Devoir de Philosophie

Blair, Hugh

Publié le 22/02/2012

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Blair was the foremost literary critic and preacher of the Scottish Enlightenment. He participated in the thriving cultural life of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, and along with William Robertson, Adam Ferguson and other enlightened Moderate party clergymen was a close friend of that city's greatest philosopher, David Hume. As minister of the High Kirk in St Giles Church, Edinburgh, from 1758 until his death, and Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at the University of Edinburgh from 1762 to 1784, Hugh Blair occupied Scotland's most prestigious platforms for literary and religious oratory. His phenomenally successful publications were direct outgrowths of his preaching and teaching. In 1807 the Critical Review declared Blair's Sermons (1777-1801) to be, excepting the Spectator, 'the most popular work in the English language'. His Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783), the first comprehensive guide to the rules of written and spoken English in the various branches of polite discourse, enjoyed comparable popularity in the literary world. One of his early academic lectures, revised and published in 1763 as A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, did much to encourage the subsequent Ossianic vogue. These works by Blair were frequently reprinted and translated; along with his professorship and church living, they brought him international fame and considerable income.

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