he entered the university of Glasgow. His seven years of stndent life at Glasgow were marked by eager work and ardent enthusiasms devoted in part to the revival of the 'liberal cause' in the university. His fellow students, Dr. John Service [q. v.~|, Dr. Henry Crosskey, and Dr. Edward Caird, now master of Balliol, remained his closest friends through every subsequent stage of his career. Before he left Glasgow Nichol printed for private circulation a volume of poems of remarkable promise, entitled 'Leaves' (Edinburgh, 1852).
In 1865, at the late age of twenty-two, Nichol entered Balliol College, Oxford. There in the following year he gained one of the Glasgow Snell exhibitions. He graduated in 1800 with first-class honours in the final classical school. At first Oxford pleased him, but disenchantment and bitterness followed, although he conceived a lasting admiration for Benjamin Jowett [q. v. Suppl.], then tutor of his college, and formed many enduring friendships, with (among other undergraduates of Balliol) George Rankine Luke (afterwards senior student and tutor of Christ Church, whose premature death by drowning in the Isis in 1862 was mourned by Nichol in a passionate sonnet) ; Thomas Hill Green [q. v.], Albert Venn (now Professor) Dicey, and Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne. With these and a few kindred 'spirits of flame' from other colleges Nichol formed in 1856-7 the Old Mortality Society, for the purpose of seriously discussing literary and other topics. It is said that members of the society showed a 'marked tendency towards professorial positions ; 'but few literary and philosophical societies of the kind have better vindicated their transitory fame (Professor Dicey, ap. Knight, p. 147).
Nichol's studies at Oxford took a philosophical rather than a linguistic direction; and owing probably to the defects of his early training he never became a very accurate scholar. A few months after he had gained his first class he lost his father ; but, in accordance with the paternal wish, he became on 12 Nov. 1859 a member of Gray's Inn. He seems never to have been actually called to the bar. After graduating B.A. (he declined to proceed to M.A. till 1874, after the abolition of university tests), he resided at Oxford, successfully engaging in the work of a 'philosophical coach for greats.' This he carried on at intervals, latterly chiefly by vacation parties, till 1873. But already in 1859 he was intent upon securing a Scottish professorial chair. While a candidate for the professorship of logic and English literature at St. Andrews in 1859, he privately printed a volume of 'Fragments of Criticism' (Edinburgh, 1860), consisting of condensed Oxford lectures on ancient philosophy and of English literary criticisms, partly reprinted from the 'Westminster Review' and from university periodicals, especially the audacious 'Undergraduate Papers.' The volume included noticeable estimates of Carlyle, whose influence Nichol in these days reflected with striking force, Tennyson, Browning, in the tardy popularisation of whose work Nichol was pre-eminently instrumental, and his intimate friend, Sydney Thompson Dobell [q. v.], to whose 'Poems' (1875) and 'Thoughts on Art, Philosophy, and Religion' (1876) he afterwards wrote introductions, accompanied, in the former instance, by a memoir. Nichol's candidature at St. Andrews was unsuccessful, but at a later date (1873) that university conferred on him the honorary degree of LL.D.
In April 1862, a year after his marriage, Nichol was appointed by the crown to the newly established chair of English language and literature in the university of Glasgow. This post he filled till his resignation of it in 1889. In the interval, from various motives chiefly from an ineradicable restlessness of disposition he was an unsuccessful candidate for several other educational posts ; but his success as a professor at Glasgow was from first to last extraordinary. He was a brilliant example of a genuinely Scottish type of academical teacher, who had assimilated the enlightened spirit of Oxford. It was his habit to write out his lectures with extreme care, and to subject them to incessant revision. Several of his pupils subsequently attained literary distinction ; but more important was the general influence, incalculable alike in breadth and depth, exercised by him during a quarter of a century upon the progress of culture among the general body of his students.
Two of the earlier of Nichol's occasional courses on English literature (in 1868 and 1869) were, at Jowett's request, redelivered at Oxford. From 1866 he was one of the most distinguished pioneers of the movement afterwards known as university extension, and he lectured with conspicuous success in many English and Scottish towns. Indeed, as a popular lecturer on literature he had in his day few, if any, rivals. His activity was not, however, exhausted by his labours of this sort at home and abroad. He was associated with his friend, Professor Knight of St. Andrews, in the foundation in 1867 of the New Speculative Society, which held its first meeting at his house in Glasgow, and
