WILLIAM SEMPLE OBSERVED in 1782 that ‘The historian is universally acknowledged to hold a distinguished rank, in the circle of literature’. Most of his Scottish contemporaries, as we have seen, shared this keen sense of their own social function as educators and moralists. Their rhetoric of scholarly intention certainly expressed this view with great vehemence and alacrity. To regard Enlightenment history as anything less than a self-consciously edificatory discourse would as a result seem needlessly perverse. But beyond the eloquent theorisation of their own activities, the practice of the eighteenth-century historians, I shall argue, substantially bears out this view. It is clear, in particular, that the Scottish historians still acted as though they were public orators and preachers. Indeed, this feeling was now to be of crucial significance in orienting the work that they produced. In the first instance, we shall see that it still meant a keen focus upon the great orators of the past. More widely, it also entailed the sometimes rather speculative attribution of eloquence and rhetorical prowess to a motley assortment of historical dignitaries. The intention of both of these strategies would still seem to have been to demonstrate the ultimate descent of the modern historical author from an ancient line of orators and preachers, as well as to provide an analysis of the uses to which such a status should be put. Having identified in this way the historical function of the moral rhetorician and illustrated the crucial role of oratory in society, we shall find that the Scottish writer remained unwilling to have his historical text merely proceed to mull over a stultifying record of ‘ what King reigned in such an Age, and what Battles were fought, which common History teacheth, and teacheth little more’. Enlightened historians instead went significantly further than their Scottish forebears. They no longer presented oratory simply as a vital characteristic of the legitimate social leader, probably the limit of their predecessors’ ambitions. Eighteenth-century historians, it turns out, now increasingly associated it directly with the possession of learning, claiming in the process that it thereby legitimated the leadership of Scottish historians and intellectuals themselves. With this far more portentous conclusion having been reached, enlightened historical discourse in Scotland became an arena for the definition and propagation of rational virtue.