Richard Hurd

(1720–1808),

bishop successively of Lichfield and Worcester. His Moral and Political Dialogues appeared in 1759. Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) is an important reassessment of Elizabethan literature: Hurd was notably sympathetic to Spenser, argued that the ‘Gothic’ was more poetic than the ‘Grecian’, and that neo‐classical rules were inappropriately applied to chivalric romances, which were composed on different but no less artistic principles.