Blair's ideal orator: Civic rhetoric and Christian politeness in lectures 25-34

In his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Hugh Blair works within the tradition of Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian in presenting rhetoric as a school subject that forms character and educates in citizenship. But by the terms of his title, "Rhetoric" and "Belles Lettres," Blair signals a commitment to two different ideals of character - the ideal of civic republicanism of Roman rhetoric, on the one hand, and that of a middleclass, polite culture, on the other. As Blair wrestles with the tensions inherent in his program to reconcile the two in lectures 25-34, he inadvertently dramatizes the transformation from a rhetorical culture to a modern, bourgeois one.