[10][11] However, ultimately, Scott failed to get a direct grant from the Crown, he was not made Professor under his specific royal patent, and the honorific has not been retained.

Unless candidates for the professorships already held Chairs they were subject to a 'trial', that is, an examination of their Greek and Latin before their appointment.

[6] Further, this practice led to something of a curiosity during the election of George Stuart in 1741 to the Chair of Humanity when both candidates:'agreed to transmit a message to the electors, stating that each believed the other to be qualified, and that they were rather inclined to refer it to their own choice, without putting them to additional trouble.

'[10] The Chairs in Greek and Humanity at the Scottish Universities, whose incumbent professors 'occupied an especial place in the culture of these cities',[13] all came to be quite distinct, and Morris writes (concerning their foundation and holders in the 19th century):[14]'In terms of appointments to chairs in Greek or Humanity each Scottish university seemed to follow a different tradition: the chair of Greek at Glasgow was the preserve of Oxbridge educated scholars [e.g., Daniel Sandford (scholar), Edmund Law Lushington, Richard Claverhouse Jebb]; at Edinburgh no Englishman was successful in applying for either chair [until Harry Goodhart in Humanity and Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge in Greek], whilst at Aberdeen the successful applicants were invariably graduates from that very university.

When J. S. Blackie sought the Chair of Greek he was in competition with the Reverend Charles McDouall, who was prevented from taking the Chair in Hebrew owing to the influence of the Presbytery of Edinburgh, Sir Wiliam Smith, a nonconformist Dissenter who could not, as a result, teach at Oxford or Cambridge, Edmund Lushington, John Conington an avowed Anglo-Catholic, and Leonhard Schmitz, then Rector of the Royal High School.

Professor Blackie was even kind enough to remark (more than once) while in the very act of writing the document above referred to, that he did not know my face.

'[17] Comparably, Sir Walter Scott, who was taught by Dalzell, records angering the Professor: 'I had the audacity to produce a composition in which I weighted Homer against Ariosto and pronounced him wanting in the balance[...] The wrath of the Professor was extreme[...] He pronounced upon me the severe sentence that dunce I was and dunce I would remain[...] which however, my excellent and learned friend lived to revoked over a bottle of Burgundy, at our Literary Club at Fortune's, of which he is a distinguished members'.