Hugh Blair

1718-1800 · Scottish · Belles Lettres, Literary Criticism, Pulpit Eloquence, Scottish Enlightenment

Perspicuity is the fundamental quality of style, a quality so essential that no degree of ornament can atone for its absence.

Hugh Blair held the first Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh, preached at St Giles' to the most fashionable congregation in Scotland, and wrote a book of lectures that became the most widely used textbook of English composition in the world for a century. Generations of British and American students learned what a good sentence was from him.

Topics Hugh Blair addresses

• taste as a faculty
• the standard of taste
• the office of criticism
• genius and the rules
• sublimity
• the sublime in objects and in writing
• perspicuity
• precision in style
• propriety of language
• purity of language
• figurative language
• the rules of metaphor
• the structure of the sentence
• the periodic sentence
• belles lettres
• the kinds of composition
• historical writing
• philosophical writing
• the eloquence of the pulpit
• the eloquence of the bar
• the eloquence of popular assemblies
• Ossian and primitive poetry
• the poetry of rude ages
• Addison and the Spectator criticized

Converse with Hugh Blair on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Hugh Blair's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.