Classical Eloquence and Polite Style in the Age of Hume

Pragmatics and Literature

“…After a short section on the ideology of Scotticisms, I will devote a few thoughts to recent research on historical (im)politeness as developed by Culpeper (2011), Culpeper and Demmen (2011), Bax and Kádár (2011), Rudanko (2006Rudanko ( , 2011Rudanko ( , 2017, Mills (2004Mills ( , 2011, Fitzmaurice (2010), and Agha (2003), touching on another cornerstone of Englishness in the second half of the eighteenth century, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son (1774). Here, Chesterfield provides advice on language style and good manners as marks of high class.…”

Cicero's Ears, or Eloquence in the Age of Politeness: Oratory, Moderation, and the Sublime in Enlightenment Scotland

“…For Adam Potkay, a resolution to the essay's proliferating ironies is eventually reached by Hume's turning, in the essay's final stages, towards an "unruffled acceptance of the deficiencies of British oratory;" for Jerome Christensen, who reads Hume's career as a whole as that of the modern man of letters remediating and succeeding the ancient orator, the essay represents the clearest example of a "strategic moderation" which deliberately severed links with the admirable oratory of the past, to prescribe instead the mundane, writerly virtues of "ordonnance," or order and method. 3 In such readings, the apparent praise which Hume lavishes on the oratory of the ancients operates as cover under which to set out the more modest possibilities at which modern speech might aim, and the at times "monstrous" eloquence of Cicero is implicitly replaced by the easy conversational orderliness of Hume's own style.…”