'In close fights a champion grim, In camps a leader sage.' SCOTT. 'We have had,' says Dr. Guthrie in a letter dated 6th September 1839, 'a meeting about our newspaper. Miller, I may say, is engaged, and will be here, I expect, in the course of two or three weeks. His salary is to begin with £200, and mount with the profits of the paper. I think this too little, but I have no doubt to see it double that sum in a year or two--Johnstone to be the publisher, we advancing £1000, and he will need other two. I am down with Brown, Candlish, and Cunningham for £25 each. A few individuals only have as yet been applied to, and already £600 of the £1000 has been subscribed.' His household he left behind him in Cromarty for the time, and he lodged in St. Patrick Square. Fortunate was it for the people that at the right time its ear should have been caught by such a writer, one whose voice in the arena was at once recognised by the individuality of its tone. The Edinburgh press had long been held by the Moderate party, and the belief had been that the conflict was a mere clerical striving for power. It remained for Miller to educate the party, and to such effect was this done that, while the non-intrusion petition to Parliament in 1839 from Edinburgh had borne but five thousand signatures, the number, says Robert Chambers, mounted in the first year of _The Witness_ to thirteen thousand. It was clear to all Scotland that there was a new Richmond in the field. It is the more necessary to insist on this, because the clerical mind, which after Malebranche is too prone to see everything in itself and its own surroundings, has never fully confessed the services to the country of the layman. As Guthrie points out, a silence is maintained all through Buchanan's _Ten Years' Conflict_ on Miller. This he regrets, not only on the ground that it would be Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, but also for its missing the cardinal principle that at such a time the press and public meetings form the most influential of factors. This such a kindred spirit and public orator as Guthrie is quick to see, nor does he go beyond the facts of the case, or the judgment now of the country, in maintaining that 'Miller did more than any dozen ecclesiastical leaders, and that, Chalmers excepted, he was the greatest of all the men of the Ten Years' Conflict.'