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. [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _Their doctrine._]