SOURCE: "The English Teaching of Dr. Hugh Blair," in Anglica: Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie, Mayer & Muller, 1925, pp. 281-94.

In the excerpt below, Cowling lauds Blair's method of literary criticism and his approach to teaching English composition.

Dr. Hugh Blair (1718-1800), a graduate of Edinburgh and minister of St. Giles' Church, was the arbiter of taste in polite literature in the northern capital, and the friend of Robertson, Hume and Adam Smith. The most celebrated preacher of his day, he published several volumes of sermons, praised most highly in that age for their sound morality and their 'continuous warmth', and valued even more perhaps for their graceful eloquence. He was appointed the first Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the University of Edinburgh in 1762, and signalized his accession to the chair by his Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1765), in which with more patriotism than judgement he...