Gulliver's Travels_--both never so familiar in Scotland to boys as they are in England--Cook's _Voyages_, John Howie of Lochgoin's _Worthies_, the _Voyages_ of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Byron, 'my grand-dad's narrative' of the poet. It was not till his tenth year that he became, as he says, 'thoroughly a Scot,' and this was effected by a perusal of Blind Harry's _Wallace_, that 'Bible of the Scottish people,' as Lord Hailes has called it, following or anticipating the remark by Wolf as to the similar position of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ among the Greeks. No one now need be informed about the influence that quaint old work had produced in Burns, and through him on the subsequent re-awakening of the national spirit at the end of the eighteenth century. Barbour's _Bruce_ has remained the possession of the scholar and the antiquary, while this work of the old minstrel, literally 'sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment,' as Bentley had said of his great predecessor, has had an abiding influence on literature, and on the national character. 'Up to Crummade (Cromarty) and through the Northland' had blind Harry, with a fine patriotism, and, we fear, a total disregard for geography, made his hero effect a raid. When a man has got a view from Dan to Beersheba in which to smite the enemy hip and thigh, he need not be troubled with a few outlying counties.