Sentimental Scenes, Selected from Celebrated Plays; And Calculated to promote Morality, the Knowledge of Mankind, Facility in Reading, and Gracefulness in Public Speaking. Accompanied with many Figurative & Impassioned Paragraphs, Which are intended as Useful Elocutionary Exercises.

Notes

The rare first edition of this anthology of texts assembled by elocution teacher John Wilson to aid his classes. It was reprinted in 1809 and 1818, and these second and third editions are found in the NLS only; this first edition is unknown to Library Hub and recorded by Worldcat in just a single copy, at The National Library of Israel. John Wilson (no relation to the slightly later Edinburgh Professor of Moral Philosophy of the same name) was teaching elocution from an address on South Bridge from at least 1798, and his anthology spread more widely relatively quickly. An early appreciator was William Motherwell, whose schoolteacher (not Wilson himself but a William Lennie) records: 'During the last year he was with me [i.e. 1808], "Wilson's Sentimental Scenes" were introduced into the upper classes. The reading of these sketches delighted him exceedingly, and he entered so completely into the spirit of the pieces that he made the characters his own' (quoted in M'Conechy's Memoir of Motherwell).