And what is true in science is also no less true in his purely literary performances. The reader of his articles, political or social, cannot fail to be struck with the pertinence of his quotations and illustrations. What he knew was instantly at the call of a powerful memory and a vigorous imagination. As an editor, he had not to go to memory for his metaphors, and to his imagination for his facts. Both came easily and naturally; and his writing, even in its most sustained flights, shows no signs of effort. Some critics have detected in his style an element of exuberance; and this may be allowed in his narrative and descriptive passages. There would appear to have been, as it were, a Celtic lobe of imagination in his mind for the feeling of discursive description and external nature. Thus, in his slightest landscapes his imagination or eye is not satisfied with the few bold touches such as Carlyle would, after his manner, throw upon the canvas. It expands, like the method of Ruskin, over the surface. But in each case the defect is the result of original endowment. The eye, he says, had been in his case exclusively trained as a mason, and this habit of seeing the projected line complete from the beginning was at the bottom of his often spoiling the effect of his narrative with flamboyant additions, through his possession of the geological eye for its conformation in detail. Johnson said of Thomson that he had a true poetical genius--the power of seeing even a pair of candles in a poetical light. The landscape became to Miller at once anatomised into its geological aspects.