Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/59

Rhetoric 47 1 creasingly scholarly lexicography; it passed through a middle stage in which it studied Old English and the history of the English language, and amassed solid materials for inferences about English usage; and it emerged at length into distinctly literary studies and editions of great authors or great literary types — Chaucer, Shakespeare, the ballad. The beginnings were meagre. The low estate of belles lettres and liberal studies in general at Yale in 1778 has been indicated in President Stiles's Inaugural Oration. Almost at the same time (1776) Timothy Dwight, then a tutor, "gave a course of lectures on style and composition similar in plan to the lectures of Blair," then not yet published. During his presi- dency Dwight resumed the teaching of belles lettres, probably with the same scope as that of Blair's rhetoric — the study of diction and style in the narrower sense. Rhetoric at Yale, however, was until a late period generally rather a step-child in the family of the arts. At Harvard, rhetoric has been taught continuously and systematically. The sum left by Nicholas Boylston (1771) for the foundation of a professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory having accumulated until 1806, John Quincy Adams was installed and held the chair until 1809. His Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (18 10), to the number of thirty- six, begin with the regular defence of rhetoric against its ma- ligners; move historically through Greece and Rome down to Quintilian, with, however, only the barest mention of Aristotle ; and thence build upon a combination of Cicero's analysis (in- vention, disposition, elocution, memory, and pronunciation or action) with Aristotle's classification of all oratory as demon- strative, deliberative, and judicial, adding a modern class, ' ' eloquence of the pulpit. ' ' The discussion throughout is illus- trated by excellently chosen examples from the orators and the poets, modern as well as ancient. It is doubtful whether any- body wrote or spoke the better for having listened to these lectures, substantial and sensible as they are, but that fact does not prevent them from being an exceedingly interesting account of rhetoric as understood early in the nineteenth century. The Boylston Professorship was held from 1819 to 1851 by Edward Tyrrel Channing (i 790-1 856), a younger brother of William Ellery Channing. His Lectures, published immediately