The works of Richard Hurd, volume 2 (of 8)

After all the praises that are deservedly given to the novelty of a _subject_, or the beauty of _design_, the supreme merit of poetry, and that which more especially immortalize...

Ut flos in septis secretus nascitur hortis, Ignotus pecori, nullo convulsus aratro, Quem mulcent auræ, firmat sol, educat imber, Multi illum pueri, multæ optavere puellæ. Idem,...

2. The ingenious author of the _Observations on Spenser_ (from which fine specimen of his critical talents one is led to expect great things) directs us to another imitation of...

Nothing is better known than the easy, elegant, agreeable vein of VOITURE. Yet you have read his famous Letter to BALZAC, and have been surprized, no doubt, at the forced, quain...

The ancients appear to have had no doubt at all on the matter. The tragedy on low life, and comedy on high life, were refinements altogether unknown to them. What then hath occa...

All _Poetry_, to speak with Aristotle and the Greek critics (if for so plain a point authorities be thought wanting) is, properly, _imitation_. It is, indeed, the noblest and mo...

For 1. There are in every language some current and authorized forms of speech, which can hardly be avoided by a writer without affectation. They are such as express the most ob...

From the account of comedy, here given, it may appear, that the idea of this drama is much enlarged beyond what it was in Aristotle’s time; who defines it to be, _an imitation o...

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Milton’s calling a ray of light—a levell’d _rule_ in Comus v. 340, is so particular that, when one reads in Euripides ἡλίου ΚΑΝΩΝ σαφὴς, Suppl. v. 650, one has no doubt that the...

A defect of _natural ability_ is not that, which the critics have been most forward to charge upon _Statius_. A person of true taste, who, in a fanciful way, hath contrived to g...

I mean, from our own internal frame and constitution, is the sole way of writing naturally and justly of human life. And every such description of _ourselves_ (the great exempla...

Critics and antiquaries have been sollicitous to find out who were the inventors of rhyme, which some fetch from the Monks, some from the Goths, and others from the Arabians: wh...

1. _Though a plot be necessary to produce_ humour, _as well as the pathos, yet a_ good plot _is not so essential to comedy, as tragedy_. For the pathos is the result of the _ent...

But there is a higher instance in view. The humanity and easy elegance of the two Latin poets, just mentioned, joined to an unaffected _naivetè_ of expression, were, perhaps, mo...

The same conclusion would, it must be owned, hold of our _religious_, as _moral_ sentiments, were we to regard them only in this view of _dispassionate and cool reflexions_. For...

HORACE, explained and illustrated, _passim_. his _Epistle to the Pisos_, a criticism on the Roman drama, Introd. to vol. i. 15. the character of his genius, 24. his _Epistle to...