And while thus labouring with their hands, they went on with their inventions, the perfecting of which has proved of so much advantage to the world.

Hugh Miller furnished, in his own life, an excellent instance of that practical common sense in the business of life which he so strongly recommended to others.

When he began to write poetry, and felt within him the growing powers of a literary man, he diligently continued his labour as a stone-cutter.
Horace Walpole has said that Queen Caroline's patronage of Stephen Duck, the thresher poet, ruined twenty men, who all turned poets.

It was not so with the early success of Hugh Miller.

"There is no more fatal error," he says, "into which a working man of a literary turn can fall, than the mistake of deeming himself too good for his humble employments; and yet it is a mistake as common as it is fatal.