ABSTRACT
Aside from the attention paid to student notes of Smith’s lectures on rhetoric delivered at the University of Glasgow, historians of 18th-century rhetoric have paid little attention to the numerous sets of student notes on rhetoric housed in the archives of Scottish universities and in the National Library of Scotland. Perhaps scholars have been reluctant to use the notes because they are uncertain what these notes represent: Do the students represent what these lecturers said in a reliable way? Can scholars use these notes to understand what lecturers such as Blair and Smith believed about rhetoric? In the case of Smith, scholars have no other source. But in the case of Blair, the published lectures are available, and scholars have relied exclusively on these, assuming perhaps that the published lectures represent what Blair delivered to his students. Horner (Horner, 1990; Horner & Barton, 1990) urged scholars to examine these lecture notes for some time, and described some of these notes in A Short History of Writing Instruction . She also catalogued and described most of these sets of notes in Nineteenth-Century Scottish Rhetoric (1990b). This chapter describes the student notes of Blair’s lectures on rhetoric and suggests some possible directions these notes indicate for understanding Blair’s ideas on rhetoric, his relationship with his students, and his relationship with other lecturers, such as Smith.
