ABSTRACT
Hugh Blair (1718–1800), Scottish divine and critic, was Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh from 1762. The extract is from Lecture XXXVII in Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), vol. ii, p. 309. In the preceding passage Blair had discussed French fiction, in particular Rousseau and Marivaux.
