His own Works[[129]] are of much higher importance. The edition (with commentary, notes, and dissertations) of Horace’s Epistles to the Pisos and to Augustus is in part of the class of work to which in this stage of our history we can devote but slight attention, but even that part shows scholarship, acuteness, and—what is for our purpose almost more important than either—wide and comparative acquaintance with critical authorities, from Aristotle and Longinus to Fontenelle and Hume.[[130]]

The Dissertations.

The “Critical Dissertations” which follow mark a higher flight, indeed, as their titles may premonish, they rather dare that critical inane to which we have more than once referred. Hurd is here a classicist with tell-tale excursions and divagations. In his Idea of Universal Poetry he will not at first include verse in his definition, nor will he accept the commonplace but irresistibly cogent argument of universal practice and expectation. Poetry is the only form of composition which has pleasure for its end; verse gives pleasure; therefore poetry must use verse. The fiction or imitation is the soul of poetry; but style is its body (not “dress,” mark). Hurd even takes the odd and not maintainable but rather original view that the new prose fiction is a clumsy thing, foolishly sacrificing its proper aids of verse.[[131]] He is most neo-classically peremptory as to the laws of Kinds, which are not arbitrary things by any means, nor “to be varied at pleasure.”[[132]] But the long Second Dissertation On the Provinces of the Drama, which avowedly starts from this principle shows, before long, something more than those easements and compromises by which, as was said in the last volume, eighteenth-century critics often temper the straitness of their orthodoxy. “It is true,” says Hurd,[[133]] “the laws of the drama, as formed by Aristotle out of the Greek poets, can of themselves be no rule to us in this matter, because these poets had given no examples of such intermediate species.” It is, indeed, most true; but it will be a little difficult to reconcile it with the prohibition of multiplying and varying Kinds. The Third and Fourth Dissertations, filling a volume to themselves, deal with Poetical Imitation and its Marks, the hard-worked word “imitation” being used in its secondary or less honourable sense.

The Discourses are, in short, of the “parallel passage” kind, but written in a liberal spirit,[[134]] showing not merely wide reading but real acuteness, and possessing, in the second instance, the additional interest of being addressed to “Skroddles” Mason, who certainly “imitated” in this sense pretty freely. Even here that differentia which saves Hurd appears, as where he says,[[135]] “The golden times of the English poetry were undoubtedly the reigns of our two queens,” while, as we saw in the last volume,[[136]] Blair was teaching, and for years was to teach,

his students at Edinburgh, a scheme of literary golden ages in which that of Elizabeth was simply left out.

Still, these three volumes, though they would put Hurd much higher than the Addison Commentary, are not those which give him the position sought to be vindicated for him here.

Other Works.

Neither will his titles be sought by any one in his Lectures on the Prophecies: while even that edition of Cowley’s Selected Works the principle of which Johnson[[137]] at one time attacked, while at another he admitted it to more favour, can only be drawn on as a proof that Hurd was superior to mere “correctness” in harking back to this poet. Nay, the Moral and Political Dialogues (which drew from the same redoubtable judge[[138]] the remark, “I fear he is a Whig still in his heart”), though very well written and interesting in their probable effect on Lander, are not in the main literary. Literary characters—Waller, Cowley, and others—often figure in them, but only the third, “On the Age of Queen Elizabeth,” has something of a literary bent, and this itself would scarcely be noteworthy but for its practically independent appendix, the Letters on Chivalry and Romance. Here—not exactly in a nutshell, but in less than one hundred and fifty small pages—lie all Hurd’s “proofs,” his claims, his titles: and they seem, to me at least, to be very considerable. It is true that even here we must make some deductions. The Letters on Chivalry and Romance. The passages about Chivalry and about the Crusades not merely suffer from necessarily insufficient information, but are exposed to the diabolical arrows of that great advocatus diaboli Johnson when he said[[139]] that Hurd was “one of a set of men who account for everything systematically. For instance, it has been a fashion to wear scarlet breeches; these men would tell you that according to causes and effects no other wear could at the time have been chosen.” This is a most destructive shrapnel to the whole eighteenth century, and by no means to the eighteenth century only; but it is fair to remember that Hurd’s Romance was almost as distasteful to Johnson as his Whiggery. And now there is no need for any further application of the refiner’s fire and the fuller’s soap; while on the other hand what remains of the Letters (and it is much) is of altogether astonishing quality. I know nothing like it outside England, even in Germany, at its own time; I know nothing like it in England for more than thirty years after its date; I should be puzzled to pick out anything superior to the best of it (with the proper time allowance) since.