Blair, Hugh (1718-1800)

Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

London and Edinburgh

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

1783

"It changes the key in a moment; relaxes and brings down the mind; and shews us a writer perfectly at his ease, while he is personating some other, who is supposed to be under the torment of agitation."

FIRST, the propriety of their introduction. From what has been already said of Comparisons, it appears, that they are not, like the Figures of which I treated in the last Lecture, the language of strong passion. No; they are the language of imagination rather than of passion; of an imagination sprightly, indeed, and warmed; but undisturbed by any violent or agitating emotion. Strong passion is too severe to admit this play of Fancy. It has no leisure to cast about for resembling objects; it dwells on that object which has seized and taken possession of the soul. It is too much occupied and filled by it, to turn its view aside, or to fix its attention on any other thing. An author, therefore, can scarcely commit a greater fault, than, in the midst of passion, to introduce a Simile. Metaphorical expression may be allowable in such a situation; though even this may be carried too far: but the pomp and solemnity of a formal Comparison is altogether a stranger to passion. It changes the key in a moment; relaxes and brings down the mind; and shews us a writer perfectly at his ease, while he is personating some other, who is supposed to be under the torment of agitation. Our writers of tragedies are very apt to err here. In some of Mr. Rowe's plays, these flowers of similes have been strewed unseasonably. Mr. Addison's Cato, too, is justly censurable in this respect; as, when Portius, just after Lucia had bid him farewel for ever, and when he should naturally have been represented as in the most violent anguish, makes his reply in a studied and affected comparison:

Thus o'er the dying lamp th' unsteady flame
Hangs quiv'ring on a point, leaps off by fits,
And falls again, as loth to quit its hold.
Thou must not go; my soul still hovers o'er thee,
And can't get loose.
(Vol. I, Lecture XVII, pp. 409-10)

Uncategorized::Relaxation Motion::Bring Down Music::Key

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