In 2005, Art Walzer graciously invited me to join an NCA panel celebrating the recent publication of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Southern Illinois University Press, eds. Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran). After my clumsy talk about Blair’s bourgeois rhetorical style, I listened to Art’s sophisticated claim that Blair occupies a pivotal place in the canon because he negotiated the turn from civic humanism to civil society by transmogrifying ancient civic virtue into modern Christian politeness. Enthralled, I committed to reading Art’s work on George Campbell, an erudite exploration of abstruse rhetorical theory and Enlightenment emotional psychology. Art had made Blair into the Anglican Quintilian, Campbell into a Humean Aristotle. Up until that point, I had ignored British belletrism because it seemed like a moribund scholarly field. Art made the Scottish Enlightenment blossom.
To date, I have avoided the Renaissance because it looked like a stripped...