Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

The “Notes of Dr. Smith’s Rhetorick Lectures,” discovered in 1958 by a Universityof Aberdeen professor, consists of lecture notes taken by two of Smith’s students at the Universityof Glasgow in 1762–1763. There are thirty lectures in the collection, all on rhetoric and the different kinds or characteristics of style.

The book is divided into “an examination of the several ways of communicating our thoughts by speech” and “an attention to the principles of those literary compositions which c...