There is evidence here that Rollock cannot have been merely a stiff scholastic and pedagogue, but was a man of some real, if coarsish, fervour of heart, of whom it might be expected that he would have the power on occasion of putting his hand on the shoulders of any promising youth among his pupils, and doing him good by some earnest words of moral and spiritual stimulus. On the whole, however, the impression from the sermons and the other writings is that he was by no means a man of such extraordinary calibre intellectually as it was desirable, and perhaps possible, that the University of Edinburgh should have had for its first regent and principal, the shaper of its methods and its tendencies from the outset. High forms of study and speculation were then asserting themselves in the intellectual world of the British Islands, the influence of which had never reached Rollock, or to which, in his place and circumstances, he remained necessarily impervious. His administration of the University could only be according to the lights in which he had himself been educated, and which he brought with him from St. Andrews. What if the Town Council of Edinburgh, instead of sending to St. Andrews for Rollock to be the first head of the new University, had invited their neighbour, Napier of Merchiston, to the post? He was Rollock’s senior by five years, the one man in all Scotland supremely fitted for the post; and, as he was to outlive Rollock eighteen years, how different might have been the infancy of the University had _he_ been in Rollock’s place! But Napier was a layman and a laird; and the heavens would have fallen on the Edinburgh Town Council of 1583, as indeed they would have fallen on any subsequent Edinburgh Town Council till 1858, if they had thought of choosing any one but an ecclesiastic for the University Principalship. Besides, it is possible that the Laird of Merchiston, a man of many acres, and the owner and inhabitant of one of the finest turreted mansions near Edinburgh, would have regarded the offer as a joke.