sb. pl. Also 8 -letters, belle-lettre. [Fr.; lit. ‘fine letters, i.e., literary studies,’ parallel to beaux arts the ‘fine arts’; embracing, according to Littré, grammar, rhetoric and poetry.] Elegant or polite literature or literary studies. A vaguely used term, formerly taken sometimes in the wide sense of ‘the humanities,’ literæ humaniores; sometimes in the exact sense in which we now use ‘literature’; in the latter use it has come down to the present time, but it is now generally applied (when used at all) to the lighter branches of literature or the æsthetics of literary study.
1710. Swift, Tatler, No. 230, ¶ 2. The Traders in History and Politicks, and the Belles Lettres.
1747. Scheme Equip. Men of War, 23. Civil or Military Law, or any other Part of the Belles Letters.
1801. Finlayson, H. Blair, V. 462. To erect and endow a Professorship of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the University of Edinburgh.
1848. L. Hunt, Town, iii. 138. A strong union has always existed between the law and the belles-lettres.
1855. H. Reed, Lect. Eng. Lit., i. (1878), 34. That vapid, half naturalized term ‘belles-lettres,’ which has had some currency as a substitute for the term ‘literature.’
