xiv Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinhurgli, 
to be, as soon as seen, to use a phrase of Dr Chalmers, “ men of 
weight.” 
He was educated at the High School of Edinburgh during the 
rectorship of Dr Carson, a learned scholar, and in the class of Mr Ben- 
jamin Mackay, who is described by his pupils as a practical Scottish 
schoolmaster of the best kind — intelligent, accurate, and thorough. 
Several of his class-fellows still happily survive, two of whom — 
Lord Moncreiff, the competitor of Ingiis at the Bar and his friend 
on the Bench, and Sir Douglas Maclagan — held the office of President 
of the Eoyal Society, which was offered to, and declined by, Ingiis 
for reasons afterwards noticed. From the High School he went to 
the University of Glasgow, where the lectures of Sir Daniel Sand- 
ford gave him a taste for literature in its best models — the classical 
authors of Greece. “I can never forget,” he said many years after, 
when addressing the students of that University as their Eector, 
“ with what delight I listened to the prelections of Sandford, whose 
reading of Greek poetry conveyed to the hearer the highest intellectual 
pleasure.” In him, as in others, the living voice of the teacher 
wakened the intellect, and by the pleasure it gave evoked the taste 
for study and the study of good taste. 
Having been elected to an exhibition on the foundation of 
Mr Snell, he matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1830, 
graduated as B.A. in 1834, and as M.A. in 1836. He did not 
obtain high academic honours, and was placed in the third class 
in the Classical School two years after Mr Gladstone and the same 
year in which Lord Selborne took degrees which more certainly 
indicated their future eminence. 
He had entered probably with more zest into the social than the 
learned life of Oxford, but his ability, especially in argument, was 
recognised by his contemporaries. That he had not been a careless 
spectator of the University in all its bearings, was shown by his 
grasp of the principles of University education and accurate know- 
ledge of the difference betvi^een the English and Scottish systems, 
with their respective merits and deficiencies, when called on to 
legislate for the Scottish Universities, and act as Chancellor of that 
of Edinburgh. But it was the profession he chose which first gave 
scope to his mental powers. 
In 1835 he was admitted a member of the Faculty of Advocates. 
