King on the death of Archbishop Cornwallis in 1783.  Although he rose from a comparatively humble origin, ‘his parents,’ he tells us, ’were plain, honest, and good people’ (his father was, in fact, a farmer); he seems to have been gifted by nature with great courtliness of manner, and with aristocratic tastes.  On his first introduction at Court he won by these graces the heart of the King, who remarked that he thought him more naturally polite than any man he had ever met with.  Hurd subsequently became the most trusted friend and constant adviser of George III.  There is a very touching letter extant, which the King wrote to Hurd in one of his great sorrows, expressing most feelingly the value in which George held the religious ministrations of his favourite bishop, and the high opinion he had of his piety and worth.  The mere fact that Hurd won the affectionate respect—­one might almost say veneration—­of so good a Christian as King George, furnishes a presumption that he must have been a man of some merit; and there is nothing whatever in any of his writings, or in anything we hear of his life, that should lead us to think otherwise.  Nevertheless, it was just such men as Hurd who tended to keep the Church of the eighteenth century in its apathetic state.  Hurd was a religious-minded man; but his religion was characterised by a cold, prim propriety which was not calculated to commend it to men at large.  Like his friend Warburton, he could see nothing but folly and fanatical madness in the great evangelical revival which was going on around him, and which he seems to have thought would soon be stamped out.  He only emerged from his stately seclusion on great occasions; but when he did go forth, he was surrounded with all ‘the pomp and circumstance’ which might impress beholders with a sense of his dignity.  ’Hartlebury Church is not above a quarter of a mile from Hartlebury Castle, and yet that quarter of a mile Hurd always travelled in his episcopal coach, with his servants in full-dress liveries; and when he used to go from Worcester to Bristol Hot Wells, he never moved without a train of twelve servants.’  Hurd has left us a very short memoir of his own life; but short as the memoir is, it gives us a curious insight into one side of his character.  The whole account is compressed into twenty-six pages, and consists for the most part merely of a bare recital of the chief events of his life.  But one day—­one memorable day to be marked with the whitest of white chalk—­is described at full length.  Out of the twenty-six pages, no less than six are devoted to the description of a visit with which the King honoured him at Hartlebury, when ’no accident,’ we are glad to learn, ’of any kind interrupted the mutual satisfaction which was given and received on the occasion.’