University, and his Chair,[124] effected. [Sidenote: _Hurd. His Commentary on Addison._] The remaining member of the group requires handling with some care. Not much notice has been taken of Bishop Hurd for a long time past, and some authorities who have given him notice have been far from kind. Their unkindness, I think, comes very near injustice; but Hurd has himself to blame for a good deal of it. As a man he seems to have been, if fairly respectable, not in the least attractive; an early but complete incarnation of the disposition called “donnishness”; a toady in his earlier manhood, and an exacter of toadying in his later. He lived long enough to endanger even his critical fair fame; by representing his admiration for Shakespeare as an aberration, and declaring that he returned to his first love Addison.[125] And his work upon Addison himself (by which, I suppose, he is most commonly known) is of a meticulous and peddling kind for the most part, by no means likely to conciliate the majority of recent critics. Most of Hurd’s notes deal with mere grammar; and while nearly all of them forget that writers like Addison make grammar and are not made by it, some are choice examples of the sheer senseless arbitrariness which makes grammar itself too often a mere Lordship of Misrule and Abbacy of Unreason.[126] Yet even here there are good things; especially some attempts[127]—very early and till recently with very few companions in English—to bring out and analyse the rhythmical quality of prose. But it may be frankly admitted that if the long-lived Bishop[128] had been a critic only in his Addisonian commentary, he would hardly have deserved a reference, and would certainly have deserved no long reference, here. [Sidenote: _The Horace._] 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] [Sidenote: _The Dissertations._]