Abstract: Robert Watson, historian, minister, and professor, delivered a series of lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres in Edinburgh from 1752 to 1756, between the time Adam Smith and Hugh Blair delivered similar public lectures. Watson's unpublished manuscript lectures are described and discussed here for the first time and are compared to the lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres of Blair and Smith. Watson's lectures demonstrate a practical, moral rhetoric which, in its emphasis upon critical understanding and analysis of literary texts, provides additional evidence for an emerging "belletristic rhetoric" in eighteenth-century Scotland.