ABSTRACT
From Shaftesbury, Thomas Blackwell had inherited a desire to blend the activities of philosopher, historian and patriot, and the tension between these varied aspirations is, at times, awkwardly evident. Blackwell adopted Shaftesbury’s skeletal theory on a natural development in the arts and transformed it into an historical method that offered a provocative alternative to much neo-classical wishful thinking on the subject of the arts. Blackwell’s originality lay in the range of his investigation and the ways in which it invited a thorough re-examination of the nature and sources of great literature. Blackwell’s mission was rather to explain, in the Shaftesburyan manner, the fuller context which might cause a great work to appear, and the possibility of “natural” sources for artistic excellence. In his Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Hurd defended the national past in a similar adaptation of Blackwell’s principles, in his elaborate discussion of the “Gothic manners of Chivalry”.
