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Hugh Blair (1718–1800)

  • Very popular (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 poetic works and disparaged publicly pragmatic formats

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