BLAIR, Dr Hugh, was born April, 7, 1718, at Edinburgh, where his father was a merchant. He entered Edinburgh University in 1730 and won the favourable notice of Professor Stevenson by an essay on the Beautiful, written for the logic class in his sixteenth year. On taking the degree of M.A. in 1739, he printed a thesis De Fundamentis et Obligatione Legis Naturoe, which contains an outline of the moral principles afterwards unfolded in his sermons. He was licensed to preach in 1741, and in a few months the earl of Leven, hearing of his eloquence, presented him to the parish of Collessie in Fife. In 1743 he was elected to the second charge of the Canongate Church, Edinburgh, where he performed the pastoral duties with great success, until removed to Lady Yester’s, one of the city churches, in 1754. He married his cousin, Katherine Bannatyne, in 1748, and by her had a son, who died in infancy, and a daughter who lived to her twenty-first year. In 1757 the University of St Andrews conferred on him the degree of D.D., and in the following year he was promoted to the High Church, Edinburgh, the most important charge in Scotland. In 1759 he commenced, under the patronage of Lord Kames, to deliver a course of lectures on composition, the success of which led to the foundation of a chair of rhetoric and belles lettres in the Edinburgh University. To this chair he was appointed in 1762, with a salary of £70 a year. Having long taken interest in the Celtic poetry of the Highlands, he published in 1763 a laudatory Dissertation on Macpherson’s Ossian, of which he maintained the authenticity. This critique, after being greatly overrated at the time, has now fallen into neglect. In 1777 the first volume of his Sermons appeared. It was succeeded by other four volumes, all of which met with the greatest success. Dr Samuel Johnson praised them warmly. “I love Blair’s Sermons ·,” Johnson said, “his doctrine is the best limited, the best expressed; there is the most warmth without fanaticism, the most rational transport.” The Sermons were translated into almost every language of Europe, and in 1780, to signify the royal approbation, George III. conferred upon him a pension of £200 a year. In 1783 he retired from his professorship and pxrblished his Lectures on Rhetoric which he had carefully revised, and which have been frequently reprinted. He died, after a brief illness, on the 27th December 1801. In the church Blair belonged to the “moderate” or latitudinarian party, and his Sermons have been objected to as deficient in doctrinal definiteness. His once brilliant reputation is now becoming forgotten. His works display little originality, but are written in a flowing and elaborate style; and his Rhetoric, although inferior to Campbell’s, and wanting in research and depth of thought, is unworthy of the neglect it has met with.

BLAIR, Robert, author of the well-known poem entitled The Grave, was the eldest son of the Rev. Robert Blair, of Edinburgh. He was probably born at Edinburgh about the year 1700, and at the university of that city he received the elements of a classical education. He afterwards spent some time on the Continent. Upon his return he ’ took orders, and in 1731 was ordained minister of Athel-etaneford, in East Lothian, where he spent the remainder of his life. He died of fever, February 4, 1746, and was succeeded in his living by John Home, the author of Douglas, His fourth son became lord-president of the Court of Session. Blair wrote several other pieces besides The Grave; but that poem alone constitutes his title to rank as a poet. It consists of a succession of descriptions and reflections, which have no other connection except what they may derive from their relation to a common subject, but these are interspersed with striking allusions, picturesque imagery, touches of a rude though effective pathos, and a vein of sentiment at once natural and just. The rhythm is often harsh, and the versification frequently devoid of correctness, harmony, and grace; but it has nevertheless a masculine vigour and freshness about it, which more than atone for the defects in the finishing; while, in certain moods of the mind, the air of deep and almost misanthropical melancholy diffused over the whole proves highly touching and impressive. Campbell, in the Pleasures of Hope, has borrowed, with a slight variation, a line from this poem—

“Its visits,

Like those of angels, short and far between.”

The vigorous, though occasionally rather forced, poetic conceptions of the author of The Grave, were finely illustrated in Cromek’s edition, published in 1808, by the grandly wild designs of William Blake, engraved by the delicate burin of Schiavonetti. The Grave was first printed at London in 1743.