The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume

This engaging and insightful book explores the fate of eloquence in a period during which it both denoted a living oratorical art and served as a major factor in political thought. Seeing Hume's philosophy as a key to the literature of the mid-eighteenth century, Adam Potkay compares the staus of eloquence in Hume's Essays and Natural History of Religion to its status in novels by Sterne, poems by Pope and Gray, and Macpherson's Poems of Ossian . Potkay explains the sense of urgency that the con