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. [Sidenote: _Other Works._]