A model edition of the early correspondence of one of George III's favourite bishops. ARCHIVES Richard Hurd is best known to ecclesiastical historians as one of George III's favourite bishops who was offered, and declined, the archbishopric of Canterbury. These letters, therefore, illuminate the early career of one of the most prominent clerics of the late eighteenth century. The letters begin in 1739, just after Hurd had graduated B.A. at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. They chart his gradual climb up the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment, through his time as Fellow at Emmanuel and end with him settled in the comfortable country rectory of Thurcaston in Leicestershire. Hurd had a wide circle of correspondents. He became a close friend of William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, perhaps the most prominent controverialist of the period. He was also a member of a literary circle which included the poets Thomas Gray and William Mason. Indeed, Hurd himself is well-known to students of English literatureas the author of Letters on Chivalry and Romanceand as a significant figure among the so-called `pre-romantics'. Hurd's letters reveal the full range of his interests, from theology and university politics, through literature, to painting and sculpture. This edition, therefore, not only tells us about Hurd's early life and career, but also provides a valuable insight into the social life of the Anglican clergy in the eighteenth century.

In Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels, R. H. Winnick identifies more than a thousand previously unknown instances in which Tennyson phrases of two or three to as many as several words are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands—discoveries aided by the proliferation of digitized texts and the related development of powerful search tools over the three decades since the most recent major edition of Tennyson’s poems was published. Each of these instances may be deemed an allusion (meant to be recognized as such and pointing, for definable purposes, to a particular antecedent text), an echo (conscious or not, deliberate or not, meant to be noticed or not, meaningful or not), or merely accidental. Unless accidental, Winnick writes, these new textual parallels significantly expand our knowledge both of Tennyson’s reading and of his thematic intentions and artistic technique. Coupled with the thousand-plus textual parallels previously reported by Christopher Ricks and other scholars, he says, they suggest that a fundamental and lifelong aspect of Tennyson’s art was his habit of echoing any work, ancient or modern, which had the potential to enhance the resonance or deepen the meaning of his poems. The new textual parallels Winnick has identified point most often to the King James Bible and to such canonical authors as Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Cowper, Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth. But they also point to many authors rarely if ever previously cited in Tennyson editions and studies, including Michael Drayton, Richard Blackmore, Isaac Watts, Erasmus Darwin, John Ogilvie, Anna Lætitia Barbauld, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, John Wilson, and—with surprising frequency—Felicia Hemans. Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels is thus a major new resource for Tennyson scholars and students, an indispensable adjunct to the 1987 edition of Tennyson’s complete poems edited by Christopher Ricks.