SOCIETY. 221 



music was always full of melody, the poetry a sort of 

 measured blank verse, sometimes rhyming, sometimes 

 not. It fell on the ear like the ripple of a 



" hidden brook 

 In the leafy month of June, 

 That to the sleeping woods all night 

 Singeth a quiet tune." ' 



The section of Edinburgh society which Miller would 

 probably have found at heart most congenial was closed 

 to him by the sectarian animosities of the time. Scotch 

 literature had found him out before the clerical world of 

 Scotland cast eyes on him, for it was as a literary man that 

 he had interested Principal Baird, and we have seen 

 proofs of the cordial feeling with which he was regarded 

 by Mr Carruthers, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, and Mr 

 Robert Chambers. But these, with the large majority 

 of literary men throughout Scotland, viewed the claims 

 of the Church either with positive disapproval or with 

 indifference, and would have told Miller that, in be- 

 coming the fighting man of the non-intrusionists, he was 

 throwing himself away. . He, on the other hand, was so 

 fervent in his devotion to the cause he had espoused, so 

 confident that the best and dearest interests of his coun- 

 try were at stake, that he could not enjoy any society un- 

 less it gave him on this point not only tolerance but 

 sympathy. He did not, therefore, during the early 

 period of his residence in Edinburgh, mingle in literary 

 circles. The clerical leaders, with the exception of Dr 

 Chalmers, with whom he soon grew into warm friend- 

 ship, did not welcome him to their firesides with the 

 genial hospitality to which he had been accustomed in 

 Cromarty. His only intercourse with them in a social 

 capacity was at an occasional dinner-party given by an 

 evangelical publisher or lawyer. 



His editorial contests in capacity of non-intrusion 



