Ecclefechan and the Stars

Robert Crawford

• The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect by George Davie
  Polygon, 283 pp, £17.95, September 1986, ISBN 0 948275 18 9

The university discipline we now call ‘English Literature’ is a Scottish invention. Though he had already given his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belies Lettres in Edinburgh, it was at Glasgow University in 1751 that Adam Smith became the first person to give an official university course in English that dealt with the technique and appreciation of modern writers in that language as well as in the Classical tongues. Hugh Blair, a Church of Scotland minister who from 1762 became Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University, was in effect the world’s first Professor of English Literature. He built his lectures on Smith’s work. Smith held that ‘we in this country are most of us very sensible that the perfection of language is very different from that we commonly speak in,’ and Blair’s ideal style was ‘without Scotticisms’. The enterprise of Smith and Blair was to enable the ‘provincial’ Scots to engage with the culture of England on that culture’s own ground. In their Glasgow and Edinburgh lecture rooms Smith and Blair were busy translating their audiences.