degrees, but was one of the three visitors charged with seeing that
the whole business of the College was administered according to the
statutes of 1727. While still filling these two offices, he was in
1762 appointed to the additional and important business office of
Vice-Rector, by his personal friend Sir Thomas Miller, the
Lord-Advocate of Scotland (afterwards Lord President of the Court of
Session), who was Rector of the University that year. As Sir Thomas
Miller was generally absent in consequence of his public engagements
in London or his professional engagements in Edinburgh, Smith as
Vice-Rector had to preside over all University meetings--meetings of
the Senatus, of the Comitia, of the Rector's Court--at a time when
this duty was rendered delicate by the contentions which prevailed
among the professors. The Rector's Court, it may be added--which
consisted of the Rector and professors--was a judiciary as well as
administrative body, which at one time possessed the power of life and
death, and according to the Parliamentary Report of 1829, actually
inflicted imprisonment in the College steeple on several delinquents
within the preceding fifty years. It may be mentioned that some time
elapsed after Sir Thomas Miller's election to the Rectorship before
he was able to appoint a Vice-Rector, because he could not appoint a
Vice-Rector till he was himself admitted, and he could not attend
personally to be admitted on account of engagements elsewhere. During
this interval Smith was elected praeses of the University meetings by
the choice of his colleagues, and as the position was at the time one
of considerable difficulty, they would not be likely to select for it
a man of decided business incapacity.

Some idea of the difficulty of the place, on account of the
dissensions prevailing in the College during Smith's residence there,
may be got from a remark of his successor, Dr. Reid. In the course of
the first year after his arrival in Glasgow, Reid writes one of his
Aberdeen friends complaining bitterly of being obliged to attend five
or six College meetings every week, and meetings, moreover, of a very
disagreeable character, in consequence of "an evil spirit of party
that seems to put us in a ferment, and, I am afraid, will produce bad
consequences."[56] A writer in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, in noticing
Smith's death in 1790, says that these divisions turned on questions
of academic policy, and that Smith always too