SOURCE: "Dr. Hugh Blair," in Public Characters, or Contemporary Biography, Bonsal and Niles, 1803, pp. 237-49.

In the following excerpt, originally written in 1800, the author describes the development of Blair's career as a preacher and a scholar, noting that he was "regarded as one of the rising literary ornaments of his country."

He [Dr. Hugh Blair] was completely and regularly educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he took his degree of M. A. and entered into orders in the year 1742. The medical sciences, even before that period, had begun to be taught in that illustrious school with eminent ability and success. Pure and mixed mathematics were then recommended to students by the genius and scientific ardour of Maclauren, the friend of Newton, and the best interpreter of the Newtonian philosophy. Logic, ethics, the principles of classical and elegant literature, as well as theology, were, perhaps, explained with inferior...