Prelate and writer, named the “Beauty of Holiness” on account of his comeliness and piety, was born at Congreve, Staffordshire, January 13, 1720, and became a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1742. In 1750 he became a Whitehall preacher, in 1774 Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and in 1781 of Worcester. He died May 28, 1808. Among his works are “Commentary on Horace’s Ars Poetica” (1749); “Dissertations on Poetry” (1755–57); “Dialogues on Sincerity, &c.” (1759), his most popular book; “Letters on Chivalry and Romance” (1762); “Dialogues on Foreign Travel” (1764); and “An Introduction to the Prophecies” (1722). See Hurd’s Works (8 vols. 1811) and “Memoir” by Kilvert (1860).
Personal
He is grown pure and plump, just of the proper breadth for a celebrated town-preacher.
Of Dr. Hurd, Bishop of Worcester, Johnson said to a friend, “Hurd, Sir, is one of a set of men who account for every thing 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 that time have been chosen.” He, however, said of him at another time to the same gentleman, “Hurd, Sir, is a man whose acquaintance is a valuable acquisition.”
His appearance and air are dignified, placid, grave, and mild, but cold and rather distancing. He is extremely well-bred nevertheless…. Piety and goodness are so marked on his countenance, which is truly a fine one, that he has been named, and very justly, “The Beauty of Holiness.” Indeed, in face, manner, demeanour, and conversation, he seems precisely what a bishop should be, and what would make a looker-on, were he not a Bishop, and a see vacant, call out,—take Dr. Hurd! that is the man!
Hurd had acquired a great name by several works of slender merit, was a gentle plausible man, affecting a singular decorum that endeared him highly to devout old ladies.
Let me be allowed to boast that, from the commencement of my typographic life to the day of his death, I had the honour of uninterruptedly enjoying his Lordship’s patronage…. I had often the satisfaction of attending this good prelate officially, when he was only Mr. Hurd, in the business of his various learned works; and uniformly experienced the same gratifying affability, which was not lessened by the progressive dignities to which he was advanced. After Dr. Hurd became a Bishop, I have frequently been honoured with an invitation to his hospitable dinners, with a very small but select party of his Lordship’s friends, when the culinary feast, neatly elegant as it always was, formed the least part of the treat. The rich stores of a capacious and highly-cultivated mind were opened with the utmost placidity of manner, and were a never-failing source of instruction and delight.
Hurd was a man of strict integrity, and very kind to those of whom he approved; but he was distant and lofty, and not at all admired by those who did not estimate him in a literary capacity. Indeed he paid no attention to them; for in one of his letters to Warburton he made use of a common phrase of his, “I am here perfectly quiet, for I have delightfully bad roads about me.”
In person, Bishop Hurd was below the middle size, of slight make, but well proportioned, his features not marked, but regular and pleasing, and his whole aspect intelligent, thoughtful, and in later life venerable. This idea is fully conveyed in the portraits of him extant, by Gainsborough and others. Although he reached so advanced an age, his health seems never to have been good; and, notwithstanding his temperate and abstemious mode of living, we find in his letters frequent complaints of his suffering from attacks of gout, dizziness, and lowness of spirits, as well as of languor and indolence arising from these causes…. His moral character was distinguished by undeviating integrity, and exact propriety, arising from principle, rather than from sentiment. It was said of him by an unfriendly judge, that he was “a cold, correct, gentleman,” each word being intended as emphatic; and, with due allowance for the quarter from whence it came, this judgment seems not destitute of truth. Another jocularly called him “an old maid in breeches,” a sarcasm which, though it attributes to him, perhaps not unjustly, some share of primness and precision, bears testimony to the scrupulous correctness of his character. This constitution of mind, whilst it rendered him less generally amiable, exempted him from many of the temptations to which warmer tempers are exposed…. As a Preacher, his manner was calm, dignified, and impressive. His discourses, though not marked by force and energy, had yet a mild persuasiveness, and a tone of gentle insinuation, which, joined to frequent originality of thought, and constant exactness of method, peculiarly recommended him to his cultivated and refined audience at Lincoln’s Inn.
Hurd was a man who, having many qualities that obtain respect, and none that attach regard, has been more hardly treated by the biographers than he deserved to be. That he provoked a peculiar animosity among his contemporaries may well be understood. For if men ill brooked the domineering arrogance of Warburton, they were little likely to tolerate the irritable superciliousness of Warburton’s toady. The “terse, neat, little, thin man,” as one of his college contemporaries describes him, was sadly deficient in the warmth and geniality which the impetuous and choleric Warburton possessed in excess. This contrast of character promoted the intimacy which sprang up between the two.
The Bishop of Worcester, chiefly from his connection with Warburton, enjoyed high reputation in his day, but he was emphatically an over-estimated man, and though his manners were courtly and dignified in the presence of royalty, they were extremely cold and proud to those whom he considered his inferiors. Some literary claims indeed may fairly be allowed him. His discourses on “Prophecy” are still known and valued.
Hurd is a man for whom, though he has attracted a recent biographer, animated by the ordinary biographer’s enthusiasm, it is difficult to find a good word. He was a typical specimen of the offensive variety of University don; narrow-minded, formal, peevish, cold-blooded, and intolerably conceited. As Johnson said of “Hermes” Harris, he was “a prig, and a bad prig.” Even Warburton, it is said, could never talk to him freely. In his country vicarage he saw nobody, kept his curate at arm’s length, and never gave an entertainment except on one occasion, when Warburton, who was staying with him, rebelled against the intolerable solitude. As a bishop, he never drove a quarter of a mile without his episcopal coach and his servants in full liveries. His elevation to the bench was justified by his fame—for which there are, perhaps, some grounds—as an elegant writer of Addisonian English and a good critic of Horace.
General
It is a pleasure to have anybody one esteems agree with one’s own sentiments, as you do strongly with mine about Mr. Hurd. It is impossible not to own that he has sense and great knowledge—but sure he is a most disagreeable writer! He loads his thoughts with so many words, and those couched in so hard a style, and so void of all veracity, that I have no patience to read him. In one point, in the “Dialogues” you mention, he is perfectly ridiculous. He takes infinite pains to make the world believe, upon his word, that they are the genuine productions of the speakers, and yet does not give himself the least trouble to counterfeit the style of any one of them.
I have now seen the whole of the “Letter on Chivalry,” and am wonderfully taken with them…. They cannot but please all persons of taste, greatly. They are the petit-piece to that noble work, “The Dialogues.”… In which there is all the correctness of Addison’s style, and a strength of reasoning, under the direction of judgment, far superior.
In this interval, I published at London my “Natural History of Religion,” along with some other small pieces: its public entry was rather obscure, except only that Dr. Hurd wrote a pamphlet against it, with all the illiberal petulance, arrogance, and scurrility, which distinguish the Warburtonian school. This pamphlet gave me some consolation for the otherwise indifferent reception of my performance.
To grapple with the unwieldy was among the frolics of Warburton, whilst your Lordship toiled in chasing the subtle. He often darkened the subject, and you perplexed it. He, by the boldness and magnitude of his conceptions, overwhelmed our minds with astonishment, and you, by the singularity and nicety of your quibbles, benumbed them with surprize. In him, we find our intellectual powers expanded and invigorated by the full and vivid representation which he sometimes holds up, both of common and uncommon objects, while you, my Lord, contrive to cramp and to cripple them by all the tedious formalities of minute and scrupulous analysis. He scorned every appearance of soothing the reader into attention, and you failed in almost every attempt to decoy him into conviction. He instructed, even where he did not persuade, and you, by your petulant and contemptuous gibes, disgusted every man of sense, whom you might otherwise have amused by your curious and showy conceits.
The assassination of Jortin by Dr. Hurd, now Bishop of Worcester (see the “Delicacy of Friendship”), is a base and malignant act, which cannot be erazed by time or expiated by secret pennance.
Bishop Hurd, with the hand of a master, has opened the general View of the subject of prophecy, and freed it from the intricacies of speculation, and shewn its time, nature, end, and intent.
The most distinguished of our philosophical critics.
His Horace, his “Dialogues,” and three volumes of “Sermons,” with a “Life of Bishop Warburton,” are the principal works he left behind him, for as to the “Delicacy of Friendship,” it has been dragged into notice without his consent, and in all probability contrary to his wishes. His merit as a writer has been variously estimated, and literary men have gone into opposite extremes. It must be acknowledged that his veneration for the author of the “Divine Legation” seduced him into excessive panegyric, both of the work itself and of the author, and caused him to depreciate the merits and labours of all who had the fortune to differ in their opinions. With much ingenuity in criticism, there will be discovered some unnecessary refinement, and, in this instance, the character of the two prelates will descend to posterity as perfectly congenial.
Subtle and sophistical, elegant, but never forcible, his heart was cold, though his admiration was excessive. He wanted that power of real genius, which is capable of being fired by the contemplation of excellence, till it partakes of the heat and flame of its object. On the other hand, he wanted nothing of that malignity which is incident to the coolest tempers, of that cruel and anatomical faculty, which, in dissecting the characters of an antagonist, can lay bare, with professional indifference, the quivering fibres of an agonized victim. For this purpose his instrument was irony; and few practitioners have ever adopted that or any other, more unfeelingly than did the biographer of Warburton, even when the ground of complaint was almost imperceptible, as in the cases of Leland and Jortin.
Then Hurd, the future shield, scarcely the sword of Warburton, made his first sally; a dapper, subtle, and cold-blooded champion, who could dexterously turn about the polished weapon of irony.
This elegantly-written and learned volume [“Prophecies”] has long been known and duly appreciated by the public. The subject is here opened in the most masterly and instructive manner by Bishop Hurd.
Never were my humble expectations more miserably disappointed [ed. Addison]. It seemed to me as a sad “potatoe-roasting” performance from such a quarter.
Hurd has, perhaps, the merit of being the first who in this country aimed at philosophical criticism: he had great ingenuity, a good deal of reading, and a facility in applying it; but he did not feel very deeply, was somewhat of a coxcomb, and having always before his eyes a model neither good in itself nor made for him to emulate, he assumes a dogmatic arrogance, which, as it always offends the reader, so far the most part stands in the way of the author’s own search for truth.
An upright and scholarly, but formal and censorious man, whom Johnson called a “word-picker,” and franker contemporaries “an old maid in breeches.”
Hurd was a cold and “correct” writer, no less arrogant than his master, little less learned, and if anything even more vapid and perverted as a would-be leader of literary taste; in style he seems a kind of ice-bound Addison.
He is best known to the present generation by his impertinent notes on Addison’s “Works.” By reprinting them, Mr. Bohn did much to spoil what was otherwise an excellent edition of that author.
We must regard Hurd as a strong influence. (1) He was a follower of the Warton school of criticism, and spoke much more boldly and decisively than Warton for Romantic tastes. (2) Besides helping in the general movement, he joined the Wartons in dethroning Pope by exalting the imaginative poets. (3) He came just at the time to accelerate the speed of the Romantic movement. Hurd’s learning and authoritative position counted for much; and the emphasis with which he spoke is remarkable, coming so early as 1762. The critical judgments on poetry made by Matthew Arnold are really a simple re-statement of what Joseph Warton and Hurd laid down a hundred years before.
