94 FAMOUS SCOTS 



and taking many a blow. But I am taking all the care 

 I can to strike only big wicked fellows, who lift hands 

 against the Kirk, or oppress the poor man.' 



Napoleon feared three papers more than ten thousand 

 bayonets, and certainly Miller was a tower of strength 

 not to be found in the adverse battalions. None of the 

 merely * able editors ' of the Establishment party, much 

 less the pamphleteers of the quality of Dean of Faculty 

 Hope, could touch him or find a link in his armour. 

 This was a tribute to character. The men of the 

 opposition had 'nothing to draw with, and the well 

 was deep ' ; and many names then blown far and wide 

 by windy rumour, such as Dr. Cook, Robertson of 

 Ellon, Dr. Bryce, and Principal Pirie of Aberdeen, 

 survive like flies in amber only because it was their 

 misfortune to be associated with great men. He might 

 have said with Landor that he did not strive with 

 these men, for certainly of them all 'none was worth 

 his strife ' ; yet, though individually contemptible, they 

 formed a solid phalanx of Moderatism and of dead 

 resistance to argument and conviction. It was a time 

 of great men. If Chalmers was the incarnation of the 

 country and the movement, Murray Dunlop its jurist, 

 Cunningham and Candlish its debaters, it was yet to 

 the leaders in The Witness that the great mass of his 

 countrymen looked for the opinions of Hugh Miller. 

 His relative, Dr. Gustavus Aird of Creich, the late 

 Moderator of the Free Church, has informed us that 

 in his own parish he learned the paper was read out 



