I have come to the conclusion to nominate you, because you are a man of public position versed in these matters--you are (if you will allow me to say so) on most friendly and even intimate terms with me for years past--we are, I believe, after many conversations with you, quite at one upon University questions--and you are almost bound to be _persona grata_, having quite recently received the Honorary Doctorate of the University. Besides which, I think that an outside expert is better adapted to see questions fairly than somebody who is necessarily inside some local groove. {189} [Sidenote: 1892, St. Andrews and Dundee] Dr. Metcalfe was duly appointed to the assessorship; and with one at his side in whose sound judgment as well as his personal attachment to himself he had the fullest confidence, Bute was greatly encouraged in the assumption of his important duties with regard to the university, in which he had already shown his practical interest by giving it, at a time of some financial distress, very timely and welcome help. This help had been all the more welcome in view of the unsympathetic attitude of successive Governments towards St. Andrews. Mr. Arthur Balfour had indeed during his Rectorship (1886-1889) persuaded the administration of which he was a member to build the addition to the library to which Bute refers in the extract from his diary quoted above. But, generally speaking, Tories and Liberals alike had shown towards the premier university of Scotland the minimum of interest and generosity. This was the more remarkable, inasmuch as the patronage of the principalships of the United College as well as of St. Mary's, and also of the chairs of Church History, Biblical Criticism, and Hebrew and Oriental Languages, was vested in the Crown. In 1889 Parliament had actually entrusted to the newly appointed Universities Commission powers to abolish St. Andrews University altogether--a proposal which found a certain measure of support in Dundee, where University College had been founded in the same year. The relations of this new college to the ancient university were still indeterminate when Bute took office in 1892; but its medical possibilities, situated as it was in the heart of a populous and growing city, had of course become quickly apparent to its managers.