1809 printing. The author is credited with a Master of Arts degree and as Principal of Baltimore College. This text is written in a question and answer form for the benefit of both students and instructors. Rhetoric is defined to be the quintessence of all that is excellent in Belle Lettres and classical and literary composition. The topics covered include taste, criticism, genius, sublimity, beauty, novelty, imitation, style, sentence structure, harmony, figurative language, kinds of poetry, characters of prose, classical argument, and Stirling's definitions of tropes and figures of rhetoric. The Schultz Archive's copy is roughly the complete text.