"Mr. Hurd, the supposed author of this performance, is one of those valuable authors who cannot be read without improvement. To a great fund of well-digested reasoning, he adds a clearness of judgment, and a niceness of penetration, capable of taking things from their first principles, and observing their most minute differences. I know few writers more deserving of the great, though prostituted name, of critic; but, like many critics, he is better qualified to instruct, than to execute. His manner appears to me harsh and affected, and his style clouded with obscure metaphors, and needlessly perplexed with expressions exotic, or technical. His excessive praises (not to give them a harsher name) of a certain living critic and divine, disgust the sensible reader, as much as the contempt affected for the same person, by many who are very unqualified to pass a judgment upon him."
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Edward Gibbon, 'Examination of Dr. Hurd's Commentary upon the Epistles of Horace addressed to the Pisos and to Augustus', in Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Vol. II, ed. Lord Sheffield (1796), p. 27
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Hurd_(bishop)
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Richard Hurd (bishop)
Richard Hurd (13 January 1720 – 28 May 1808) was an English divine and writer, and bishop of Worcester.
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