Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I The Longinian tradition
- Part II Rhapsody to rhetoric
- Part III Irish Perspectives
- 25 A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful (1759)
- 26 Lectures concerning oratory (1758)
- 27 Clio; or a discourse on taste (1769)
- Part IV The Aberdonian Enlightenment
- Part V Edinburgh and Glasgow
- Part VI From the Picturesque to the Political
- Sources and further reading
26 - Lectures concerning oratory (1758)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I The Longinian tradition
- Part II Rhapsody to rhetoric
- Part III Irish Perspectives
- 25 A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful (1759)
- 26 Lectures concerning oratory (1758)
- 27 Clio; or a discourse on taste (1769)
- Part IV The Aberdonian Enlightenment
- Part V Edinburgh and Glasgow
- Part VI From the Picturesque to the Political
- Sources and further reading
Summary
Lecture the Fifteenth.
Of figures, or tropes
Clearness, propriety, and harmony, are not sufficient to answer the ends of oratory, which require beside these, that discourse should be lively and animated: to this purpose the use of figures is necessary; concerning which I now proceed to make some observations.
It is a question which hath received various answers, and occasioned no small debate, whence it cometh to pass, that figures render discourse more pleasing: what is there in the mind of man, which disposeth it to entertain with more delight, notions conveyed to it in this disguise, than in their own natural form?
The variety of opinions concerning this point seemeth to have sprung from hence, that different men fixing upon different causes, have persisted in reducing the effect, each to the cause assigned by himself, excluding all others; to the production of which effect several, perhaps many do concur. I will explain myself.
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- The SublimeA Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, pp. 144 - 146Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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