Blair, Hugh (1718-1800)

Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

London and Edinburgh

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

1783

"A maxim, or moral saying, properly enough receives this form; both because it is supposed to be the fruit of meditation, and because it is designed to be engraven on the memory, which recalls it more easily by the help of such contrasted expressions."

A maxim, or moral saying, properly enough receives this form; both because it is supposed to be the fruit of meditation, and because it is designed to be engraven on the memory, which recalls it more easily by the help of such contrasted expressions. But where a string of such sentences succeed each other; where this becomes an author's favourite and prevailing manner of expressing himself, his style is faulty; and it is upon this account Seneca has been often, and justly, censured. Such a style appears too studied and laboured; it gives us the impression of an author attending more to his manner of saying things, than to the things themselves which he says. Dr. Young, though a writer of real genius, was too fond of Antitheses. In his Estimate of Human Life, we find whole pages that run in such a strain as this:

"The peasant complains aloud; the courtier in secret repines. In want, what distress? in affluence, what satiety? The great are under as much difficulty to expend with pleasure, as the mean to labour with success. The ignorant, through illgrounded hope, are disappointed; the knowing, through knowledge, despond. Ignorance, occasions mistake; mistake, disappointment; and disappointment is misery. Knowledge, on the other hand, gives true judgment; and true judgment of human things, gives a demonstration of their insufficiency to our peace."

(Vol. I, Lecture XVII, pp. 418-9; pp. 189-190 in SIUP ed.)

Impressions::Engraving Writing::Maxim::Engraving

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