- Very popular work
(the Quintilian of his time with regard to influence, approval, and widespread application)
- Defender of Hume, and in some ways the ideal man of taste Hume's work envisions
- Links rhetoric and belle lettres
- Rhetoric persuades through appeals to reason and passion
- Lit. Crit. evaluates on the quality of such appeals
- Establishes transmittable rules for taste, speaking, writing, and literature
- Language is steeped in psychology (faculties of the mind) for effect
- Arguably placed work in a hierarchy that privileged poet works and disparaged publicly useful formats
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