SOURCE: Introduction to Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, by Hugh Blair, edited by Harold F. Harding, Southern Illinois University Press, 1965, pp. vii-lx.

In the essay below, Harding outlines the main ideas in Blair's lectures and appraises the man and his work from a twentieth-century perspective.

For well over a century beginning about 1760 Hugh Blair markedly influenced writers and speakers, teachers and students in Great Britain and in America. He was well known as a university lecturer on rhetoric and belles lettres, as a preacher to a fashionable Edinburgh congregation, as an editor and literary taste maker, and indeed as the shaper of the style of generations of readers. In republishing his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, it is fitting that we should appraise the man and his work in the light of what we of this generation know.

Although Blair's reputation today may have slipped from...