But before this Miller arose—­we proceed to say, if only to show that we are familiar with other members of the family—­there was another, and very different Miller, who was born in old England, about one hundred years earlier than our sadly, or gladly, mistaken Second Adventist.  His Christian name was Joseph, and he was an actor of repute, celebrated for his excellence in some of the comedies of Congreve.  The characters which he played may have been comic ones, but he was a serious man.  Indeed, his gravity was so well known in his lifetime that it was reckoned the height of wit, when he was dead, to father off upon him a Jest Book!  This joke, bad as it was, was better than any joke in the book.  It made him famous, so famous that for the next hundred years every little bon mot was laid at his door, metaphorically speaking, the puniest youngest brat of them being christened “Old Joe.”

After Joseph Miller had become what Mercutio calls “a grave man,” his descendants went into literature largely, as any one may see by turning to Allibone’s very voluminous dictionary, where upwards of seventy of the name are immortalized, the most noted of whom are Thomas Miller, basket-maker and poet, and Hugh Miller, the learned stone-mason of Cromarty, whose many works, we confess with much humility, we have not read.  To the sixty-eight Millers in Allibone (if that be the exact number), must now be added another—­Mr. Joaquin Miller, who published, two or three months since, a collection of poems entitled “Songs of the Sierras.”  From which one of the Millers mentioned above his ancestry is derived, we are not informed; but, it would seem, from the one first-named.  For clearly the end of all things literary cannot be far off, if Mr. Miller is the “coming poet,” for whom so many good people have been looking all their lives.  We are inclined to think that such is not the fact.  We think, on the whole, that it is to the other Miller—­Joking Miller—­his genealogy is to be traced.

But who is Mr. Miller, and what has he done?  A good many besides ourselves put that question, less than a year ago, and nobody could answer it.  Nobody, that is, in America.  In England he was a great man.  He went over to England, unheralded, it is stated, and was soon discovered to be a poet.  Swinburne took him up; the Rossettis took him up; the critics took him up; he was taken up by everybody in England, except the police, who, as a rule, fight shy of poets.  He went to fashionable parties in a red shirt, with trowsers tucked into his boots, and instead of being shown to the door by the powdered footman, was received with enthusiasm.  It is incredible, but it is true.  A different state of society existed, thirty or forty years ago, when another American poet went to England; and we advise our readers, who have leisure at their command, to compare it with the present social lawlessness of the upper classes among the English.  To do this, they have only to turn to the late N.P.  Willis’s