Hugh Blair (1718–1800): Preacher, Critic and Teacher of Rhetoric

This article uses three labels. established means the claim rests on primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means the claim is widely repeated but cannot be traced to a primary or independent source.

Blair's church and university career is well documented in the Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, in university records and in early biographies by James Finlayson (1801) and John Hill. The minor disagreements are about dates: when his professorship began (1760 or 1762), when the royal warrant was signed, and whether he retired in 1783 or 1784. How far Blair was deceived over Ossian is a matter of judgement. The American evidence comes mainly from Hook, who drew on curriculum studies, local press bibliographies and American magazines of 1787–1833; his figures are dated scholarship, given as he reported them. His larger argument about Blair's effect on American literary style is his own interpretation, and other scholars have read the same evidence differently.

An Edinburgh upbringing and a church career

established Family and schooling. Blair was born in Edinburgh on 7 April 1718, the son of John Blair, a merchant, and Martha Ogston. He was a weak child and was steered towards the ministry early. He attended the High School and entered the University of Edinburgh in 1730. His MA thesis of 1739, De fundamentis et obligatione legis naturae, dealt with the foundations of moral obligation, a theme that runs through his later sermons.

established Four charges in sixteen years. Licensed in 1741, he was presented by the Earl of Leven to Collessie in Fife and ordained there in 1742. Within a year he was back in Edinburgh as second minister of the Canongate. In 1754 he moved to Lady Yester's Kirk, and in 1758 to the High Kirk of St Giles, which the biographer Alexander Chalmers called "the most important ecclesiastical charge" in Scotland. He held it until he died.

established A Moderate. Blair belonged to the Moderate party in the Church of Scotland, the group around William Robertson that favoured learning and polite culture against the stricter Popular party. His preaching avoided the hard edges of Calvinist doctrine and concentrated on practical morality. Critics complained that his sermons lacked doctrinal precision.

shared Marriage and family. In April 1748 he married his cousin Katherine Bannatine, daughter of the Revd James Bannatine. They had a son who died in infancy and a daughter, Katherine, who died at about 20 or 21 (sources differ). His wife died in February 1795.

The chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

established From unpaid lectures to a royal chair. On 11 December 1759, with Lord Kames's support, Blair began lecturing on composition in the university, paid at first only by his students. In 1760 the town council named him Professor of Rhetoric. In 1762 a royal warrant created the Regius Professorship of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres for him, with a salary of £70. Chalmers dates the warrant 7 April 1762; the University's history page gives June. Most sources date his retirement to 1783, but the University gives 1784, so that date is shared.

shared The "first English department". The University of Edinburgh describes Blair's appointment as the birth of the oldest English department in the world. The claim is reasonable as a statement about a dedicated chair. But Blair was not the first to teach the subject. Hook notes that John Stevenson, professor of logic at Edinburgh from 1730 to 1775, had lectured for years on taste and elegance in composition, and that Adam Smith gave public lectures on rhetoric in Edinburgh from 1748 to 1751 before taking them to Glasgow. Blair, in Hook's words, followed Smith's example.

shared Why rhetoric was a Scottish speciality. Hook argues that Scottish rhetoric was at bottom practical: educated Scots wanted to write and speak an English that London would accept. He points to Thomas Sheridan's lectures on pronunciation, which drew some three hundred gentlemen in Edinburgh in 1761, and to the Select Society's new Society for promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland. The National Library of Scotland records Blair as its chairman. This reading of the rhetoricians as anxious provincials is influential, but it is Hook's interpretation.

established The Lectures in print. Blair published his course in 1783, on retiring, partly because unauthorised student notes were circulating. The work runs to 47 lectures in two volumes. It covers taste and criticism; language and style, with close analyses of English prose passages; eloquence in popular assemblies, at the bar and in the pulpit; the parts of a discourse; delivery; and the main kinds of prose and poetry.

Ossian

established Midwife to the Fragments. In September 1759, at Moffat, James Macpherson showed the playwright John Home some English versions of Gaelic poems. Home brought them to Edinburgh, where Blair took them up eagerly, arranged their publication as Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) and wrote its unsigned preface. Chalmers (1812) also credits Blair and Home with raising the subscription for Macpherson's Highland tour, which produced Fingal (1761/62) and Temora (1763).

established The Critical Dissertation (1763). Blair's Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal treated Ossian as a primitive Homer and analysed the poems as genuine epics. It made Blair's name as a critic across Europe. Later editions of Ossian were printed with the Dissertation, which tied his reputation to Macpherson's.

established Hume's warning. On 19 September 1763 David Hume wrote from London that men of letters there widely took the poems for a forgery. He asked Blair for proof that Macpherson had not composed them in the last five years: "These proofs must not be arguments, but testimonies." He suggested letters from Highland clergy who could have bards recite passages for comparison. The second edition of the Dissertation (1765) duly carried "An Appendix, containing a variety of undoubted Testimonies establishing their Authenticity".

shared How far was Blair deceived? A Highland Society committee chaired by Henry Mackenzie reported on the poems in 1805. Reviewing it, the Edinburgh Review concluded that readers must give up "the pleasing idea, 'that Fingal lived, and that Ossian sung'" (as quoted by Hook). Modern scholars regard the poems as largely Macpherson's own work, built on genuine fragments of Gaelic tradition. Blair never retracted. There is no evidence that he knew of any deception, but after Hume's warning he can fairly be called credulous.

The Sermons and the royal pension

established A slow start, then a best-seller. Blair offered the first volume of his sermons to William Strahan, the London publisher, who at first discouraged it. Samuel Johnson then read the first sermon and wrote to Strahan on Christmas Eve 1776 that he had read it "with more than approbation; to say it is good, is to say too little". Strahan and Cadell published the first volume in 1777. Chalmers records that they paid £100 for it and added two gifts of £50 as sales rose; the third volume brought £300 and the later ones about £600 each. Four volumes appeared in Blair's lifetime and a fifth in 1801. They were translated into most European languages.

shared The king's admiration. Blair was granted a royal pension of £200 a year on 25 July 1780, which he received until his death. Biographers have long linked the pension to George III's and Queen Charlotte's admiration for the Sermons. The sources checked for this article confirm the pension, its amount and its date. They do not document the royal motive directly, so that link is given here as the usual account rather than as proven fact.

established A reputation that faded. By the early nineteenth century the sermons seemed smooth and shallow. An American review of John Hill's life of Blair, in the Analectic Magazine of 1815, discussed the decline of his standing as a preacher, while arguing that as a critic he had "suffered much less from the lapse of years" (as quoted by Hook).

Clubs, colleagues and Burns

established The literati. Blair belonged to the inner circle of the Edinburgh Enlightenment. His friends included David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Alexander Carlyle, William Robertson, John Home and Lord Kames. Hook names him with Hume, Smith and Robertson as the leading "North Britons", the Scots who looked outward to England and Europe rather than inward to Scotland's vernacular tradition.

established The Select Society and the Poker Club. Blair was an early member of the Select Society (founded 1754). He was also a member of the Poker Club, formed in 1762 out of the Select Society's circle to "poke" the fire of Scottish patriotism, at first over the demand for a Scottish militia. Its surviving minute book (1774–84) lists "Dr Blair" among its members alongside Hume, Smith, Robertson, Carlyle, Home and Black.

established Burns in Edinburgh, 1787. During Robert Burns's first Edinburgh winter of 1786–87, Blair was among the literati who received him. On 4 May 1787, the day before setting out on his Border tour, Burns wrote to Blair from the Lawnmarket to thank him for his kindness, patronage and friendship. He called his own fame a "meteor-like novelty" that might not last, and enclosed a proof of John Beugo's engraving of himself. The letter is held by the National Trust for Scotland.

established Later years. Blair was a founding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783 and served as its literary president from 1789 to 1796. He died at his house in Argyle Square on 27 December 1800 and was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard.

Blair in America: the most published North Briton

established Ahead of Kames. Hook treats Blair and Lord Kames as the most widely published Scottish Enlightenment writers in the United States. Kames's Elements of Criticism, first printed at Boston in 1796, had nine more American editions before 1835. Blair outstripped him. The Lectures were first printed at Philadelphia in 1784, a year after the British edition, and the first of many abridgements appeared at Albany in 1788. Counting complete and abridged versions, Hook finds 56 American editions in 1805–23 alone.

established Printed in small towns. Besides Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York, many editions came from small-town presses that rarely printed literature at all. Of the 74 titles from the Morristown, New Jersey, press in 1798–1820, mostly religious works and almanacs, the only belles-lettres title was Blair's Lectures, the "Sixth American, From the last Edinburgh Edition" (1814). The Brooklyn press printed the Rhetoric in 1807 and 1812. Hook lists further editions, usually abridged, at Albany, Brookfield, Wilmington, Exeter, Haverhill, Portland, Concord, Brattleboro, Windsor, Troy, New Brunswick, Poughkeepsie, Northampton, Salem, Worcester, Hartford and Wendell.

established A schoolbook. Some American editions were "reduced to question and answer" or printed "with appropriate questions", which Hook takes as proof that Blair was taught in schools as well as colleges. English composition, he writes, was taught from Blair at both levels. He also quotes the historian Richard Beale Davis's finding that almost every well-read Virginian of 1790–1830 used Blair as a textbook for composition, oratory and taste, at school and afterwards. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy.

The college textbook

established The colleges and dates Hook records. Hook draws mainly on Snow's history of the American college curriculum, Samuel Miller's Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803), the traveller John Morison Duncan and Charvat's Origins of American Critical Thought:

• Yale: introduced 1785 and in use until at least 1824. Duncan, a Scottish visitor in 1818–19, reported the first volume read in the third term of the sophomore year and the second in the first term of the senior year.
• Harvard: introduced 1788; Miller says it was read in the second year, and a note in the North American Review confirms this was still so in 1818.
• Rhode Island College (later Brown University): Kames from 1783; Blair and Kames both studied by 1803, and both still in the curriculum in 1827.
• Union College: the curriculum announced for 1804 set Blair in the junior year and Kames in the senior.
• William and Mary: Miller mentions a course in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres based on Blair.
• Columbia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Middlebury, Williams, Amherst, Hamilton and Wesleyan: Blair adopted as a text at some point between 1800 and 1835.
• University of Virginia: examination answers from about 1828 discuss Blair alongside Thomas Brown, Dugald Stewart and Adam Smith.

That gives fourteen named institutions. Hook adds that a course in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, or in Criticism, became a standard part of the American curriculum, and that the texts were almost always Blair and Kames.

shared Dickinson and Princeton. Hook suggests that Charles Nisbet's course in Belles Lettres at Dickinson College, Carlisle, which Nisbet taught from the mid-1780s, almost certainly used Blair and probably Kames. He is frank that no record of the Dickinson textbooks survives. He also mentions a similar Belles Lettres course at Princeton under John Witherspoon but does not name its textbook. Blair's use at these two colleges is a reasonable inference, not a documented fact.

established Why Blair. Hook explains Blair's dominance in plain terms. His lectures were logically arranged and therefore easy to teach. His reputation as a preacher was high, and the Sermons were also widely reprinted in America. Above all, the work was practical: chapters on speaking in popular assemblies, at the bar and from the pulpit; on the parts of a discourse; on pronunciation; and on how to improve in eloquence. These, Hook argues, were studied by a great many rising American politicians, lawyers and preachers. He concludes that "no minister's library could have been complete without a copy of Blair".

What American periodicals said, 1787–1833

established An early and lasting presence. Hook finds Blair discussed in American magazines less often than expected, perhaps because his standing was taken for granted. The evidence still runs across almost fifty years:

• 1787: the American Museum quotes Blair in an attack on Samuel Johnson's English.
• 1799: an essay on style in the Monthly Magazine and American Review calls Blair's work "in many respects superficial and inaccurate" but "greatly and deservedly popular" (as quoted by Hook). The same essay remarks that "the most popular British writers are natives of Scotland".
• 1806: Charles Brockden Brown's Literary Magazine publishes a sketch of Blair's life; the Port Folio lists him among "the eminent Scotch literati" with Robertson, Hume, Millar, Smith, Ferguson, Reid and Stewart.
• 1812: a long essay on the sublime in the Port Folio, mainly about Stewart, brings in Blair and Kames.
• 1815: the Analectic Magazine reviews John Hill's life of Blair, accepting the decline of the sermons but praising the lectures as "an exercise of correct taste, and an accumulation of good sense" (as quoted by Hook).
• 1820: the Analectic reprints an article from Constable's Edinburgh Magazine naming Blair among the Scots whose fame should encourage American writers.
• 1829: in Charleston, the Revd Mitchell King, addressing the centenary of the St Andrew's Society, names Kames, Blair and Campbell as Scotland's critics and rhetoricians, whose books "form the text books of our schools and colleges".
• 1833: the American Quarterly Observer, on the "Qualifications of a Critic", still treats Blair and Kames as the authorities to agree or disagree with; the Knickerbocker Magazine calls Blair "by far the best of modern writers on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres" (as quoted by Hook).

shared Invisible Scottishness. Hook adds that an American could study Blair's Lectures without ever thinking of him as Scottish. His influence was broad but did not create a popular image of Scotland; that came from Ossian, Burns and Scott.

Ossian in America

established Blair's essay in the first American Ossian. David Hall offered Fingal and Temora for sale in Philadelphia in 1766, and Jefferson was an enthusiastic reader by 1773. But the first American edition of Ossian appeared only in 1790, at Philadelphia, and it was printed with Blair's admiring Critical Dissertation. Further American editions followed at New York, Philadelphia, New Haven and Morristown between 1801 and 1823; Hook does not say which carried the Dissertation. Blair's essay thus framed the poems for their first American readers, as it had for British ones.

The "genteel tradition" argument

shared Hook's case. Hook goes beyond counting editions. He suggests that American political oratory owed much to the study of Blair and his fellow rhetoricians, and that the general level of American writing probably rose. But he also argues that teaching composition as a matter of taste and correctness was limiting. He links it to John Witherspoon's 1781 coinage of the word "Americanism", modelled on "Scotticism", to condemn American usage. "The study of the Scottish rhetoricians," Hook writes, "seems to me to lie behind a great deal of the genteel tradition in American writing and criticism": its taste for smoothness, elegance and correctness, and its dislike of anything vernacular. He goes further, suggesting that rhetoric teaching "impeded the development of a native American literary idiom".

shared The other side. Hook cites Richard Beale Davis, who saw Blair as a down-to-earth textbook that, on its bad side, encouraged artificial and unidiomatic precision and neglected feeling. But Hook also records that Bernard T. Spencer, in The Quest for Nationality (1957), credited Witherspoon, Blair and Kames with loosening neo-classical rules in American writing. Hook himself framed his thesis as speculation; it is one reading among several.

Americans in Blair's Edinburgh

established Remembered by visitors. In 1819 Walter Scott walked George Ticknor of Boston round the Old Town, pointing out the houses of Fergusson, Blair, Hume, Smith, Robertson and Black. In 1825 the New York journalist Nathaniel Carter visited the graves of Hume, Smith, Blair, Maclaurin, Gregory, Allan Ramsay and Playfair.

shared Legacy. Blair's sermons are little read now and his Ossian criticism is a cautionary tale. His Lectures have lasted better, and Hook's evidence makes them one of the most widely exported Scottish books of their age.

• Blair began his university lectures in December 1759 without a salary; his students paid him directly until the royal chair was created in 1762.
• Samuel Johnson's letter of praise persuaded a reluctant publisher to bring out the Sermons.
• David Hume, Blair's friend, warned him in 1763 that London's men of letters thought Ossian a forgery and asked for "testimonies", not arguments.
• Of the 74 titles printed at Morristown, New Jersey, between 1798 and 1820, the only work of literature or criticism was Blair's Lectures.
• Some American school editions turned the Lectures into a question-and-answer catechism.
• Burns's farewell letter to Blair in May 1787 enclosed a proof of the famous Beugo engraving of the poet.
• Hugh Blair should not be confused with James Blair, the Scot who founded the College of William and Mary in 1693, although William and Mary later taught from Hugh Blair's book.

• Myth: Blair wrote or forged the Ossian poems. The poems are now understood to be largely Macpherson's own work. Blair promoted and defended them and never retracted. There is no evidence he knew of any deception, though after Hume's warning in 1763 he can fairly be called credulous.
• Myth: Blair was the first person to teach English literature or rhetoric in a Scottish university. He held the first dedicated chair, which the University of Edinburgh calls the oldest English department in the world. But John Stevenson lectured on taste and composition before him, and Adam Smith gave public lectures on rhetoric in Edinburgh from 1748 to 1751.
• Disputed: when his professorship began. He lectured from 1759, was named Professor of Rhetoric in 1760 and became Regius Professor in 1762. Sources also differ on the month of the royal warrant and on whether he retired in 1783 or 1784.
• Disputed: that the 1780 royal pension rewarded his Sermons. The pension of £200 a year, granted on 25 July 1780, is documented. Its link to George III's and Queen Charlotte's admiration for the Sermons is the usual account, but the sources do not document the royal motive.
• Disputed: how widely Blair was used in American colleges. Andrew Hook counts 56 American editions of the Lectures in 1805–23 alone, and names fourteen colleges that adopted them. Use at Dickinson and Princeton is only inferred, since no textbook records survive.
• Disputed: that Blair created America's "genteel tradition". Hook argues that the Scottish rhetoricians lie behind its taste for smoothness and correctness. It is his interpretation, and Bernard Spencer saw Blair and Kames as loosening neo-classical rules.