SOURCE: "Johnson and Blair on Addison's Prose Style," in Studies in Philology, Vol. 39, No. 4, October, 1942, pp. 638-49.

In the following excerpt, Mays summarizes Blair's criticism of Joseph Addison, illustrating Blair's methods of literary analysis and principles of style.

Of the critics in [Joseph] Addison's own century who pronounced on his style none was more approving or more exhaustive in his treatment of it than Dr. Hugh Blair. Blair was the minister of the most distinguished pulpit of eighteenth century Scotland, that of St. Giles' Cathedral, or, as it was commonly known, the High Church, in Edinburgh, and arbiter elegantiarum of Scottish letters in the latter half of the eighteenth century. On December 11, 1759, Blair began to read in the University of Edinburgh a series of lectures on rhetoric,²² which became a permanent part of the work of the institution for the next twenty-four years when the Town Council appointed...