Critical Essay | Critical Essay by James M. Farrell

Critical Essay by James M. Farrell

SOURCE: “Letters and Political Judgment: John Adams and Cicero's Style,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 24, 1995, pp. 137-53.

In the following essay, Farrell studies Adams's correspondence and concludes that he consciously modeled his letters after those of his hero, Cicero.

A number of eighteenth-century rhetoricians offered prescriptions on letter-writing as part of their treatment of rhetorical style. As it had been in previous ages, letter writing remained in the eighteenth century among the genres of composition commonly taught by rhetoricians. Moreover, as had earlier rhetoricians, the writers of the belles lettres movement turned to Cicero's epistles as the principal model for letter writing style. Charles Rollin, for example, found in Cicero's letters “the proper character of the epistolary style,” while Hugh Blair called them “the most valuable collection of letters, extant, in any language.”¹ These professional assessments of Cicero's letters, however, do not reveal much about the influence...
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