#hurd library

When you think of Egypt pyramids and sphinxes usually spring to mind - like the view George Sandys saw in 1610.

But Penny found a very different book in the Hurd Library a few weeks ago:

As usual she had a good look and found plenty of plates illustrating interesting plants, but she also found these:

We hope Bishop Hurd enjoyed them as much as we did. They certainly look pretty happy, though the first one seems to be chained to his seat.

Lord Mansfield’s bust was one of our subjects a few years ago, after we had discovered its marble plinth lying in a glory-hole outside the Hurd Library. Now it is back on it, in the library, after many years sitting on an inappropriate pedestal in the great hall.

The last recorded sight of this monument in the Hurd Library was in 1860, in Francis Kilvert’s biography of Bishop Hurd.

Thanks to our new director, Mark Davies, who carried the marble slabs for us, they are reunited at last. Lord Mansfield sits once again under the portrait of his old friend, Bishop Hurd, and we can work under the benign expressions of them both.

Computers are pretty clever these days at identifying instances of literary plagiarism or forgery. As reported in The Times recently, scientists writing in the journal Advances in Complex Systems have analysed the epics of Ossian, claimed by James Macpherson, who published them in 1760 under the title Fingal, to be the genuine works of a blind Scottish bard who lived in the third century AD. They were extremely popular and Napoleon carried them around with him in his baggage.  The researchers, though not accusing Macpherson of making the poems up, report that the work does appear to be an ingenious fake, modelled on Irish poems written some 800 years after Ossian is supposed to have died.

Several 18th century  scholars and poets, including Thomas Gray,  believed the poems to be genuine but one scholar, with no mechanical aid but his own acute brain, considered them to be forgeries from the outset. Bishop Hurd had a copy of the 1762 edition in his own library.

He had seen a copy in 1761 and wrote to William Warburton on Christmas Day that year, from his rectory at Thurcaston: “I have by accident got a sight of this mighty Fingal.... To say nothing of the want of external evidence, or, which looks still worse, his shuffling over in such a manner the little evidence he pretends to give us, every page appears to me to afford internal evidence of forgery.” He goes on at some length, with examples to prove his point. The Christmas post was obviously very reliable that year as Warburton was able to reply the day after Boxing Day. He, poor man, had to admit he had been completely taken in: “I am fully convinced of my false opinion... concerning Fingal. I did not consider the matter as I ought. Your reasons for the forgery are unanswerable. ... You have waked me from a very pleasing dream.”

Bishop Hurd couldn’t always recognise a masterpiece - Boswell and Gibbon were not among his favourites - but he could certainly spot a fake.

In July we posted a blog about Corporal T Smyth, who convalesced at Hartlebury after being wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. He made a lively entry in the first of the albums compiled by the VAD nurses who ran the hospital.

We were afraid he had been sent back to the front , despite being wounded three times, but to our delight one of our followers looked him up and found he survived. He had arrived in France on 29 November 1914 but after his last wound he was promoted to Sergeant and transferred to a home battalion, suitable for an injured soldier, where his job was to train other soldiers. So he was safe in Blighty. There is a photograph of him in one of the albums.

He is number 6, on the right of the group who were the winners of the boat race at the gymkhana held at nearby Wilden on 19 August 1916.

His name appears in the programme:

So  perhaps he was not too badly wounded. He looks pretty fit in the photograph:

We never know what we might find in the Hurd Library. Last week I was sorting a pile of bills sent to Bishop Hurd’s nephew, young Richard, in 1827, the year he died. They had been filed in the old fashioned way, impaled on a spike after being paid, and later fastened with string. Two bills from Thomas Price for meat, bread and washing, had been sent on one sheet, now torn in half for accurate filing:

The reverse showed the sheet had been addressed to Richard Hurd, so I put the two pieces together:

Then I held them up to the light to see if there was a watermark. There was - and I was probably the first to look at it for 189 years:

I’ve no idea if one of my ancestors was a paper maker - but who knows!

Charles Wild (1781-1835) was a watercolour artist and engraver specialising in architecture. He published works on six English cathedrals - Canterbury,York, Chester, Lichfield, Lincoln and finally Worcester. We have a fine copy of this in the Hurd Library.

It was published in 1823, after Bishop Hurd’s death, but was probably purchased by Richard Hurd jr who has bound in some fine watercolours of the cathedral by James Ross. Usually I study these but last week I had a closer look at Wild’s engravings. These are large and detailed - here is the north side of the cathedral taken from College Yard.

As in so many topographical prints you barely notice the tiny figures the artist has included, but a close-up is revealing.

What I thought was a row of posts  near the north porch is actually a little procession of children, two by two. So I had a look at some of the others too.

A procession at the beginning of a service.

Is this a little boy with his grandfather? What is Grandpa looking at?

A couple being taken round.

And another small boy with his parents in the choir. All recorded in a moment of their lives but scarcely visible to the naked eye.

The heavenly blue of  the tiny speedwells always suggests summer is on the way. They were sparkling in the churchyard at Hartlebury yesterday, looking perfect in the green:

and overlooked by the rabbits:

Of course I looked them up in Curtis when I got to the library and here is his version:

Fine matter for a May morning, as Shakespeare almost said.

As a long-time resident of Stratford-upon-Avon I was of course delighted to hear of the recent identification of an unrecorded First Folio on the Isle of Bute. But as Hurd Librarian I was even more delighted to hear that it once belonged to Isaac Reed, a generous donor to the Hurd Library.  Reed (1742-1807) was a literary editor and book-collector; his day job was conveyancing. After his death his library was auctioned and the First Folio appears in the catalogue.

A book not included is this one, once the property of Alexander Pope:

Pope was extremely annoyed by the appearance of this publication as he was planning to translate the whole of Homer himself and thought Tickell had pipped him to the post. He covered his copy with caustic notes:

- criticising  the use of Thee rather than Thou in the first example and pointing out that “lame men hop, not skip” in the second. (The line refers to the lame god Hephaestus who was the  cup-bearer on Olympus, “skinker” being an archaic term for the job.)  Pope’s copy became part of William Warburton’s library but Warburton thew it out when he began to suffer from dementia. Reed spotted it on a book stall in 1776 and bought it, recording the purchase in a note.

Reed was friendly with the printer John Nichols, who was also a friend of Bishop Hurd and mentioned the copy to him after the Hurd Library had been founded. In 1784, hoping that it might join the other items from Pope’s library now at Hartlebury, Hurd asked Nichols to write to Reed with an offer to buy it. Reed replied that he would not dream of accepting money for it and sent it to Hartlebury with the following note: