We return now to Professor Wilson and propose to tell you how he came by that title. It was after only a few years of work in connection with _Blackwood_ that the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinboro’ University--which had been held by Dugald Stewart, and later by Dr. Thomas Brown--fell vacant; and at once the name of Wilson was pressed by his friends for the position. It was not a little odd that a man best known by two delicate poems, and by a bold swashbuckler sort of magazine writing should be put forward--in such a staid city as Edinboro’, and against such a candidate as Sir William Hamilton--for a Chair which had been held by Dugald Stewart! But he _was_ so put forward, and successfully; Walter Scott and the Government coming to his aid. Upon this, he went resolutely to study in the new line marked out for him; his rods and guns were, for the time, hung upon the wall; his wrestling frolics and bouts at quarter-staff, and suppers at the Ambrose tavern, were laid under limitations. He put a conscience and a pertinacity into his labor that he had never put to any intellectual work before.[16] But there were very many people in Edinboro’ who had been aggrieved by the appointment--largely, too, among those from whom his pupils would come. There was, naturally, great anxiety among his friends respecting the opening of the first session. An eye-witness says:-- “I went prepared to join in a cabal which was formed to put him down. The lecture-room was crowded to the ceiling. Such a collection of hard-browed, scowling Scotsmen, muttering over their knob-sticks, I never saw. The Professor entered with a bold step, amid profound silence. Every one expected some deprecatory, or propitiatory introduction of himself and his subject, upon which the mass was to decide against him, reason or no reason; but he began with a voice of thunder right into the matter of his lecture, kept up--unflinchingly and unhesitatingly, without a pause--a flow of rhetoric such as Dugald Stewart or Dr. Brown, his predecessors, never delivered in the same place. Not a word--not a murmur escaped his captivated audience; and at the end they gave him a right-down unanimous burst of applause.”[17]