 Sir William Hamilton was a graduate of the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford. At Glasgow he studied logic and moral philosophy under George Jardine and James Mylne. Though neither published anything of significance, they both transmitted to a new generation the philosophical legacy of Reid – though not uncritically. Mylne in particular seems to have viewed Reid with detachment. In 1807 at Balliol College Oxford Hamilton held the Snell Exhibition, a scholarship that regularly allowed Scottish students of philosophy to spend time at England's oldest university, and though he found the intellectual life there uninspiring compared to Edinburgh, he gained an extensive knowledge of Aristotelianism . From 1811–21 he worked at the Scottish Bar (with limited success) until being appointed Professor of Universal and Civil History at the University of Edinburgh, where he transferred to the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics in 1836, a post he held until his death in 1856.