Blair “Abroad”: The European Reception of the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

The extraordinary popularity of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1965), first published in 1783, has been long recognized. This work, published in over one hundred editions, versions, and abridgments in Britain and the United States was, in the words of Blair’s biographer, Robert Schmitz (1948), “a staple of instruction for half the educated English-speaking world in its day” (p. 3). The popularity of the Lectures was not, however, restricted to the English-speaking world.