Blair, Hugh (1718-1800)

Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

London and Edinburgh

Printed for W. Strahan; T. Cadell; and W. Creech

1783

"It may consist of parts, indeed; but these parts must be so closely bound together, as to make the impression upon the mind, of one object, not of many."

I PROCEED now to the second quality of a well-arranged sentence, which I termed its Unity. This is a capital property. In every composition, of whatever kind, some degree of unity is required, in order to render it beautiful. There must be always some connecting principle among the parts. Some one object must reign and be predominant. This, as I shall hereafter shew, holds in History, in Epic and Dramatic Poetry, and in all orations. But most of all, in a single sentence, is required the strictest unity. For the very nature of a sentence implies one proposition to be expressed. It may consist of parts, indeed; but these parts must be so closely bound together, as to make the impression upon the mind, of one object, not of many. Now, in order to preserve this unity of a sentence, the following rules must be observed:
(Vol. I, Lecture XI, pp. 257)

Impressions::Impression

ECCO-TCP

29 entries in ESTC (1783, 1784, 1787, 1788, 1789, 1790, 1793, 1796, 1798). See also Heads of the Lectures on Rhetorick, and Belles Lettres (1767, 1771, 1777) and abridgments of the lectures as Essays on Rhetoric (1784, 1785, 1787, 1789, 1793, 1797, 1798).

See Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. By Hugh Blair (London: Printed for W. Strahan; T. Cadell; and W. Creech, in Edinburgh, 1783): <Link to ESTC>. See also Dublin edition of same year in ECCO-TCP: <Link to Vol. I><Vol. II><Vol. III>. Revised and corrected for second edition of 1785.

Reading Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, eds. Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005). Text based on second edition of 1785.

11/18/2013